note: this review is excessively long and convoluted and takes forever to get to the point, but only as a clever form-is-an-extension-of-content type reference to the movie it describes, in my opinion. Unfortunately I could never match the feel of the movie no matter how hard I tried. It’s like when some asshole reviews a Dr. Seuss movie in rhymes or some shit like that.
introductory remarks/overture
My friends, we have lost. Michael Bay has defeated us. First he invaded the shores of the genre we hold most dear. He brought us gifts of explosions, while behind our backs he robbed us of the very language of geography and context we use to communicate what is exploding and who or what is endangered by said explosion. Then he confiscated our property, buying up our favorite low budget horror classics to rebuild as slick, soul-less product – just to crush our spirits. And now he has completely subjugated us.
At first we sought to make peace. I tried to enjoy THE ROCK, but I couldn’t make it work. After ARMAGEDDON we resisted and openly rebelled. We stopped going to his movies, stopped paying for his remakes. But all these years later we’ve lost our fight. We’ve grown used to the occupation, learned to accept it as a fact of life. We’ve gotten curious, wanted a taste of the other side. So we gave them $12.50 for a ticket plus $2.00 for 3D plus $1.25 internet convenience surcharge. Right? Didn’t we guys?
Well, I did. I cracked. But they said the most horrible things. They threatened to remake my family.
I’ve said more than my piece about why these TRANSFORMERS movies are awful. This is the third one, there’s no surprise and nothing to prove here. Michael Bay movies haven’t changed, but I have. I can admit I’ve gone from hating them to loving to hate them. I might even watch ARMAGEDDON again some day. You never know.
Of course, if Platinum Dunes starts announcing more remakes I might get bitter again. And I definitely reserve the right to go off when people make that “it’s only entertainment, so you can’t criticize it for doing a shitty job of that” argument, or the “this is what action movies are meant to be: badly made action movies,” or the “if you haven’t personally directed a $200 million robot movie then you don’t have the right to point out that one could theoretically be made that was actually pretty good,” or the “I know it seems like it’s shitty when you watch it but actually it’s not, because here is the number of dollars it has made and it is a high number,” or of course the “what did you expect, it’s based on a toy commercial, of course it’s ineptly made, moronic horse shit designed by and for drooling, tasteless, subhuman imbeciles. That said, it was right up my alley! I loved it!”
If you claim he’s making the modern equivalent of TERMINATOR 2 then I’m gonna react on primal instinct like you just spit on my grandma. But I can appreciate him as a hilariously overblown and uniquely inept (but also talented in some superficial ways) weirdo. We can use a couple of those as long as they’re the exception to the rule. There have been great Summer Movies made since TRANSFORMERS, and there will be more of them some day I’m sure. (Maybe next summer.) Unlike Autobots and Decepticons I have come to believe that high quality Summer Movies and hilariously shitty ones can co-exist peacefully. After all, ALIENS came out the same summer that HOWARD THE DUCK did, and I don’t got a problem if some people get their jollies putting on the duck movie every once in a while and trying to figure out what the hell that was all about. We have the capacity to enjoy both. Humans are complicated machines.
So I cannot lie, I was really excited to see TRANSFORMERS’S DARK OF THE MOON. I come to it not as a so-called hater or as an insurgent, but as someone who has made peace with the terribleness of this series and now enjoys watching them to see just how far they will go, just what they will feel is a good thing to put on screen, just how intimate a portrait of Bay’s subconscious can be concocted within the confines of the budget, shooting schedule and needs of advertising partners (Hasbro, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, the U.S. military).
the action
If somebody likes this movie they’ll say it’s because of the action. TRANSFORMERS sequels are more like software upgrades than sequels. They’re about advancements in computer technology, not in story or character. In each one they wreck more stuff than in the last and since that’s all most people care about each new sequel has to be by definition the best one.
To its credit part 3 does have some spectacular spectacle. It does seem more impressive than, to name one recent example, 2012, even though technically it doesn’t destroy nearly as much of the earth. Although the robots can barely count as characters they do get to smash lots of things and flip around and shoot lasers, occasionally saying moronic comedy dialogue in a variety of ethnic accents, like the dogs in Walt Disney’s LADY AND THE TRAMP. So by that definition there’s alot of action.
