I thought the first film was probably the the greatest example of incoherent filmmaking I've ever seen. It's the cinematic version of those drunk driving videos they show you in high school with all the blood and gore, like the VD movies they show GI's with all the genital sores and rotting cocks, a friendly try at convincing them to not sample the local talent. They should throw the Transformers franchise in with the Star Wars prequels as a warning to film students.adam_grif wrote:I must be the only person who thought that #2 was only marginally worse than the first, which was itself terrible in many ways. Or maybe I'm just bad at distinguishing shades of abysmal from one another.
You may know a movie like this has gone through endless rewrites during pre-production but rarely do you ever see a mishmash of three completely different takes on the movie make it to the screen without anyone trying to clean it up in the script. It's like they had different teams all told to write a script separately and then someone just grabbed every other page and stuck 'em together and Bay said "Action!"
Seriously, we have an alien transforming spaceship that flies to Earth and crashes into the Arctic and suddenly he's too cold to move? What the hell was he flying through out there, warm and gooey nacho cheese dip? If he can stay warm in deep space, he can stay warm on planet Earth. Now someone's going to say "But convection means he'll be cooling faster in an atmosphere than he would in deep space." No. Stop it. Don't try and use science to defend Transformers. Every time you do that an angel's wings get chainsawed off.
So you have Mr. nonononononononono playing the kid who befriends a giant warbot, the thread of his relative finding a robot in the arctic, the frozen bot zapping a map onto a pair of glasses for no reason, the glasses getting on ebay and everyone knowing he's got 'em, random Megan Fox inserts because Bay hasn't quite yet talked himself to putting tits on a robot to satisfy the sex appeal requirement, soldiers running around in the desert, and of course the hacker thread with the so-not-convincing-me hot computer chick babbling on about fourier transforms not saving us now. Oh, and let's not forget her minstrel sidekick who did more to in that film to set back black progress than the entire entire oeuvre of the Wayans Brothers.
The Star Wars prequels are at least awful in a consistant fashion. You can tell that every bad idea came from Lucas and at least have a kind of thematic unity of disappointing underachievement. With Michael Bay, it's like he forgot what movie he was making part way through and started making another.
Aside from the complaints about his action scenes which have aptly been described as looking like a ball of car parts was welded together, rolled down a hill, and the camera was put in tight focus on the whirling metal, I have to love his complete lack of chronological continuity. An action scene will begin in late afternoon, have a few pretty sunset shots, and then go directly to night in what has to be the space of 30 seconds.
And the sequel, he doubled down on that. Ghetto bots, check. Giant robot testicles, check. So what's he going to do for the third film? "'One thing we're getting rid of is what I call the dorky comedy,' Bay adds." Wait a second. The dorky comedy was your idea. How can you cop a superior, condescending attitude to something that was only in there because of you in the first place? That would be like the Grateful Dead frowning at all the drug imagery in their music and promising the next album won't have any. Bay could say the less movie will have less robots and not make any less sense.
Frankly, I'm looking forward to the rifftrax version of Dark of the Moon. I'm betting at some point they'll break out into song -- "In the dark of the moon megatron will find you!"
