Transformers: Less than meets the eye

Robert Oppenheimer kept coming to mind during Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. After bringing together the smartest minds in the world, and years of research, the scientist successfully created the first nuclear bomb. Afterward he had enough sense to realize what he’d done: “Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he famously quoted after seeing the blast.

Director Michael Bay will not have that hindsight with his new Transformers movie, which also brought together a lot of talented people with good intentions to produce a critical mass of movie so genuinely awful that we, as a people, don’t deserve the art of the cinema if we deify these transforming robots to the tune of a billion bucks or more. It’s not entertainment anymore; it’s a cruel and violent assault on our senses.

At least you get a bang for your buck, though: Transformers is like a dozen or so other movies stripped of their souls, hollowed out and mashed into this one preposterously long (two-and-a-half hours!) summer blockbuster. Transformers 2 contains everything, which is just a kinder way of saying it contains nothing at all. Exotic cars, hot babes, military gunplay, computer hackery, robots, motorcycles, action, thrills, romance, stereotypes, clichés, racist robot caricatures, inexplicable titillation on custom choppers, mechanical fire farts, dogs humping legs … all of it atomized into this inane plot about a boy and his transforming robot buddies. It all comes at you so fast and unrelenting that watching it is like having your eyeballs sandblasted with salt and red-pepper flakes.

The film wasn’t written so much as it was grown in a marketing analyst’s Petri dish, like the way bio-chemists harvest anthrax. You’ll know exactly what I mean when afterward you feel like drinking a Mountain Dew, downloading a song by Green Day (sell outs!), logging on to a Cisco Systems video chat or buying a Chevy, a GM brand that our tax dollars are keeping afloat while they goof off on movie sets. Product placement isn’t a new device at movie theaters by any stretch of the imagination, but Transformers makes it feel even dirtier than it should, like making moonshine with holy water.

I don’t dare explain a plot in fear that a black hole form around my desk and begin sucking this side of the solar system into it. Generally speaking, it’s again about Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), who has the Transformers on speed dial because, what the hell, every super-mega-ultra transforming robot forms an alliance with a powerless teenager who still hasn't got to second base with the Geekdom's reigning queen. Sam’s going off to school, which gives his mother a reason to eat pot brownies and sack the Frisbee players on the university lawn, a scene so horrible it actually stands out from the clutter.

The movie dives headfirst into a lot of Transformers mythology, none of which makes any sense even to the robots, one of whom is shocked to discover that a shard of god-cube has downloaded into Sam’s brain if only to give Sam a reason to stay in the movie. (I guess he has more of a role than Megan Fox, though, who pouts on the Web chat seductively.) Then there’s all the rules: the shard can re-animate dead robots, the shard can also kill living robots, there’s a Matrix thingy that unlocks a device, the device can only be started by the One, the One can only be found in a temple of dead robots, the temple requires magic writing to find … on and on into infinity until your brain is a soupy mush. At one point a Transformer with a pirate beard transports himself to Egypt with no explanation as to how he did it or why we hadn’t seen that specific trick before or since.

As if the plot wasn’t confusing enough, the Transformers themselves are just as perplexing. First of all, they have no shape. So when they fight it’s hard to tell who’s giving a punch and who’s receiving one. Nevermind that they all have guns on their arms, but still fight with swords. At one point five Transformers unite into one big robot to (I think) eat the Pyramids, although I’m still not sure how. And secondly, all the Transformers look alike. The good guys, the Autobots, are usually more colorful, while the bad ones, the Decepticons, are steel gray, although this rule is not usually followed consistently so good luck making sense of anything from the first chase sequences in China to the endlessly long battle in the sands on the Giza Plateau.

And speaking of locations, someone explain this to me: Sam apparently walks the two blocks between New York City and the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. in like 10 minutes. Once he’s in the Smithsonian, he walks out the back door into an airplane boneyard in Tucson, which doesn’t look at all like the Washington, D.C., area. And then he transports inexplicably to Egypt. To review, he goes from NYC to DC to Tucson to Egypt in about 15 minutes of screen time. If you can explain this without defying the natural order of things, I’ll buy your tickets to the next Transformer movies up to Part 6, or until Michael Bay is run out of town, whichever comes first.

Compounding all these visual illusions, Bay frames the action in tight close-ups and using these dizzying spin shots that rotate around scenes to show off stuff not really worth showing off. All totaled up, it’s utterly and stupendously incomprehensible. It was difficult enough to watch on the big screen I can’t even imagine how kids will be able to watch this thing on their tiny iPod screens in four months — makes me want the red-pepper flakes again.

This is director Michael Bay’s eighth movie, which, coincidentally, is also the number of films he’s probably actually seen. Had he screened even a single movie that wasn’t his own he’d learn that this is not what people want or need with their films. The movie-going public just thinks it needs it because it’s on billboards, TV and comes as a freebie with their combo meal. We can have talking transforming robots, but we must also have coherent plots, characters that are important to those plots, and images that are more than visual static.

What Bay’s done is taken a line of Hasbro toys and injected less life into their contorting bodies than the children that were playing with them in sand boxes back when Reagan was president. If that's an achievement then I refer back to my original suggestion: we, the artless hacks called humans, no longer have a right to contribute to the cinema and should abandon it until we can prove ourself worthy again.