There’s a part where a building is slowly tipping over and a bunch of humans are (for some reason) running up it and climbing around in it. There’s some real footage of some guys base jumping. Chicago gets destroyed (in a short montage). PEARL HARBOR has better put-together action sequences in my opinion, but (despite intentionally evoking imagery from 9-11 and the Challenger explosion) this is more tasteful so it might be Bay’s most enjoyable action. And for reasons explained in the next section I was able to mostly follow what was going on.
So for once I know for sure that it’s not just fast editing that keeps me at a distance from Bay’s action. It’s that these characters are so stupid and unlikable, their predicament is so ridiculous and the specific goals of each sequence are so poorly explained that it’s hard to really give a shit about an hour straight of bang bang bang bang bang scream bang complain bang. There’s an impressive amount of “cool” stuff in there that’s nice to look at, but it’s all so hollow. When John McClane is so desperate to avoid an explosion he decides he has no choice but to tie a firehose around his waist and jump over the side you’re right there with him, you feel it in your gut. But the dickheads in this movie run around beneath an epic intergalactic war of massive destruction and you barely ever bother to think “oh shit, you better duck.”
I was thinking Tyrese was gonna return (he was in parts 1-2) and when he hadn’t shown for a good 2+ hours I thought “Tyrese was smart to choose FAST FIVE over this.” Then he shows up and brings some authentic-looking military hard-asses to fight the robots and I thought “Jesus, why has the movie been about whiny fucking Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) when these guys were around?” Then for some reason Witwicky gets to lead their team against the Decepticons. Every once in a while a good guy robot shows up to murder somebody or get murdered. There’s not that much interaction between the robots and humans except when the bad guys vaporize people leaving just skulls.
I guess you don’t always have to connect with the characters, but you do have to believe in them on some level for it to be effective. The opening kidnapping/car chase/shootout in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION is fucking exhilarating, and you have no idea who those people are when it happens. But there’s a story arc to the scenes, there’s escalation, there’s a climax, there’s a constant sense of danger. That’s the more important part of a great fight or chase: it’s not just bombast, it’s a story within the story. The much discussed last act of DARK OF THE MOON is like a white guy, it doesn’t have any rhythm. Optimus or Bumblee Bee will show up for a second and do something and then be gone for a while and you don’t know where they are. They aren’t really anywhere I guess, until they’re needed for a shot. As is traditional in the TRANSFORMERS series the villain just stands on a tall building for the last half hour or so, occasionally yelling something evil.
I really believe you could chop out almost any of the scenes and mix them up in any order at all and it wouldn’t make any more or less sense.
stereoscopics
The tone and style of DARK OF THE MOON is not all that different from the preposterous last installment. The one major difference is that it’s shot/animated in the 3D. There has been alot of hype and complaints from Bay that he was forced into shooting competent action scenes because the cameras are too heavy to jerk around like he normally does and the 3D is too hard to read if you edit it in his usual eyeball torture style. I was convinced that somebody would be blinded by this combination.
It doesn’t seem to me like he toned down his style much from the previous two, and the quick cuts in a few scenes actually did hurt my eyes (mostly the opening montage, which jarringly cuts between 3D and 2D and stock footage and grainy fake stock footage because the president JFK is featured so the style of the movie JFK has to be mimicked). But I have to admit that I assumed wrong, the 3D really is more helpful to a Bay movie than hurtful. In 2D the big-pile-of-garbage character design style of the robots blends together so you can’t tell where one ugly robot ends and the other begins. In 3D your eye can easily distinguish between the different piles of garbage because one is in the foreground and one is further back. You still don’t necessarily know who the different robots are or what they’re supposed to be doing, but you definitely have a better idea of where they’re situated within the smashed buildings, which is a major breakthrough for this series. I know I’m being condescending but I mean it honestly that for me anyway the 3D was a handy tool to understand what in fuck’s name was going on.
