Swig
Ah. Well, content is long overdue. I’ve had a quick look at my hit stats and this blog has effectively flatlined. I’m sure a mention of Michael Jackson or THE DARK KNIGHT will get things cooking again.
I am basically most of the way through all my pending reviews, they all basically need a conclusion (every time I seem to get going, I manage to get interrupted at the climax of the piece and prevented from finishing up) and I will then be caught up. Who knows, you might actually get them by the end of 2008.
However, some films also override my penchant for abandoning ship early. Here’s a big one. It’s first draft as always, just how you like them.
TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN
Directed by Michael Bay
Cast: Shia LeBeouf, Megan Fox, John Tuturro, Peter Cullen, Hugo Weaving
As I left the press screening for Michael Bay’s first foray into the toy market, I noticed four nerds walking out in single-file, each loudly decrying Bay’s bombastic robot epic as ‘The worst film I have ever seen’. I knew at that point that 1) Michael Bay had done something right; and 2) TRANSFORMERS was going to make an awful lot of money.
And lo, the latter came to pass. With a worldwide gross of some $700 million, Paramount had clearly struck gold and the inevitable sequel was greenlit. More of the same, please. And what made the original so successful both critically and commercially? Simple. Bay and his crack team of writers took a leaf from the Bryan Singer book of genre adaptations and stayed true to the inherent core of the franchise knowing that if you do that, you can do pretty much anything you like. And so they did, jettisoning decades of continuity and streamlining an origin story that let everyone in on the ground floor. The result? An accessible, fun Summer event that delighted in giving its audience sensory overload while also managing to pay faithful homage to what had come before.
And if you thought Bay’s first try was an aneurysm waiting to happen, your eyes are going to bleed when they feast on the explosion of metal and colour that permeates virtually every single frame. That trailer footage of the construction site Decepticon playing havoc in Shanghai? It looked like an amazing finale. Wrong: it’s the first scene, the camera drifting slow and wide across a fairly innocuous excavation vehicle encircled by the US military and a few familiar Autobots. Bay plays the moment to perfection, an eerie silence being allowed to settle for just seconds before cogs whirl and a 2 hour 27 minute orgy of Making Things Explode Loudly kicks off. You’ve not seen anything like this before.
Unfortunately, bigger and louder does not necessarily mean better. Tenuously-held together as the first film was, there was at least some semblance of a plot to latch on to. Exposition is ultra-thin on the ground in REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, with plot points dished out in tiny morsels before an explanation comes two-thirds of the way through. Except by this point it’s hard to care because all you’re gagging for is the next fight between two titanic gladiators all of whom like to posture a bit before going for the other’s throat.
It’s also a disappointment to find so many Autobots sidelined, no doubt because they cost too much to animate but also because most of them don’t sell as much merchandise. Much like X-Men 2 got rid of anyone who wasn’t Wolverine, so the Transformers sequel relegates Ironhide and Ratchet to nothing more than cameos while Sideswipe shows up as the Hot New Car (about the only one, GM cars aren’t on the whole known for being exotic. But that’s the fickle world of the movie tie-in for you) but then spends most of his time parked up or lost in the swooping camera work which is so kinetic that a lot of the visual impact is lost as you recover from your last dizzy spell. Instead, the film focuses on Bumblebee (y’know, for the kids) and two annoying newcomers, Skids and Mudflap who belong in the Jar Jar Binks Hall of Shame. Yes, they’re that bad and yes, the film spends far too much time with these vaguely racist stereotypes. What about Optimus Prime? Don’t get too attached to Big Blue and Red.
Fortunately the Decepticons get a little more time to shine (when they’re not being blown up) and it’s nice to see a little verbal interplay even if it is Megatron and Starscream just doing a little turn in the name of fan-service. Overarching nemesis The Fallen is a spindly creation who never really appears too threatening even in the final reel (he’s basically just something for Prime et al to smash so they can say they’ve won). The real plaudits are reserved for Devastator, the Constructicon gestalt made up of six individual robots who appears only for the sake of topping everything that’s gone before him. And he does with aplomb, every last penny is up on screen animating this goliath. Industrial Light & Magic should just go ahead and accept the Oscar now – if anything else pinches the golden statuette, it’s a fix. These are benchmark-raising effects.
Perhaps the most damning criticism one can lay at the door of REVENGE OF THE FALLEN is that, whisper it quietly, it’s just not as cool as the first. While it’s easily up there as one of the great Summer thrill rides, any of the élan that the first film had has gone, sucked up in a balletic hurricane of testosterone and metal. There’s nothing that comes close to the giddy glee you got from the Bumblebee/Barricade chase in the original save for a rumble between Optimus and three ‘Cons that finally gives Prime a chance to shine. As you leave the cinema, it soon dawns on you that for a film about a bunch of aliens named Transformers, there’s not a great deal of transforming. Bay and co. have bet the farm on your automatic investment in the characters without realising what made them so appealing in the first place. Instead the audience is handed just a series of mind-boggling explosions punctuated by the occasional pretty picture and asked to accept it. And accept it you will, because the film barely leaves you any time to think and that’s probably just as well.
So, what are we left with? If you’ve come for Citizen Kane, the exit is right behind you. It’s difficult to bring standards to a movie like this when its chief protagonists are Big Fucking Robots. It’s bold and bright and wicked fun but ultimately the most vacuous thing you will see all year, there’s scarcely anything keeping it tethered to the ground. What we have is pure popcorn escapism, nothing more, nothing less and sometimes, that’s really all you need.
* * *
