I just saw a trailer for Transformers 4, which apparently has been renamed “Battleship” for some reason. There’s nothing particularly interesting about the trailer, but it did remind me of the time over summer that I saw Transformers 3 with its director Michael Bay.*
I didn’t write anything about it at the time, owing to the deep psychological trauma it inflicted upon me, but I did manage to find some of my notes of the viewing, which I decided to post here for posterity.
Me: Alright, let’s get this over with. I’ve got somewhere to b… HOLY CRAP THIS IS TWO-AND-A-HALF HOURS LONG?
Bay: Buckle up, baby. It’s time for some Total Bay-os!TM
Onscreen voiceover: In the last days of the great war on Cybertron between the noble Autobots and the evil Decepticons, a single Autobot ship escaped, carrying cargo that would have ended the war and saved…
[ Said spaceship gets blown to smithereens attempting to leave orbit. ]
Onscreen voiceover: Well, shit.
Me: Wait a second… the ship that got blown up at the beginning of the movie, presumably eons ago on a planet hundreds, if not thousands, of light-years away, managed to crash on the Moon? The only moon of the very same planet where, completely unrelated, a tiny piece of the all-important AllSpark landed? And, also completely unrelated, where the Decepticons once set up a sun-destroying machine hidden in the Great Pyramids?
Bay: Awesome, isn’t it?
Me: Do you have any idea what the odds are of anything remotely like that happening?
Bay: Dude, I crashed a spaceship in a vacuum and still had it make a shit-ton of noise. I keep having NASA scientists say “the dark side of the moon” even though there is no such thing. I’m making a movie premised on the idea that the Apollo 11 module landed fifty feet from the wreckage of a spaceship that appears to be the set of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, except with dead robots sporting Fu-Manchu mustaches instead of talking monkeys, and that no further evidence of this is ever found in the intervening four decades of space flight and telescope technology. Do I look like I care?
Me: You, sir, are a douche-bag.
Me: Did Bumblebee just shoot a rocket straight into a Iraqi soldier?
Bay: USA! USA! USA!
Me: But… why does he still look like a bright-yellow Camaro? Transformers are robots “in disguise.” The “in disguise” is pretty much the only tagline of Transformers.
Bay: What?
Me: You established in the first movie that Transformers could change their vehicle states at will into anything they scan….
Bay: …
Me: And you said in this one that they’re working with the US army…
Bay: …
Me: …So why doesn’t he transform into something more appropriate to desert warfare like a Jeep or a Humvee or a tank or… well, pretty much anything other than a glow-in-the-dark neon-yellow muscle car?
Bay: …
Me: …
Bay: Did I mention the car is American? USA! USA! USA!
Me: You, sir, are a douche-bag.
Me: So, the Decepticons are hiding out in the middle of the savanah?
Bay: No one would think to look for them in Africa!
Me: …No one except for the entire world, on account of the fact that the Decepticons tore the living shit out of the Great Pyramids in the last movie. And how does that work, anyway? Megatron and Starscream are giant, lumbering 50-foot tall metal monsters. They kind of stand out against the background.
Bay: Ah, but did you notice that Megatron is wearing a hood so nobody will recognize him now?
Me: …
Me: That‘s Shockwave? Why the hell is he riding a robotic sandworm? He’s supposed to transform into a laser gun, man, not the freaking Kwisatz Haderach.
Bay: Croissant-Hadda-whatnow?
Me: Seriously, dude it’s “Robots… in disguise.” What part of “in disguise” confuses you?
Bay: You wanna know who can use “disguise” in a sentence? [ Points thumbs at himself. ] Dis guy…. zuh.
Me: You, sir, are a douche-bag.
Me: So the Autobots went to the moon and found their good buddy Sentinel Prime, who is inexplicably voiced by Leonard Nimoy. That’s after scenes with John Malkovich playing a OCD spaz, Frances McDormand playing a hyper-strung uber-bitch, and Alan Tudyk playing a German manservant so flamingly gay it’s a wonder he hadn’t yet spontaneously burst into flames. What do you have on these people?
Bay: Don’t forget! I also had John Turturro pissed on in the first movie.
Me: [ Remembering. ] Oh God.
Me: So let me get this straight. The Decepticons knew about the crashed spaceship and Sentinel Prime, but they were waiting for the Autobots to find him first, so they could use the Leadership Matrix thingie, which is the only thing that could bring him back to life?
Bay: Brilliant, isn’t it?
Me: But in fact Sentinel Prime is in league with the Decepticons to make a “space bridge” to teleport Cybertron to Earth to rebuild it?
Bay: It’s a plot twist no one could see coming!
Me: But… if Sentinel Prime and Megatron were in cahoots all along, why did the Decepticons blow up the ship at the beginning?
Bay: Er… to throw the Autobots off their trail? After all, they had the Matrix of Leadership, which I established in the last movie revives Primes. Also, it and blows up suns.
Me: Riiiiiiiggghht. But they Autobots only discovered the Matrix after Sentinel’s ship had been blown up. According to the previous movie, the Matrix was assumed to have been destroyed. The Decepticons had no reason to believe the Autobots had it. And if Megatron left Cybertron after Sentinel Prime’s ship blew up and headed off to the Moon, how the hell did Megatron himself end up on Earth stuck in an iceberg hundreds of years earlier?