I guess Bay was right, there was no reason to learn how to stage clear, crisp action scenes. He was waiting for mankind to develop a system of cameras, projector lenses and glasses that would help people’s eyeballs to partly decipher the wiggly pile of bullshit he slops in front of them.
What’s new in Transformers 3.0?
So I agree with any praise people have for the 3D here, but not the other conventional wisdom that Bay toned down all the horrible parts of the previous TRANSFORMERSes, like how George Lucas had less Jar Jar Binks after everybody hated him in Star Wars part 1. It is different in a few respects:
1. Racism. As far as I noticed Bay made good on his promise that the jive talking gold-toothed “gangsta” robots with the monkey faces were not in this one. And you know what, how dare you imply that those racist caricatures that he created and publicly defended would be in this movie? What kind of person do you think he is, to continue doing that? You make me sick, smearing a good man’s name like that. Shame on you. Shame.
My prediction that Bay would have a WWII flashback featuring buck-toothed Zero-bots has not come to pass. The most racist stereotype in the movie is Ken Jeong as a guy named “Wang,” but that’s his usual shtick so I blame him as much as Bay.
note: Bay fills the hole left by the missing racism with a couple of his old standbys, the Gay Stereotype Character (Alan Tudyk) and The Scene Where Two Guys Are Doing Something That Is Misinterpreted As Them Buttfucking.
2. “”One thing we’re getting rid of is what I call the dorky comedy.” –Bay, to USA TODAY
That’s another one, I wonder how they got that “dorky comedy” into all of Bay’s previous movies. It’s weird that they could slip that past him so many times, but I’m glad he was finally able to put a stop to it. Except not really. This is not the gritty, serious version of talking car robots.
DARK OF THE MOON does show a small amount of restraint. He doesn’t undermine every attempt at drama with lame jokes, just some of them. It’s not the constant groaner-fest that the other two TRANSFORMERSes and BAD BOYS 2 are. But there’s still alot of the actors riffing and never connecting, plus wacky flashbacks and entire scenes to introduce “funny” tangental characters. (John Malkovich for example has a big scene where he’s kind of funny, and it seems like he’s gonna be a character in the movie, and then he disappears. Doesn’t even get his head bit off by a robot I don’t think.)
3. No peeing, farting or robo-balls. And John Turturro keeps his pants on. He’s still talking and acting like an idiot, but he wears a suit. Very professional. I guess the dick and butt stuff must’ve been all Bay meant when he said “dorky comedy,” but if he’s going to continue making comedies I think he might want to re-examine the dorkiness levels of the rest of his work.
I guess these fixes have made a difference for some people, but in my opinion that is not a drastic course correction. It’s like if Joel Schumacher had made another Batman movie and said “this one has less puns, and we got rid of those stupid nipples! Who put those fucking things in there?” Okay, I see you’re trying to please me, but that isn’t enough to make it into an actual good movie. Maybe you should’ve just kept following your heart.
I believe a good movie could be made about this subject matter. I don’t believe a good movie could be made about it by Michael Bay, so the fucker might as well just get naked and go buckwild like he did last time.
And he kind of did. It’s not that different. It kind of makes me sad that Bay and LaBeouf are distancing themselves from part 2 now. It’s a terrible movie, but it’s obviously Bay’s movie, so he should stand by it. You can’t convince me that that wasn’t the movie those guys wanted to make at the time. Back then they were so high on it that Bay wrote a letter to some dinky newspaper nobody ever heard of to imply the critic should be fired for writing a negative review of a movie that made lots of money. But after a couple years of hearing how it’s the worst fucking shit ever they started to get embarrassed and blame it on the writer’s strike. (Joel Schumacher wishes he had that excuse.)
