Marvel mines its junk bins for Thor-ible film

Talk about starting the summer movie season with a bang — a bang to the side of the head. Some movies give you a good time; Thor just assaults you then gloats over your unconscious body.

Oh, it gets worse: it’s all in 3-D because two dimensions of torture just aren’t enough. Call me a contrarian stooge for not liking this beloved comic movie. Call me an elitist snob for not appreciating the dense comic mythology. Call me a jerk for blasting a movie you’ve been dying to see. Just don’t call me when Thor gives you a raging headache from its paralyzing 3-D effects.

Here is Thor, a blond bruiser with a bad attitude. The film begins on Earth but jumps to another planet, Asgard — mind the pronunciation — where Thor and his buddies, all of them wrapped in similar football padding, prance around beating up bad guys on ice planet Jotunheim. Asgard, Jotunheim, Mjolnir, Volstagg … the names will only make sense if you’re a Nordic raider, or have somehow braved ridicule by reading Thor comics when everyone else was reading X-Men and Superman. (Seriously, Thor?!? Is Marvel out of comics to adapt? What’s next Dolphin Boy?)

Thor is steeped in mythology. He ain’t no simple Spider-Man, who can be summed up in three sentences: “Spider bites boy. Boy gets super powers. Boy uses super powers to fight crime.” Thor’s origin story, which pains the entire first half of the movie, is more complicated. He’s the son of Odin, a wise and great god-king in Asgard, a land that has a railway of lightning that can traverse the cosmos, though Thor rides to the lightning machine on a horse. Odin must choose the next god-king, which comes down to Thor and his weasely little brother Loki. I knew Loki was the villain in the first shot because he had slicked-back hair — it’s almost always a dead giveaway, more so than the “No. 1 Villain” T-shirt.

A power struggle erupts and Thor is cast to earth without his powers, of which there are many: flight, lightning punches, sonic booms kicks, and the wielding of a boomerang hammer. In an earlier scene, Odin tells Thor that his hammer is a “weapon to destroy, or a tool to build.” Guess what Thor uses it for? I kept wishing that IQ-deficient Thor spoke like Hulk: “Me Thor. Me crush with hammer.” No one expects Thor to fly down to the South and start repairing tornado damage, or zip on across to Japan to rebuild from the tsunami, but that line is insulting. Marvel would rather inject Drano into its eyeballs than feature a superhero who builds something. Name me one fat comic fan that would sit through a movie about Superman repairing levees or Batman doing homeless outreach to crackheads.

Much of the film takes place on Asgard, the realm of Thor, and these scenes are horrible in nearly every way. The dialogue is laughable, the effects are weak, and all the mythology is just silly. And there are more funny hats than the royal wedding. The Earth scenes are slightly better, including the one where Thor walks into a diner and says, “This mortal form has grown weak. I require sustenance.” He orders more coffee by throwing his mug on the floor and yelling, “Another!” You’ll laugh, as I did, but only because Thor’s the dimmest of Marvel’s bulbs. Oddly enough, Thor’s staging of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men would be quite moving.

Thor is played by Chris Hemsworth, a relative newcomer. He’s a perfect Thor if only because he plays right into the title character’s oafish goofiness, which only contradicts the film’s later heroic posing. Hemsworth is surrounded by some major talent, including two Oscar winners — Natalie Portman and Anthony Hopkins — though the characters can’t seem to get a foothold on the material. They spend too much time blubbering in convoluted prose and endlessly explaining Odin’s many faults to ever recover from the film’s melodramatic undertones. When the action elements finally wrestle the plot away from the Asgardian windbags, it’s too late and Thor is mired in too much story, too many cruddy 3-D effects and all those silly outfits.