Bay: Time for an action sequence!
Me: You sir, are a douche-bag.
Onscreen Leonard Nimoy: I’m sorry Optimus, but the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Me: No… no… no…. [ Shakes fists up at the sky. ] BAY!!! BBBBBBBBBBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!
Me: So we’re going to have another high-speed robot fight on the freeway? Didn’t we cover this in Transformers 1? It seems so… repetitive.
Bay: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Me: Wait… this is a repeat! You actually just recycled footage from The Island for this chase, but digitally inserted robots in them!
Bay: Yeah? I pulled the same shit off in Transformers 1, too. Suck on that, boyee.
Me: You, sir, are a douche-bag.
Onscreen NASA tech: The Decepticons have promised to destroy the world unless the Autobots promise to leave the Earth. So why do we at NASA need to whipped up an extra-special Space Shuttle really fast, just to send them away?
Onscreen Shia Laboef: Because the Autobots can’t leave the planet.
Me: But… they were just on the Moon a half-hour ago to get Sentinel Prime. That doesn’t make any s… You know what, never mind. At least you got rid of the Racist Twins.
Bay: Yeah, I was told employing such derogatory stereotypes at such length might possibly be construed as racist. That’s why I took Skids and Mudflap out of the movie.
Onscreen Optimus: To help you, NASA scientists, are two of our top engineers, the Wrecker Twins.
Onscreen Twin #1: Achh! It’s good to see you, ma bonnie wee lass!
Onscreen Twin #2: Aye. Now whoo ett me robo-haggis?
Onscreen Twin #1: Achh! I deed, ya daft robowinkle. But now eet’s time to keel Meggeetroon Longshanks.
Onscreen Twin #2: Aye! Yeh keen take away me transmission fluid, but you’ll never take awee me freedom!
Me: You, sir, are a douche-bag.
Me: So the after blowing up the Autobots, the Decepticons take over the world, and teleport a bunch more Decepticons to Earth. Along with Cybertron and gunships, apparently. About that…
Bay: Total Bay-osTM!
Me: Why do robots who can transform into gunships actually need gunships?
Bay: …
Me: Nevermind. So the Decepticons blow Chicago the hell up and slaughter Chicagans left and right on the street… and only then do the Autobots reveal that they’d been hiding, safe and sound, all along?
Bay: It’s all a part of Optimus Prime’s master plan. I like to think of myself as Prime.
Onscreen Optimus Prime: We needed you to understand the Decepticons cannot be trusted.
Onscreen Shia LaBoef: That’s why you let the Decepticons brutally murder hundreds of thousands of humans without even trying to lift a finger to stop them? To teach us a lesson?
Onscreen Optimus Prime: Yes.
Onscreen Shia LaBoef: You, sir, are a docuhe-bag.
Bay: You need to pee? Now’s the time, because the last action scene is going to start.
Me: But… there’s an hour left in this movie.
Bay: I know. It’s going to blow… your… mind.
Me: Well, my head already hurts, so you may have a point. Do you need to use the toilet too?
Bay: Hardly. That’s what I have the American movie-going public for.
I leave for the restroom. In the stall next to me, a person breathlessly exclaims to the person with whom he’s currently on the phone: “Dude, I’m seeing Transformers 4, man. It’s the greatest movie I have ever seen in my life.” **
I weep for humanity, and return to my seat.
Me: I’m back. What did I miss?
Bay: GI Joe parachuted in using wingsuits —
Me: I thought the Decepticons controlled the air and were capable of taking out sophisticated American warplanes armed with missiles and machine guns. How the hell did bunch of guys dressed like Rocky the Flying Squirrel sneak through?
Bay: — and Shockwave used his robot-sandworm to tentacle-rape an office building —
Me: You are one sick puppy.
Bay: — and now… well, I’m not sure what exacty is going on here. Maybe its Bumblebee fighting Starscream. Or Ratchet fighting Soundwave. Or maybe its just some random automotive parts shots I accidentally threw in. I dunno.
Me: You, sir, are a douche-bag.
Onscreen Girlfriend-Who-Is-Not-Megan-Fox: Megatron, you know that when Sentinel beats the Autobots, he won’t need you anymore, and he’ll probably kill you off for, what, the third time in this franchise?
Onscreen Megatron: Your logic is infallible. I must sabotage my own plans in order to salvage my own plans.
Me: Wait, what? Did the supermodel just outwit the evil computer with an appeal to logic and vanity? What is this, Logan’s Run?
Bay: Dude, you’re missing Optimus totally kill the shit out of Megatron for the third time in this franchise.
Me: Did Optimus Prime just shoot Sentinel Prime as he begged for his life? And then ripped out his spinal column like a freaking Mortal Kombat fatality? Isn’t he supposed to be the good guy?
Bay: Total Bay-osTM!!!! Roll credits, bitches.
Me: You, sir, are a douche-bag.
* Obviously this is a parody. I wouldn’t sit through a movie with Michael Bay even if you hog-tied each of my testicles to pair of thoroughbreds and had all four horses head of in separate direction. None of this really happened.
** …Except, sadly, this part.