komplexify!

I’m going to do you all a favor, and excise from the one-hundred fifty minute long soul-suck that is Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen the only worthwhile scene. In it, the protagonists have located an ancient Transformer, one who has been on Earth since before the Great Pyramids were built.  Quoth he:

You’re welcome.

Really, you ought to just walk away right now, because if you add any more details to this movie, you’ll realize just how terrible this movie is.  Hell, just look at the title: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Just think about that for a moment, and it’s clear this movie is a joke:

Michael Bay was trying to make Transformers 2 an epic, but ending up with just EPIC FAIL.  Just take every bad thing about the first Transformers movie (and if you need a reminder on what those are, here you go),  increase it by an order of magnitude, and you’ve got the sequel.

For example,the first movie was dumb.  I don’t mean this in the sense of being of poor quality or inferior (although it was certainly these things too); rather, absolutely none of it made any sense to anyone with more than one synapse to fire.  This time its even worse.  For example, the movie opens by stating that the Autobots and the U.S. Army having teamed up to covertly assassinate Decepticons remaining on Earth, whereby “covertly” Michael Bay apparently means “100-foot-tall robots level the living shit out of downtown Shaghai in the middle of rush hour.”  Then an Obama administration official, slightly miffed by this, tries to deport them from the planet because they don’t have green cards.

Eventually it becomes clear that the real plot of Transformers 2 involves a transforming MacGuffin with the potential to empower Decepticons to destroy the Earth.  It also has the power to magically teleport humans to Robot Heaven.  Plus, it’s magic, and it only works if you really really believe in it, kind of like Tinker Bell.

I’m serious.  This movie is that dumb.

For another example, in the first movie, the robots (despite looking cool) are invariably repulsive, one-dimensional caricatures.  The same is true here.  The aformentioned ancient Transformer, to take an example,  is more or less summed up as CRANKY OLD GUY.  We know he’s old, because when he transforms, his robot form includes an effing walker.  Also, he’s incontinent, and occasionally shits himself.

I’m still serious.  This movie is that classy.

(This is in fact the most classy example in the movie, too, in that the robot only shits out parachutes.  The other robots in the movie cry, bleed, and even vomit various coolants and fluids on their foes.  Combine that with robot urination from the first movie and I’d say Michael Bay has a really creepy fascination with watersports.)

It’s actually worse than that.  Whereas the first movie only hinted at a Transformer’s mechanized manhood, this movie is chock full of cybernetic shlongs.  There’s a blender that transforms into a foot-tall robot with a foot-long cock that shoots lasers.  There’s another foot-tall robo-perv that humps legs like a horny chihuahua.  There’s a robot that transforms into a supermodel (seriously) who makes out with Shia LaBeouf using her two-foot-long tongue and (literal) buns of steel.  We even get an uncomfortable look at the underside of giant robot scrotum as its freeballin’ two-ton nads dangle (and clank) in the wind.

I’m still serious.  Michael Bay is one sick puppy.

As if gratuitous robot alien gonzo porn wasn’t enough, Transformers 2 boasts as protagonists the most irritating, blatantly racist CGI caricatures since Jar Jar Binks, the Autobot twins.  They’re robotic wanna-G’s that spend the entire movie saying things like “Git ready for a ass-whuppin’” and “‘Cuz you a pussy, that’s why” and “I’ma bust a cap in yo ass” before finally having to admit that they’re both illiterate.  Also, they have nappy robo-hair, ginormous robo-ears, and one of them sports a gold (buck) tooth:

I think their names are supposed to be Mudflap and Skidmark, but “Amos and Android” would have been far more appropriate.

I could go on about this, but other sites have done it much better, such as the Editing Room or Topless Robot.  Let me simply sum it up by saying that (1) Michael Bay is one racist, sick puppy, and (2) Transformers 2 is a monotonous unfunny joke.

I just saw Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland movie.  It’s hard to say if it’s a sequel to the books or a re-imagining of the whole thing.  In it, a young girl is accidentally transported from her humdrum everyday world to a fantasy land where she is recruited by one queen to vanquish another.  In doing so, she is escorted by a crazed, hat-wearing Johnny Depp, who offers her an odd assortment of shape-shifting snacks, as well as introducing her to an odd assortment of small identical people and various sentient animals.  Finally, the hero must locate an ancient sword and do epic CGI battle with a winged wraith and finally vanish an evil, big-eyed (and, in this case, equally big-headed) evil.

So, to sum up:

This isn’t to say that the movie is bad, necessarily… it’s just nothing new.  Burton’s Wonderland isn’t particularly wondrous at all; in fact, it looks a lot like the worlds of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride and Sleepy Hollow, and if nothing else suggests an obssessive-compulsive fascination with spiral-shaped trees.  In fact, Burton doesn’t even call it Wonderland… in the movie, it’s known as Underland.

Most of the mathematical wit and logical nonsense that characterized Lewis Carroll’s original two stories (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (and What Alice Found There) has been ejected in favor of a (rather sadly) pedestrian action movie in which Alice must prove that she’s not bound by rules and Victorian destiny by doing battle with an anemic dragon and a hydrocephalic queen… which paradoxically is precisely what everyone in Underland says she’s destined to do.

That being said, the movie moves at a good clip, so it’s never particularly boring. Burton’s twin muses of Johnny Depp and Helena Bodham Carter are entertaining even underneath all the make-up and digital manipulation, and Depp’s celebratory dance at the end of the movie is amusing as hell.  It’s certainly a nifty popcorn-fodder movie, but regrettably nothing more.