Thor’s director, Kenneth Branagh, a fine Shakespearean actor and director, was working with too many elements here. The dialogue is atrocious. The pacing is unbalanced. There are too many characters. And generally he makes some critical missteps. For instance, actor Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from The Wire) is cast in a role that requires him to wear a ridiculous costume, walk in a clunky robotic gait and speak in a chunky monotone. Why bury a fine actor in a meaningless role? The movies seems bored with its characters, which is probably why it later resorts to outright kidnapping when Thor faces off against, I kid you not, the robot Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

That doggone extra dimension of movie doesn’t help any of this. Much of the film is shot in that hyper-cut style of editing. I find that fad difficult to watch in 2-D, but here it is in 3-D painstakingly slamming itself against your frontal lobe trying to batter out a seizure or two. With action pieced together from dozens of angles and then sped up in a flurry of images, the 3-D effect is useless and counterproductive. By the time your eyes convince your brain that what you’re seeing is a three-dimensional image the shot changes and the whole process starts over again — we’re talking nanoseconds here, but they add up. And since elements within each shot are constantly shifting from foreground to background, and back again, the film constantly plays tricks with your eyes. As if to make matters worse, every camera angle, even ones as simple as basic close-ups on talking heads, are tilted, as if Branagh left his Shakespeare collection under one leg of the camera tripod. At best the 3-D won’t work; at worst you’ll get a headache or feel dizzy.

In the end, though, the joke is on the audience: Thor will get people to pay money to sit indoors and wear sunglasses.

Ferrell plays Ferrell in Ferrell comedy

Will Ferrell has grown very tiresome on me. It’s not that he’s run out of material, but rather that he’s never had any material to begin with. He plays his characters like different hues of the same color — and the color is Stupid.

He must begin each movie with Mad Libs: “In this film I am Will Ferrell as a ________ working as a ________.” The blanks are always personality traits and occupation. Anchorman was masculine jerk and news anchor. Blades of Glory was sex addict and figure skater. Talladega Nights was obnoxious redneck and Nascar driver.

Here in The Other Guys the blanks are computer geek and police officer. The performance is funny, like all his performances, but it all feels vaguely familiar, like Ferrell is doing the same character just in different costumes. He’s partnered with Mark Wahlberg, who wears comedy like it’s made of burlap and fire ants. Remember that SNL gag about Wahlberg talking to farm animals? That was not far from the truth in Other Guys, where Marky Mark seems unfit for even the simplest bits, which is strange considering the movie was probably titled from a line Wahlberg delivers in another cop movie, The Departed — “I’m the guy who does his job, you must be the other guy.”

Ferrell is Detective Gamble and Wahlberg is Detective Hoitz on the NYPD. They work in robbery-homicide, although they appear to be doing clerical work for the city inspector — Gamble has a pending investigation involving scaffolding violations. Hoitz is given desk work because he accidentally shot Derek Jeter once in a dark Yankee Stadium tunnel, and now all the other cops call him the Yankee Clipper. (Another cop tells him, “You shoulda shot A-Rod.” So true.)

Hoitz and Gamble share an office with Danson & Highsmith (ampersand intended), hero cops who live in a perpetual Michael Bay movie. In the opening scenes, they eject a hotrod out of a double decker bus into Trump Plaza — Michael Bay, take notes. They’re played by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson as if they thought the movie was starring them. In the end you’ll wish it had.

Anyway, the hero cops eventually meet an unfortunate end (here's a hint: their end involves lots and lots of bagpipes) and the department needs some new cops to take the lead on hot cases, which is where Gamble and Hoitz come in. Of course, though, they’re dimwits. Early in the film, Gamble, in his Prius, accidentally plows through a crime scene, over a bodybagged corpse and into a table full of cocaine evidence. The Prius spends the rest of the film dusted in the fine narcotic powder; at one point a bad guy swipes some off the hood and rubs it on his gums.

There’s another gag where Gamble is tricked into doing a Desk Pop, which is shooting your gun at your desk, something cops do every couple of months to blow off steam. He’s such a doofus that he actually does it and his captain (played by Michael Keaton) takes his gun away and gives him a wooden prop. When the bad guys take the guns later, they return the wooden one to the department but with a nice stain on it. “You should really send them a thank you note,” the captain says. The captain ha some other clever lines, including one where he mixes up the morning briefing (involving serial rapists and murderers) with the morning briefing at his other job at Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Some of the gags are funny, but the movie wasn’t put together very well. It transitions from scene to scene the way television commercials transition together, which is not at all. I kept wondering, “How did the characters get here?” And the action has that shaky Bourne-style editing that involves a million different shots pieced together in semi-chronological order. Also, watch some of the awkward reaction shots at the dinner table sequence; makes you wonder if director of photography was sick that day because the angles are strange and meaningless.