the plot
Don’t worry though, the claims that the new script by Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, THE RING, BROTHERS GRIMM) is relatively sensible and well written are an utter fabrication. There is no evidence of that in the movie anyway. The convoluted plot involves an Autobot or good guy robot (Leonard Nimoy) that was carrying a technology that “would’ve won the war” on the Transformer home planet of Cybertron, except he crash-landed on our moon and died so now Optimus Prime finds out about him decades later and brings him back to life but it turns out he was lured into doing that because actually the guy made a deal (hundreds of years ago?) with the bad guys, the Decepticons, to use the technology to transport the planet of Cybertron to Earth (?) and turn all humans into slaves or something. (I hope this means the humans would have to work as the robots’ household appliances, like the dinosaurs in The Flintstones.) Meanwhile sellout humans conspire to make it happen and a robotic bird is murdering NASA scientists and our hero Sam is worried that his new girlfriend is gonna fall for her handsome boss (Patrick Dempsey) and also he’s pissed because “it’s not fair” that the Autobots get to go on secret missions in the Middle East (I believe they are American citizens now) but he doesn’t get to go and the National Secretary of Intelligence (Academy Award winner Frances McDormand) is finding out secrets even she didn’t know about and Optimus is really pissed that he didn’t know about it either. Also Sam goes on a bunch of job interviews and his dad is disappointed in him that he hasn’t found a job yet but he did get a medal from Obama but nobody’s impressed. This all ties in to the moon landing and the Chernobyl meltdown, and then Congress votes that the Autobots have to leave Earth so they fly away on a secret space shuttle they had and then Chicago is destroyed and taken over by the Decepticon party (in a brief montage, it’s worth repeating that) so Sam and Tyrese lead a team of badass Navy SEAL type dudes to climb around on destroyed buildings and try to shoot the one rocket they have at a space thing or whatever, and it turns out the Autobots were faking it they didn’t leave so Optimus kills some of the Decepticons and makes one of his little speeches, so everything should be okay now. God bless America.
I might have done a better job summarizing that than I did with part 2, but in my opinion it’s not a well constructed story. Fortunately that’s the charm of these movies, if you can call it that. While not as out-and-out insane as the last one this one has a respectable collection of incredulous laughs:
-Megatron (I didn’t realize it was him at first) drives through an African Savannah, scares the zebras, tells the elephants to hail him and feeds “my frag-ile ones,” baby Garbage Pail Kid robots
-an Autobot is described as “the Albert Einstein of his civilization” even though another Autobot is designed to look like a cartoony Albert Einstein type (with glasses)
-a weird Decepticon goblin/Slimer guy occasionally wobbles past the camera making odd noises and then disappears
-for some reason Sam lives with two gremlin-sized asshole robots, one that I’m pretty sure was a bad guy in the last episode and one with hair that I thought I forgot about but I am told he was new
-a printer, a TV monitor and various other devices turn into robots and murder people
-Megatron blows up the Lincoln Memorial statue and sits in its chair (probly my favorite part of the movie)
-Optimus Prime occasionally chimes in out of the blue with corny narration (I kinda wish it was Werner Herzog)
-there’s a mournful procession of Autobots driving to the secret giant Space Shuttle to abandon the Earth, and sad music plays but you can’t help but laugh because they’re all shiny candy-colored hot rods with flames painted on them and shit
-“The honor is all mine”: Optimus meets Buzz Aldrin (playing himself!) and melts with patriotic goo, as if a robot who can fly into space without a vehicle gives a shit which puny humans landed on their moon years after his personal friend Sentinel Prime already had
etc.
With no investment in the story or characters it’s these type of unexpected bits that you have to latch onto to be able to enjoy it. If the movie’s inane, you must have insane. And there’s enough of it to keep me amused through a good percentage of the film’s seven hour, forty-two minutes not including credits running time.
empowerment or exploitation?
The love of Sam’s life from parts 1 and 2 is gone (his mom says she dumped him, one of the little asshole robots says “She was mean!”). You probly read that the original piece-of-actress Megan Fox allegedly got fired and allegedly for saying in an interview that Bay “wants to be like Hitler on his sets.” In that recent piece in GQ Bay said that Spielberg told him to fire her, so in that sense he is like Hitler, because he blamed it on the Jew.
