Written by: Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman
Directed by: Michael Bay
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Peter Cullen, Hugo Weaving, Josh Duhamel, Tyrse Gibbson

About half-way through this movie (thought I can’t be entirely sure, more on that later) there’s an exchange between our hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and an aging Decepticon-cum-Autobot named Jetfire, which pretty much sums up the whole experience. They’ve just been teleported from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum to, literally, bumfuck Egypt and the humans are very confused:
JETFIRE: I told you, taking the Space Bridge is the quickest way to get to Egypt.
SAM: What? Space Bridge? You didn’t tell us anything!
JETFIRE: Harrumph…You were given due warning.
No we weren’t! What’s a Space Bridge? Why hasn’t it been mentioned before? Why doesn’t it ever come up again? What just happened? It doesn’t matter because cool, exciting things continue to occur and the characters are left very little time to reflect on the nonsense. Such is the audience’s relationship with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
The movie succeeds in it’s stated objective, which is to show off giant robots fighting and looking awesome with the latest in digital F/X technology. There are no nits to be picked in this regard. Like the first movie, this is a visual triumph that probably spent the gross national products of a few central Asian states to bring us a full-scale Autobot vs. Decepticon war on Earth. And it even manages to have a few genuinely good moments of humor and character for it’s cast, digital and meaty alike. Michael Bay’s signature frat-boy manchild humor comes into play more often than I like (the astronomy class scene? John Tarturro’s jockstrap? Leg humping not once, but twice? Yeah, I could have done without), but it still managed to make me laugh. The Twins though…eeegh. Racist caricatures will lose you big points every time, Mikey. Gotta put that shit away. They probably would have been a lot more enjoyable without the weird high-pitched “urban” accents and gold buckteeth.
Usually I would avoid spoilers in the main body of a review, like revealing that fan-favorite Transformer Jetfire shows up and does stuff, but RotF really doesn’t need the protection. The plot isn’t just ancillary, it’s incomprehensible. The movie goes on for about 150 minutes and by the third leg of it I had completely lost all sense of place and time. Events were just happening seemingly at random, in completely different locales, with different tones of character. There were about five McGuffins throughout the movie, none of them explained much beyond “we need to go there/get them because it’s/they’re awesome!” It kind of felt like I had watched about two or three different movies by the time we reach the non-climax of the film, none of which made a lot of sense.
It’s a non-climax because while being an enormous action scene where the titular Fallen, Megatron (really, you thought he was gonna stay dead? C’mon) and their Decepticon horde tear through the US Military, Autobots and the Great Pyramid of Giza to get at a Transformer superweapon that will turn the sun into Energon which they can use to revive their homeworld or build new Transformers or something, and…How do you feel after reading that sentence? Now extrapolate that into the visual exhaustion and apathy you’d get from watching it play out on a giant screen. It’s the climax only by virtue of being the last battle in what has been a disjointed string of battles.
And yet, for all that, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. The sheer spectacle of the thing combined with characters that were pretty funny and engaging when they had a few moments where everything in the world was not exploding kept me from checking out. I don’t know why exactly we need to find Energon, or why the Fallen was never mentioned before now, or why exactly there’s a Decepticon disguised as a human (traditionally a big no-no in the mythos), and what’s the Matrix of Leadership exactly? We’re going to Giza! No wait, Petra! Now Giza again! Holy crap, look at them tear up that pyramid*! This is awesome! It’s kinda like a rickety old zipper ride at the carnival: if you get tense and resist, you’ll be jostled around and get bruised up and probably vomit. But just relax, be loose, and go along with the motions, and you’re treated to a pretty but confusing display of sounds and colors at all sorts of crazy angles. You’ll probably still vomit though if you eat before hand.
Of course, there were somthings that just can’t be ignored. Can we please, please end the trend of heroes with awesome lives trying to be “normal”? Sam has a bottomless government account, friendship with giant talking robots who think he’s awesome, and a girlfriend who is absolutely stunning in leather pants. Why does he want to leave? Writer Robert Orci says it’s because “[m]ost of us go off to school, don’t we, and leave home[...]Didn’t that happen to you? Why’d you do that?” Because my life sucked when I was 18. Maybe if I had the robots and the bank account I would have stuck the hell around. And if I can go the rest of my life without hearing another song by Linkin Park I will be a better man for it.
Some people are just not gonna loosen up enough to watch this movie. Even some of my most diehard geeky friends can’t bring themselves to enjoy it. There’s too much…stuff. I mean, really, that’s all it is. It’s stuff. Sound and fury signifying…well, that depends on who you ask. Ask them, it’s signifying nothing. Ask me? It’s signifying oh my god he just ripped that robot-tiger-thing’s spine out! Fuck yeah! And sometimes, when it’s done well, that’s all it needs to be.
*Note: It’s not a gripe really, but as the fiance of an archaeologist and a lover of antiquity myself, I gotta say that movies where historical stuff gets destroyed are painful to watch sometimes. Literally the entire time that Devastator was demolishing the capstones of the Great Pyramid I was clutching my chest like it was my first goddamn heart attack. And the scene in the library at Unnamed University? Holy freakin’ god.
