Michael Bay's robot armageddon

Good news, friends! I saw "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," and lived to tell about it.

The downright apocalyptic reviews of the film had me worried I might not get out alive. Erik Childress, the Elk Grove Village-based writer from efilmcritic.com, equated director Michael Bay to Satan in his headline, and offered this warning at the end of his review: "If you want to do your part to witness the saving of the human race, stop going to see Michael Bay films." Walter Chaw, perhaps the most infuriating film writer this side of the New York Press's Armond White, took the film as a personal affront, both to him and to his apparently idiotic readers: "The problem with Bay is that he hates you. He thinks you're a moron and then you go about proving him right by making his movies obscenely popular."

If we're morons for making the first "Transformers" movie a hit in 2007, then so are many of Chaw's peers. The first film scored a favorable 61 on Metacritic and almost wrestled a four-star rave out of Roger Ebert ("Everything comes down to an epic battle between the Transformers and the Decepticons, and that's when my attention began to wander, and the movie lost a potential fourth star"), who thought the new movie was so bad that it is destined to be studied by film classes.

Is "T:ROTF" a bad movie? Of course. But I'm more interested in explaining why than in issuing hyperbolic platitudes. Some of these reviews seem to take pleasure in dehumanizing Michael Bay. Some seem to be looking for any reason to bash it, going so far as to call it anti-Obama because the film's government stooge -- a character that is de rigueur for Bay's films -- wants to impede the heroic Autobots from defeating the Decepticons. And some are just plain puzzling, like this line from the Reader's Andrea Gronvall: "... the anti-Arab subtext is repugnant: the ensuing armageddon destroys both an Egyptian pyramid and part of the antique Jordanian city of Petra." That's quite a stretch.

The film gives us plenty of reasons to dislike it without having to manufacture new ones. The chief complaint is that the film's plot is incomprehensible. I had little trouble following it, and I'm guessing most of the "morons" who went to see it this weekend didn't either. But Bay and his sound mixers, who drown nearly every line of dialogue in Steve Jablonsky's incessant music and the whirs and clanks of a thousand moving robot parts, certainly do their best to distract the audience. When defecting Decepticon Jetfire shows up halfway through to deliver important exposition, you have to decipher his distorted British accent while he noisily lumbers around the frame. Pretty much any conversation between a human and a giant-sized Autobot is a mess of awkward editing and uneasy acting, and the spatial relationships are a constant obstacle for both the camera and the performers.

That awkward editing is credited to four different people, and the result is an awkward movie that feels like four different movies. The geniuses at ILM have given us amazing things to look at here, but we never really get to look at them thanks to all the fast cuts and Bay's insistence on spinning the camera around whenever he gets a chance. Watching a giant robot laying waste to the Great Pyramids while F-14s attack from above should be awesome, but by the time we get around to it we've been totally desensitized by anything the movie could possibly throw at us. The last hour of the film is just so ... so. So many explosions, so many robots, so many slow-motion shots, so many jumbles of computer animation. Whatever artistry went into creating the chaos gets totally lost in it, and I just wanted it to stop.

Seemingly no one -- not even executive producer Steven Spielberg, whose fingerprints were visible on the first film -- had the guts to simply say "no." But if they did, I shudder to think of what ideas didn't make the punishing 149-minute cut. This apparent lack of oversight or reason must explain Skids and Mudflap, the two Autobots who talk like gangstas and look like crude, racist caricatures of African-Americans.

(In the interest of fairness, I will point out that the characters were not both voiced by white actor Tom Kenny ("Spongebob Squarepants"), as has been widely reported in reviews of the film; Kenny plays Skids, and black actor Reno Wilson plays Mudflap.)

Of course, that's no excuse for whichever genius decided to give those characters big floppy ears and buck teeth. Thankfully for us, the so-called Twins get only five minutes of screentime. Unfortunately for everyone involved in the production, Bay chose to keep these two offensive characters who add nothing whatsoever to the plot, and who garner no laughs. They do match the film's overall tone, though, which is as crass and shameless as you are likely to see in a movie that appeals to children.

The worst part of all this is that you can see a good movie buried deep inside "T:ROTF." You get a glimpse of it early on when all the appliances in Sam's (Shia LaBeouf) kitchen come to life and attack him, a sequence that dazzles with its giddy creativity. You get glimpses of it when Sam's parents (Kevin Dunn and Julie White) and a disgraced government agent (John Turturro) are on screen, getting all the big laughs. And there are brief glimpses of visual invention, like a Decepticon tiger who infiltrates a military base, or an enormous enemy built from multiple construction vehicles, or Jetfire walking with the help of a robotic cane.

But no one involved could find a way to competently put these pieces together. Not Bay, whose "Armageddon" and "The Rock" are perfectly entertaining; not screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who helped deliver May's sparkling "Star Trek"; and not the collection of immensely likable actors who ultimately fail in their battle against the very movie they've been cast in.

This sure does seem like a lot of fuss over a movie based on a line of toys, doesn't it? "T:ROTF" is not an artistic enterprise in any way -- though it does contain moments of artistry -- and the film's defenders will cling to that fact. But "Transformers" fails even as a commercial enterprise, despite its staggering box office take. Remember: Big crowds on opening weekend are not a reflection of a film's quality, they are a reflection of a film's appeal, and this movie sure does appeal to a wide portion of the moviegoing audience. I dare say you'll have trouble finding anyone amid that wide portion who can say he or she genuinely enjoyed the experience.

All that being said ... I'm still going to line up for the inevitable "Transformers 3." Maybe Walter Chaw is right.

Happily, not even Megatron can single-handedly destroy the art of filmmaking. Rejoice, film fans! Smaller, more thoughtful films are more accessible than they ever have been, thanks to cable, on-demand and the Internet. "Transformers" is a bad movie, yes, but it's not a sign of the apocalypse.

I mean, it's not "Wild Wild West" ...

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Click here to read Daily Herald Film Critic Dann Gire's review of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."