(that’s a joke, I don’t really believe that, don’t fire me. Also I looked it up and apparently he’s Jewish too. More importantly if I was gonna unfairly compare him to a dictator I’d say he’s more of a Muammar Gaddafi)
The replacement model, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as Carly, comes courtesy of Victoria Secret, where Bay has alot of connections. To her and Bay’s credit she’s fine, her acting performance is more natural than Fox in the other two movies. But her giant man-made lips (on her face) are more distracting. Seriously, it made me yearn for the down-to-earth girl-next-door looks of Megan Fox. Huntington-Whiteley is even more in the Playboy/Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue/Person You Would Never See Or Be Allowed To Talk To In Real Life neighborhood, which to be fair is where Bay has one of his summer homes.
Carly is introduced ass-first, walking up stairs in her panties holding a stuffed bunny. Later there’s a 3D upskirt shot as she gets out of her Mercedes (a new model that Sam looks up on the internet so it can show all the specs on screen).
She’s already Sam’s girlfriend at the beginning of the movie, but Sam is humiliated that he can’t find a job and has to live off of the money she gets from a high paying job organizing a valuable art collection for Patrick Dempsey. You’ll notice that Sam regains his manhood late in the movie when it turns out Dempsey is a Decepticon collaborator and explicitly states that he really gave Carly the job because of her connection to Sam and not based on her actual talents. So don’t worry everybody, she actually didn’t do a good job or achieve any success separate of her boyfriend. Women are still in their place. It’s kind of like if in part 1 it turned out that Megan Fox wasn’t actually good at fixing cars, Sam had actually done it all while sleepwalking.
Dempsey also waxes poetic about the curves of his prize car while the camera ogles Carla’s body, because your car and your women are pretty much the same thing. Yeah, he’s supposed to be kind of a sleazebag, but I think these movies share his point of view on that one.
Bay doesn’t seem like a political guy, but he’s trying so hard to be “politically incorrect” that his movies end up having subtext anyway. I just can’t figure a coherent world view from it. He tries to ridicule any government figure but lionize any soldier, astronaut, or robot that stands in front of a flag. There are some Obama references, but I think it’s up to debate whether they’re derogatory like in part 2. Maybe the worst is a mention that he has some kind of surveillance on members of Congress so he can get dirt on his political enemies. It doesn’t come across like the smear it ought to, though. I’m not sure Bay is against it.
But Bill O’Reilly does appear in the movie as himself. You don’t put Bill O’Reilly into a movie unless you’re into him.
There was another part that I took as an anti-so-called-socialism message, when the character Sentinel Prime sinisterly yells something about “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few!” But then somebody explained to me that it was what Spock said in WRATH OF KHAN. Still kinda weird though that they would get Leonard Nimoy himself to portray Spock’s philosophy as evil. I bet it was scripted to be an understandable motivation for the character, but the way it’s delivered it might as well be “We evil robots will conquer your puny human world! HAHAHAHAHA!”
I’m scoffing at those parts because I disagree with them, but I think they belong in the movie. I think even big expensive bullshit like this should have an element of personal expression, so I encourage Bay to put whatever he believes in his movies. And you know how hard it is to be a conservative in liberal Hollywood, it’s obviously a huge struggle for him every single day. Never once given a fair shake in the business or allowed to do what he wants. It’s a crying shame.
the douchebag’s journey
I think the most interesting new development (and maybe the part that makes it a personal expression for Bay) is that Sam has transformed (get it?) from a likable, self-deprecating reluctant hero to a condescending asshole with an out-of-control sense of douchey entitlement. He spends the first 2/3 of the movie yelling at and sarcastically insulting people. It oughta be called TRANSFORMERS: DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!? For example he chews out some soldiers for the crime of not just letting him drive into the world’s most top secret military base. He insults his girlfriend, his parents, his robot friends, several potential employers, and even the National Secretary of Intelligence, who gets it for asking him who his girlfriend is that he has let into the world’s most top secret military base. There are heroes, and then there are pricks who throw a tantrum at the new security guard in their office building for not recognizing them without their required ID. I guess the idea is that Sam is supposed to be both.
I guarantee you this Sam Witwicky does not tip well, if at all.
