Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the dumbest yet most insanely self-confident 12-year-old you ever knew. This kid has Attention Deficit Disorder and an uncomfortable repertoire of cheap ethnic “gags.” For the first 30 minutes or so, I was willing to say: hey, at least it’s outrageously excessive in every dimension. For the next hour, I was willing to say: hey, it’s excessive. In the last 31 hours of its run-time, I kept asking Max if he had to go to the bathroom, just so I could take a break. I don’t hate this film–I *wish* it really had something like outrage on its mind. But, like 12-year-olds, it will scribble or mutter something “bad” then run around and bug the shit out of you, able to annoy but rarely breaking the skin, intent on its “intensity” but its effect is more to numb than to arouse. Even with its leering (12-year-old) attention to its skinny young vixens it is the opposite of arousing. But, verily, shit did explode.
I saw this with a fairly self-confident twelve-year-old, and he was not impressed. Nor was the fifteen-year-old. I am easier to please, and I did think that the last 35 minutes, which is one uninterrupted battle scene, delivered the action high that I needed (is this really the last big action movie of the summer?). Bay treats the Decepticons as little more than foreign soliders (their scale is subtley reduced for the house to house combat in the desert) and few can match his use of sound and slow motion to force an emotion upon the viewer, even one trying desperately to resist.
I should also thank Bay for providing the moral lesson to my kids that succumbing to that first kiss may well result in a long metallic tongue being inserted into the body with unpleasant results; for protection, this movie is better than that first pack of condoms.
That said, I was surprised — actually shocked — by the number of offensive missteps. These ranged from the two new Autobots in black face who brought to mind Jar Jar Binks, through the supposed comedy of our hero’s mother high on pot, John Turturro stripping down to an athletic supporter with ‘S7’ written on it, an anti-semitic quip directed at Turturro by a Decepticon, to endless shots of Megan Fox running from danger in a loose top, all filmed from slightly above the action. No doubt I am just being naive, but this was so blatant in its sexualizing of the female lead, that I had the odd, rare urge to lean over and cover the eyes of my children.
Chris, your last paragraph spells out exactly what I was trying to get at about the “bad” 12-year-old’s sensibility. (Note to most 12-year-olds: this does not mean you. I’m referencing a peculiar kind of asshole who is not yet old, clever, mean enough to have an impact beyond aggravation, but good lord does that kid cause aggravation.) I see a lot of kids’ movies, right?, and I have come to expect in the great mediocre mass of them some quietly desperate attempts to connect with the inevitable adults in the audience through double entendres, cheesy pop-culture references, etc. See, e.g., every Shrek film. What was startling here was that these moments of disruption–material clearly not aimed at the kids relentlessly targeted by the movie’s media omnipresence–these moments were so casually, smirkingly mean-spirited or crass. And yet there was nothing challenging, or even outrageous. They were just embarrassing and/or crude, and if Max were a couple years older or had found the film at all interesting beyond its concept, we’d have sat down and discussed, and probably dismissed.
The film is the perfect exemplar of pop-culture’s confusion muddled messages. There’s this ludicrous moment (okay, the film is 87.3% ludicrous moments, but still) where boy-hero Sam is given advice from a council of Prime elders. And they say something like, you can’t be given this transformer tool, you have to earn it. And in the next breath/sentence, they say, and this was your destiny, and it was ever to be so. (I get the sense that all the dialogue in the film was generated by a machine that had parsed the history of Hollywood action/war films, and without attention to internal consistency just accurately reiterated what ideological contradictions exist.) Women (or, let’s be honest, girls) are to be feared, and at them we will leer. Non-white Americans are buddies, and silly-different. Sam is first-generation college and should be proud, and college is a space of ludicrous narcissistic inanity. And so on. Like my imaginary 12-year-old, the film is so BAD and baldly foolish about its misbehavior that it’s almost the kind of film I’d like to go see with Max when he is up for a bit of critical reflexivity–it’d be easy to get a bead on the messages here.
a different take.
i was dragged to it by my visiting 12 and 16 year old nephews. they enjoyed it. i think i probably liked about 25 minutes of it (though not 25 consecutive minutes). the gangsta-bots were offensive, yes, but i can’t say i found the misogyny to very much worse than in the average hollywood film. and i still can’t tell the good and bad robots apart.