My stance on this film has always been that you’d have to pay me to witness it even via Netflix, or at least provide me with copious amounts of booze and friends to distrct me from it, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get some indirect enjoyment from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. That comes in with all the critics seemingly getting a kick out of decimating it.
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys.
And make no mistake: Mr. Bay is an auteur. His signature adorns every image in his movies, as conspicuously as that of Lars von Trier, and every single one is inscribed with a specific worldview and moral sensibility. Mr. Bay’s subject — overwhelming violent conquest — is as blatant and consistent as his cluttered mise-en-scène. His images, particularly during the frequent action sequences, can be difficult to visually track, but they are also consistently disjointed. (And proudly self-referential: the only director he overtly cites is himself, with a shot of the poster for his movie “Bad Boys II.”) The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette once described an auteur as someone who speaks in the first person. Mr. Bay prefers to shout.
Bay has a great love of flashy effects, stroboscopic editing and loud crashes; he famously calls his cinematic technique “fucking the frame”. That phrase might be brutal, but it’s accurate. And there’s no doubt about it: he really has given the frame a right old seeing-to this time. Bay has turned up at the frame’s flat with some unguent massage oils, scented candles and a hundredweight of Viagra. It isn’t long before the headboard of the frame’s bed is crashing repeatedly against the wall, while the frame gazes up at the ceiling … and I think the frame is faking it.
And we hadn’t even gotten to the point where it became obvious that no one involved in the film cared enough to craft even the most rudimentary of stories or to be concerned about even the most simple of continuity: at one point the characters walk out of the back door of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and end up blatantly in Arizona at the Sorona Desert Airplane Graveyard. It’s a breathtaking moment of not giving a shit, one that gives you an idea of how little thought and care went into the construction of the film.
