Grazing Rites

Okay, having now seen it twice I figure I should sit down and review this thing. There’s a lot to say and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about all of it. I’ve been putting this off because I knew it would take forever so get comfortable, at over 1,500 words this review is essay-sized.

First off, it’s not as good as the first one. Let’s just get that out of the way right there. With more Transformers, less stupid human screen time, and freaking Devastator you’d think this would easily beat the first but it doesn’t. Now that said, it’s still a very good film.

Lennox and Epps were so badly underutilized that they felt almost like cameos, which is truly unfortunate because after all the painful Shia-Fox scenes I was really hoping we could trade some of their screen time in for these far more interesting and realistic characters. As if that wasn’t enough they threw in some Brit who had maybe all of three lines. Don’t get me wrong, he seems an interesting and compelling character but with absolutely no back-story a Brit in the American-run and overseen NEST just doesn’t make sense.

Oh and don’t get me started on NEST. There’s ALREADY a real-life group called NEST: Nuclear Emergency Support Team. So when they say they’re calling in NEST I immediately wonder where the nuke is. And NEST in Transformers apparently stands for Networked Elements: Supporters and Transformers…are you freaking kidding me? If you’re going to steal someone else’s acronym your version should at least make sense. The only letter in that acronym that says anything is T for Transformers. Why not just call it Military Autobot Command Operations – MACOs? I’m sure Enterprise won’t need that acronym again anytime soon. Or the National Autobot Security Administration? I’m sure NASA wouldn’t mind. Hey, we could re-brand the Autobots as Government Sanctioned Transformers. People would say things like “thank god for the GST”.

I trust I’ve made my point.

And I don’t want to be one of those guys who see politics in everything but I also can’t help but notice how the view of the government changed sharply since the first film and 2008 election. In the first Transformers movie the government was embodied by a heroic SecDef, portrayed by a Republican supporter. Now the government is embodied by cowardly National Security Advisor. Now I’m not saying this is right-wing propaganda or anything – Bush was portrayed as a moron in the first film and the actor who played the National Security Advisor is openly gay – but I found the unaddressed shift in government priorities and portrayal to be somewhat jarring.

Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox’s characters have both grown over the intervening years but also remained true to themselves which is a good development and makes them more enjoyable to watch…whenever they’re not on screen together. The fact is they’re both 23 and they both look 23 and watching them try to play this 18-year-olds-can’t-say-the-word-love thing is just painful.

And the parents, what can I say? Kevin Dunn is fantastic and is given more to play with this time around for fantastic results. However every inch of improvement of the dad is outweighed by a massive decline in the already disappointing mother character. Can we please kill her off early in the next film? No seriously, it would provide Sam with some serious emotional motivation and provide some great moments for Shia and Dunn to show off their acting chops.

John Turturro waffled from awesome to caricature in the first film, for all but his underwear he spends almost all of his time in this film on the awesome side of things. Which given the fantastic range of Turturro (just see Clockers and Mr. Deeds to see to wonderfully disparate examples of his range) is great to see.

Not to end my review of the human characters on a bad note but I really could have done without the Leo character – he really served no purpose and brought almost nothing new to the table but a whimper.

Now, on to the Transformers…

The Autobots are great for the most part.

I’m not going to get into the whole controversy over the twins except to say that small poor choices in the characters like one having a gold tooth resulted in an overblown backlash – they were supposed to be juveniles and someone tried to make it even more funny without thinking it through so let’s move on.

Bumblebee really shows off his stuff in this film making me think he could one day take over for Prime when the time comes. Ratchet was painfully underutilized as well, having maybe 3 lines in the whole film. Jetfire was a fantastic character. Sideswipe is pretty awesome, although he could have done with more character development and was far too similar to Sideways, the Decepticon car in Shanghai – same colour, similar looks, almost identical names…did someone’s imagination take a vacation or something? Maybe they used up their creative juices on Wheelie because man is he awesome – I like to call him the Buscemi-bot, he could not have been any better except perhaps skipped the leg-humping…I mean seriously, it doesn’t even make sense for a robot.

Alright, on to the Decepticons…and boy were there a lot. In fact there were so many it was impossible to keep track during the battle scenes. I would have much preferred fewer more unique and established Decepticons. But let me start off with the positives…

Hello Soundwave! Frank Welker is back and doing a fine job. It’s truly unfortunate that Soundwave didn’t get to do more in the film however it felt like they were establishing him now so that they could do more with him in the next film which would suit me just fine. Call the next movie Transformers 3: Soundwave Attacks! And I’ll line up on opening day, no questions asked. Ravage was fantastic and not just a little bit terrifying. The Fallen was some fantastic voice work by Tony Todd.

The Constructicons confused the hell out of me – at least two of them appear to be in two different places at the same time during the final battle. Speaking of which, did they have to have another helicopter nearly identical to Blackout? Sure there may be subtle differences but the way these films are shot you’re lucky if you know who you’re looking at, much less able to distinguish subtle detail changes. And I saw this in IMAX with my new glasses so it wasn’t me.

Alice. Wow. What an unnecessary complication and an unnecessary character. Does Bay just insist on having attractive Australian women in his Transformer movies? And is it just me or was she based at least in part on the cardboard cutout the Will Smith shoots in MIB? I think her name was Tiffany.

This brings me to perhaps the biggest fault of the movie: a needlessly complicated plot. They try to do so much in this film that they end up doing too little of it very well. Eliminate Alice, Leo, and the can’t-say-love subplots and put that time towards flushing out all the new characters like the British member of NEST and Sideswipe and also trim the run time a bit. Then you would have one fantastic movie up to the challenge of the first.

There’s one other thing that I feel the need to comment on. When the Constructicons submerge to revive Megatron they suddenly turn on and attack one of their own, presumably for spare parts to rebuild Megatron. This is shockingly disturbing in my opinion. Frankly this makes me doubt that I want my son to see this film before he’s a teenager. I get it that the Decepticons are evil but it’s just a suddenly and jarringly dark moment and it’s given no context, no explanation, and no comment. Let me describe what they do in simpler terms: they kill their friend because they’re more loyal to another friend – and the friend they killed was no different than they were. Did they just suddenly decide to do it? Spontaneously attack one of their own? Or was it planned? Whose idea was it? Did anyone feel any remorse? How did they decide who would die? And it was just so unnecessary – if they wanted spare parts why not make use of all the navy vessels floating around? It’s gratuitous and disturbing and while it COULD add quite a bit to establish how evil the Decepticons are the few seconds of screen time it gets is hardly sufficient.

I’ve read the complaints about the twins being racist characters that children shouldn’t be exposed to and I can’t agree – however I don’t ever want to have my son turn to me and ask “why did they kill their friend, daddy?” and me have to respond “he didn’t do anything wrong, they just liked their other friend more”. I don’t care if they were evil; the casual brutality of it goes too damned far for this kind of movie.

Now I don’t want to leave you with a sour taste in your mouth but all that needed to be said. Having been said I did find this on the whole to be a fun film, if a little long, that leaves me wanting more and excited for the next installment – and if they learn their lessons from this outing then Transformers 3 promises to be something special.

This entry was posted on July 27, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.