Mostly, though, I just didn’t care for Ferrell and Wahlberg together. The chemistry is there, but the film seems to fluctuate in and out of the sweet spot on their dial. At one point I wondered if the film was ever rehearsed in front of the actual writers. If so, then they would have seen that a three-minute monologue about a lion swimming in the ocean wasn’t really on the money. Neither was Wahlberg doing ballet moves. Nor was an extended sub-plot with Gamble as a pimp with a stable of women who refer to him as Gator.

Some bits are only funny in Ferrell’s head. The Other Guys has more of those jokes than most Ferrell comedies.

Where is the Wonder in this dark land?

Tim Burton’s library must be a mess. A long time ago he reached for Alice in Wonderland on a shelf and inadvertently grabbed a Chronicles of Narnia. That accident is preserved for us in his charmless and vapid retelling of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a book far wittier than Tim Burton’s version will allow us to believe.

If you recall, Carroll’s book was about a girl encountering, via rabbit hole, a dream-like repertory of silliness: absurdist wordplay, nonsensical double-talk, riddling puns and punning riddles, and bizarre tests of logic. It’s no wonder the drug culture of the ’60s seized on the elements of the story for their hallucinogenic properties (see Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”).

But Burton, master of all of things gothic and ghouly for suicidal emo-inflicted adolescents, deviates around much of Alice’s central themes so he can, of all things, create a clunky fantasy-adventure in the spirit of Lord of the Rings or one of the Narnia movies, complete with magical swords, talking animals, epic army battles and the required dragon slaying. And, as if to add injury to insult, I found Mad Hatter Johnny Depp, Burton’s favorite muse, to be an absolute bore.

And it started so promising, too, with young Mia Wasikowska as the domineering, free-spirited Alice fleeing a marriage proposal and tumbling down that famous rabbit hole into the fantastic world of Wonderland. Although Alice spends a ridiculous amount of time shrinking and enlarging into and out of her dress — I hope those hems are reinforced — she’s a plucky heroine who’s given a curiosity level proportionate to that of Wonderland’s unusual oddities.

And there are many oddities. Consider Tweedledee and Tweedledum (both played by Matt Lucas), who are so round and doughy that a pizza chef might cover them with flour and flatten them. All of Carroll’s other creations are accounted for as well: the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the army of playing cards (shouldn't the villain be the Ace of Spades?), flamingos and hedgehogs that complete a croquet set, a slippery and evaporating Cheshire Cat, and the White Rabbit, who to my recollection never says “We’re late.”

Dare I forget Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, whose role is enlarged needlessly to give Depp the screen time his audience feels he deserves. Depp — cowering behind a silly lisp, a Carrot Top fright wig and what must be gallons of makeup — does nothing for the story outside of his tea party scene, and even there he’s pushing it as he stomps over the teapots and dodges thrown saucers. Yes, the Burton/Depp legacy goes way back, but after this and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, maybe it’s time for the pair to work apart more often.

The world of Wonderland, which looks a lot like Avatar’s Pandora because they were designed by some of the same people, is gloomy and dark even as plants with neon blooms and glowing mushrooms drape the scenery. Blame the 3-D process, which makes the picture dark and muddy and then requires audiences to wear sunglasses to view it. Even a bright movie like Up was dimmed by the 3-D glasses, so a trademark Burton film is turned hopelessly murky for a 3-D effect that wasn’t even that noticeable. If you have an option, see Alice in regular ol’ 2-D.

The first half of the film seems to function as we remember the book and the other films functioning: Alice is sucked into Wonderland where she reacts to the strangeness around her with her quirky intelligence and innocence. Toward the middle of Burton’s film, though, he turns it into a fantasy adventure by requiring Alice to rescue characters from dungeons and slay monsters with special swords. It’s as if Burton felt obligated to keep his Alice in Wonderland from being too smart for its own good, so he threw in some battles and chases. Shame on directors for thinking that’s what’s needed in any film.