Not only is he a prick, but as soon as he berates his way past national security procedures he proceeds to shit all over that trust. After complaining about being questioned and swearing to keep everything secret he goes straight to the fired/pissed-on-by-a-robot guy from the other two movies (John Turturro), that guy’s new gay stereotype assistant, and some Russians they never met before, and he tells all of them something that had been secret even from the intelligence community and the Transformers for 50 years. Later he has an evil robot watch attached to his wrist so the bad guys can find out the good guy’s plan, and if he tries to tell them about it it will kill him and his girlfriend. So he goes to another super top secret nobody-knows-about-it place and pumps his side for the details of their plan… meanwhile complaining some more about how nobody trusts him!
What makes it interesting is that I don’t think he’s supposed to be some kind of an anti-hero or even a funny asshole like an ’80s Bruce Willis role. That’s just what you do, right, you complain and insult everybody constantly? Everybody is stupider than you, and you always tell them that. Right? (if you say no you’re a loser, my friend Steven Spielberg knows a few things about movies, etc.)
Sam’s parents are annoying, but they don’t seem like they’d raise such a despicable little shit. I can only guess that he gets it from Optimus. Sure, Optimus makes some nice speeches and everything, but he’s a whiner in this one too. He also turns into a big baby and gives the humans the silent treatment, refusing to speak to them because he’s mad that they didn’t tell him about the moon landing. Maybe we should give him the silent treatment ’cause we’re mad at him for bringing his robot civil war to Earth and causing the deaths of probly hundreds of thousands of innocent people, not only indirectly but also through his numerous wreckless battles in populated cities.
Man, Autobots are the worst. Maybe they’re not as blatantly evil as the Decepticons, but they’re not doing us Organicons any favors. In the first movie all they had to do was fuckin leave and they would’ve saved us from getting killed. At this point it’s like Afghanistan, they’ve started this cycle of violence and they don’t know if it’s gonna get worse if they leave. Megatron might stay and keep trying to turn us into slaves. Like his little robot brain spiders and pet bird and shit aren’t good enough for him.
At one point in the movie Congress passes landmark Tell The Fucking Autobots To Leave Already legislation. Sam talks about it with them as if nobody understands how legislation works, which is too bad because it would be awesome if there was a scene where Optimus gives a speech to Congress urging them to vote no. Anyway the Autobots comply and fly into space, leaving the Decepticons to destroy Chicago, but it turns out the Autobots were just hiding (giggling the whole time, I bet) and waiting until everybody gets killed to “show your leaders why we’re needed here.”
Dear Optimus Prime,
Thanks for making such a good point.
signed,
dead Chicagoans
Then at the end he has the wrecking balls to tell Sam “We shall never forsake you.” A little late for that, one-arm. Why don’t you make like E.T. and leave. Land on that asteroid from part 2 and have your war with the robot babies.
Optimus isn’t as obnoxious as Sam, and he does still have that great voice, but it’s hard to remember what it is that’s supposed to be so good about him. He keeps complaining about how the spaceship that crashed on the moon contained the technology “that would’ve won the war.” Yeah, coulda woulda shoulda. He’s like Rambo complaining about how the bureaucrats wouldn’t let him win Vietnam. But here he is fighting and he’s doing a terrible job, getting humans and robots alike killed. He’s not a particularly good military leader and he makes huge mistakes like, to name one example, resurrecting the guy who’s trying to enslave all of humanity. Whoops.
He’s even more bloodthirsty than before. I’m surprised they didn’t throw in a secret Autobot prison where they enhanced-interrogate wacky comic relief Decepticons and disrespect their religious beliefs (didn’t they worship that guy “The Fallen”?). Or they could have him kidnap Megatron’s babies and use them against him. Optimus comes from a culture where you don’t try to give somebody a fair chance, you just chase them around and then when you catch them you say something mean and execute them on the spot. In this uncomfortably humorless interview with Drew McWeeny, LaBeouf explains that part 3 is the best because Optimus is “essentially a murdering monster.”
wrapup
If this sounds like a negative review it’s not really. I find all this stuff hilarious. I got what I wanted out of the movie and I keep thinking about it days later, suddenly remembering parts I had forgotten about. “Holy shit, I forgot about that part where the elephant opened his mouth and it seemed like he was talking!”