Driving home the third act is Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, whose head is as abnormally large as her temper. Out of self-pity and jealousy of her sister, the White Queen — a goth-accented Anne Hathaway — the Red Queen is determined to rule Wonderland with an iron fist. She plans to use a dragon that only Alice can destroy, which of course sets off a race to kill Alice by "offing her head" or stopping her from stealing the only sword that can slay the dragon. It’s all mindless fantasy fare, and could have been left out completely. However, I did like the Red Queen’s castle, which is full of legless tables and chairs; holding them up are little monkeys or pot-bellied pigs.

Although I loved Wasikowska as Alice and some of the minor characters, I’m concerned at the liberties Burton took with his Alice in Wonderland. Not because he deviates from the book, which is fine by me, but because he changes the tone of the book into this glowing mess of mediocrity. The book was unique because it was free of the elements Burton seemed so inclined to add into his version.

For years I’ve said that Hollywood was going to do an action-adventure version of the Bible, maybe with Bruce Willis as a sword-wielding Moses and perhaps Zac Efron as a joke-hurling Jesus — maybe Michael Bay can direct. This version of Alice in Wonderland is an evolutionary step in that direction.

(All the photos with this review are reproduced here exactly as the studio sent them out. You can see for yourself how dark the film is. Now look at pictures with sunglasses on to appreciate the whole 3-D effect.)

Stare into my eyes, Vampire

As if the world needed more skulking, brooding teens, here is an entire film of them doing nothing but staring into the abyss of each other’s eyes contemplating being together for the most miserable of eternities. Why they want to brave immortality together is beyond me, especially when they can’t muster a smile for more than about 5 minutes.

Even in the film’s opening moments — usually the parts of a movie full of happy pre-conflict characters — our hero is reciting Romeo & Juliet, and not the romantic verses either, but the suicide parts. Apparently, his soul is tortured, which is why he tortures the screen (and us) with his overplayed teen angst.

I’m going to just unload on New Moon starting right from the top since the core audience of the Twilight franchise doesn’t read this blog because it isn’t delivered as an iPhone app or a Twitter update. And because if they know better they’ll stay away from reviews, most of which are going to devour this petty, minuscule movie and its unnecessarily loud hype.

New Moon is a teen vampire movie set in the Pacific Northwest. It made me yearn for better teen movies, better vampire movies and a different story in the Pacific Northwest, a setting far too pretty for these gloomy teens. If you haven’t seen Twilight then there’s no real point in seeing New Moon, which assumes you know every scene from the first film and every word, comma and veiled nuance in Stephenie Meyer’s novels, including the endings to sequels that haven’t been filmed yet.

Apparently even the most average Twilight fans read the books multiple times so they can nod in agreement when the films ace the material, and then shake their fists when they get it all wrong. It’s as if the film isn’t a film, but an appendix to the book. Those same fans will say you have to read the books to enjoy the movies, but let me add this: you can skip the books and the movies so you can free up time in your schedule for charity work, organized sports or treehouses. (To be fair, the same can be said about Star Wars, Harry Potter or any other overhyped franchise.)

Bella (Kristen Stewart) is back and this time she wants to be a vampire. The pros are fashionable clothes, overpriced cars and eternal life with Edward (Robert Pattinson). The cons are twinkling ice-cold skin, pale complexion, chronic boredom and eternal life with Edward. Most women at the screening I attended would love to spend just half an hour with Edward (if it even takes that long for the little imp) even if there’s clearly not a single thought in that vampire brain of his. Honestly now, how long could you really talk about how much you loved each other? This is why Romeo and Juliet are both dead at the end of their story — they really had nothing better to talk about anyway.

Sensing Bella’s sudden vampire urge (a blatant sexual metaphor perhaps), Edward ditches her “for her own safety.” Taking advantage of Bella’s new single status is Jacob (pudgy faced Taylor Lautner), the local werewolf who reveals himself to be a werewolf about 90 minutes after the Twilight idiots (like myself) have figured it out for ourselves. The fact that he walked around in cut-off shorts and no shirt in Washington’s winter had something to do with it, though. And then after he’s revealed, cue a stream of horrific wolf/dog puns.