Do not go to this hoping for a legitimately good movie on any level, but if you like ludicrous bullshit (and I do) this is top shelf stuff. Not as charming as GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA, but even more head-scratchingly crazy and way more expensive looking, if that matters to you. And 3D. I’d feel better about the world if it had the August stupid-Rob-Cohen-type-movie slot instead of the July 4th “this is what this summer has to offer,” but I’ll take it.
Some day Bay’s kingdom will probly crumble. He wants to keep going bigger and more expensive, but he’s not James Cameron. The sun will eventually melt his wax wings. A couple of his movies in a row flop, the studios are gonna at least have to shrink his budgets a little.
“I don’t change my style for anybody. Pussies do that.” –Michael Bay on changing his mind about trying to hold shots longer on Pearl Harbor, to GQ
I know he’s saying he’s gonna do a $20 million “dark comedy like PULP FICTION” next, but I can’t imagine doing those for now on would keep him happy. I’m not sure he could persevere – more likely he’d just do commercials, or retire and live off the checks from the Lamborghini Collectors Union. Tastes will change, movies will evolve, interesting new people and styles will appear. Until that day Bay will sit on his throne and we can either stay out of his way or try to get in on the orgies.
See, Megan Fox? He’s not Hitler. He’s Caligula. (not sure if you got that metaphor there)
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bonus questions:
1. Were Megatron’s “frag-ile ones” the Deceptitot babies from part 2, and what was he feeding them? Do adult robots have to eat? What would happen if Megatron fucked Lightning McQueen’s girlfriend?
2. What the fuck was that robotic goblin dude?
3. Was it my imagination or did the two little asshole-bots die heroically in a crashing something or other? And if so why didn’t they get a dramatic slow motion death, because that would’ve been awesome?
4. Explain Sentinel Prime and Megatron’s plan. What were they trying to do and what is the chronology of their truce in relation to when they separately crash-landed, the whole thing with the pyramid that was gonna destroy the earth in part 2, etc. (seriously, if anybody feels they understand this clearly I would love to know)
answers: I honestly have no idea, that’s why I’m asking you guys
July 2nd, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Outstanding work. You’ve topped yourself with this one, Vern.
I’m sure no one has anything to add in the comments, as you’ve covered it all, but just in case someone feels the need to chime in, allow me to establish a respectful, perhaps even amicable tone here by quoting a better writer than myself:
**This book is not a revenge-record. When I build a fire under a person in it, I do not do it merely because of the enjoyment I get out of seeing him fry, but because he is worth the trouble. It is then a compliment, a distinction; let him give thanks and keep quiet. I do not fry the small, the commonplace, the unworthy.**
– Mark Twain, from his Autobiography, Volume I
The sheer number of comments in the archives & still to come on this websight indicates that Michael fucking Bay is indeed “worth the trouble,” that he is not “small” or “commonplace” or “unworthy,” and I would like to extend such compliments to his apologists, er, his supporters. For though he earns mostly scorn and befuddlement, Michael fucking Bay has proven worthy of our lengthy analysis & interest, for we can disagree and ridicule each other’s points about TRANS3’s merits or lack thereof , yet this forum should and will always remain a civil place, a welcome web of ideas that is a respite from the world of the wider worldwideweb, where infantilism & fanboyism reigns. Michael fucking Bay isn’t a pussy, and there are no pussies here.
The discussion here is fascinating, and not only because its origin, the merits of Michael fucking Bay, is so paradoxically uniquely off-putting to most thoughtful fans of cinema; I am thankful to all contributors, Prestwiches & Pauls alike, for allowing me to absorb these talkbacks freely, and I am amazed that I am accepted as a part of it. Thank you, Vern, for the excellent review, and thank you in advance, fellow commenters, for making this summer’s biggest post-FA5T movie release far more interesting than it should be.