The acting is atrocious on nearly every level. Stewart, who I feel has some talent, is required to have bad dreams and stare into empty spaces like Edward's face, which barely counts as acting in a movie not made for girls with Hello Kitty! backpacks. Edward looks clueless in every scene, and Pattinson doesn't help him with the hazed-over wonderment in his moonface. All the best characters are given only brief parts, like Charley, Bella's dad, who says stupid fatherly things, but is generally a sane character if also a little clueless about his free-wheeling daughter. Vampire matriarch Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) is the most interesting of the vampires, if only because he's not 17 years old, yet all he does is stitch an arm then fade into the background. Bella's friend Jessica has a terrific little monologue about zombies and clichés that's so poignant it could be a commentary on the film itself. Jessica's played by Anna Kendrick, the star of one of my favorite movies about teens, Rocket Science. She also keeps up with George Clooney in December's superb Up in the Air. See either of those movies and you'll be better using your time.

I’ve explained some of the plot, but I’m not doing the film justice. What is it about? It’s about Bella waiting for Edward to return. That’s it. She toys with Jacob’s feelings, but he clearly never has a shot, the poor wolf-guy, because Edward is destined to return or Bella will just whither from his absence. The film states all this again and again in tortured sequences of dialogue that will test your patience and the strength of your armrest as you claw at it mercilessly. In terms of content, the vacuum of space feels like a conga line compared to the chilly and unpleasant conversations these characters share during many of New Moon’s 130 minutes.

All this weepy drama can’t be good for women, especially young girls, who are brainwashed by opera this soapy. I hate it when a movie makes me feel like a feminist, but this is one of them. Consider: Bella is defined by the men she’s dating. She’s worthless when Edward’s not around. When he disappears she acts suicidal in hopes that he’ll return and pity her. She’s always in need of rescuing. Watch this movie and you’re being told that women are stupid and meaningless until a man completes them. I expect this from a misogynist like Tucker Max, not a woman. And why does a man have to draw attention to this?

If it hates women or loves them, all I ask is that something happens. New Moon just pretends to have things happening: vampires lunge at open wounds, shirtless boys transform into overgrown wolves, stand-offs and chases in the woods, and Italian castles with a vampire tribunal (in which Dakota Fanning has one line, “Pain”). Break all that down, though, and you still only have a frozen tundra of uncomfortable silences, impassioned gazes and lifted eyebrows all directed at Bella, who’s so self-centered that maybe immortality as a narcissist vampire is an appropriate career path.

Obviously, I hated this movie, but — and this has to be said — Twilight fans will love it. They’ll see Bella and Edward’s bland conversations as modern-day Shakespeare, and all the weepy, detached romance as eternal true love. They’ll eat it up in multiple viewings and then write me to say I’m a cranky old man who doesn’t understand anything. Well, here’s one thing I do understand: skulking, brooding teens are no fun to watch. In real life, or in a movie.

Smile already.

Why Marlon Wayans is cast in garbage

The Internet is full of dumb trivia, but this one is not only dumb, but completely retarded. It was a trivia nugget that appeared on the front page of IMDb, though I think these nuggets must cycle randomly because it wasn't there when I returned. It said, and I quote (because you can't make this shit up): "Marlons Wayans was cast as Ripcord [in G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra] after his performance in Requiem For a Dream (2000). Wayans is also a fan of G.I. Joe."

How the producers of G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra could watch Requiem For a Dream — a serious, honest-to-goodness FILM of the highest order — and come to the conclusion that he's perfect for their absurd, big-budget, stale-popcorn piece of shit MOVIE is beyond all comprehension. The fact that they were even allowed to say G.I. Joe and Requiem For a Dream in the same sentence proves they're absolutely insane, and Requiem director Darren Aronofsky gets to knee each of them in the balls until they are dead. If anything it's a sad commentary on Marlon Wayans, who hasn't done enough work for Joe producers to name-drop. What are they going to do, say "We picked Marlon for an elite super-soldier because he played a terrific man-baby in Little Man"? Or, "Marlon did white-face better than anyone I've ever seen in White Chicks so we had to have him in this lame-ass action movie." Of course not. The producers are going to name-drop the best thing Marlon has ever done, and that's Requiem, a movie he did 10 years ago and has nothing to do — in this universe or any alternate universes — with G.I. Joe.

One beer, please ... but make it to go.

At the Tempe screening of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell the real Tucker Max, the main character from the film, made an appearance. Four minutes into his pre-show routine — one in which he treats every fan like a hostile witness or comedy-show heckler — he had painfully shared stories of dead prostitutes, objectified turkey legs and using abortion payments to rack up frequent flyer miles on his credit card.

One fan stood up, grabbed a mic and seemed ready to brag about a sexual assault he perpetrated as a “joke.” Tucker, the screening’s foul-mouthed court jester, cut the fan off before he implicated himself in something that required police intervention. “Hey,” I thought to myself, “at least Tucker has some limits.”

Tucker Max is offensive for offensive’s sake. He claims he’s not a bigot because he hates everyone almost equally. He claims he’s not a misogynist because, after all, he has sex with thousands of women, so by default he must love them, right? Remember when mountaineering pioneer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest and he responded, “Because it’s there.” Why does Tucker say crude things? For no other reason than because they’re there.

The movie would have been better served without its star personality in attendance, mainly because afterward you could plainly see how the film watered down the real Tucker, a mean-spirited and bitter young man who has crafted a franchise from his drunken sexual exploits for the frat-boy branch of future alcoholics of America. The Tucker in the film is not nearly as toxic, which may be its only redeeming quality.

The film follows law student Tucker Max (Matt Czuchry) as he pesters his friend Dan (Geoff Stults) for a rambunctious bachelor party before his wedding to a girl far too sweet for a movie like this. Against his better judgment, Dan relents to a road trip that can only end bad, and has ended bad in a dozen other better films. Tucker and Dan bring along another buddy, Drew (Jesse Bradford, Flags of Our Fathers), who recently broke up with his girlfriend when he found her cheating with a celebrity rapper named Grillionaire, which sounds like a McDonalds prize giveaway.

Beer in Hell pretty much follows a well-worn path through the rowdy bachelor party formula: naked women shimmy from poles, the drinking increases, someone ends up in jail with puke in his hair, the wedding is in jeopardy after the bride’s phone calls go unanswered and Tucker wakes up in bed with a little person, a conquest on par with his bedding of a blind girl and a deaf girl. “Hey, you’re halfway to a Helen Keller,” a friend tells him. Disabled Americans should froth at all this, even if it’s all in “good fun.”

Most of the film is Tucker sharing his twisted theories on life with whoever will listen, be it strippers, drunk bachelorettes or his easily manipulated friends. His core belief system is that women are nothing until a man completes them. That man, of course, is Tucker, who thinks he’s God’s gift to everything.

Parts of the film are funny, though not nearly as funny as similar scenes in its far-more-intelligent 2009 comedy counterpart, The Hangover. Many parts are disgusting beyond description, including an extended sequence involving diarrhea and plastic-wrapped toilets. One of the better subplots is with the Bradford character who is so angry and bitter toward women after his breakup that he can barely stomach the strippers gyrating in front of him. He taunts and ridicules them until one fights back, they retreat back to her place to have a Halo 3 tournament and then he falls in love with her. I wasn’t sure I liked this development until they left the club and began actually talking and you could sense they were real, albeit shallow, people.

Most of the movie, though, is a vain attempt for Tucker Max to mythologize and deify Tucker Max. It’s a monument to himself disguised as a comedy franchise. The stories, or variations of them, are taken from his book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, a book I’ve read and appreciated for its honest writing and Gonzo style. Seeing it on the screen, though, made me cringe. I would compare it most to Fight Club, another flawed monument to man’s failing masculinity — Roger Ebert called it “macho porn,” a term that works for both movies.

Who cares whether they serve beer in hell or not. My question is this: Is hell big enough for Tucker Max’s over-inflated ego?

Michael Bay = The Devil

Everyone has their adversaries. Superman had Lex Luthor. Batman had the Joker. The Duke Brothers had Boss Hogg. The Jews had Hitler. Muslims have 24 (or is it "Jack Bauer has Muslims"?).

Well, movie critics have Michael Bay. Movie fans haven't followed our lead, although they should if they had anything rattling up in their Hey-look-it's-Scooby-Doo-2-let's-buy-a-ticket brains. Someday. Someday.

Until then, I wanted to put a face on the enemy. This, my friends, is the man who will destroy film as we know it.

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.