You’ve never — even by Michael Bay‘s standards — seen $200 million lavished on two-and-a-half hours of such stratospherically absurd spectacle as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
[rtimage]MapID=1188000&MapTypeID=2&photo=19&legacy=1[/rtimage]
Understandably nerve-wracked Australian starlet Isabel Lucas prefaced the film’s Sydney premiere by advising the audience to ‘strap on’ for the thrill ride to follow. Given the awkward giggles in the theatre, we’re pretty sure she meant to say ‘strap in’; then again, when you see her character, well — mild spoiler alert — maybe she meant it.
The familiar metallic soundwave soon strafed the usually-placid DreamWorks logo and then — wow — what could only be described as 150 minutes of operatic mayhem pummeled the senses.
So, has Michael Bay made history’s most surreal masterpiece of self-parody, or is this cinema as we know it perishing in one almighty fireball of molten metal and cheese?
[rtimage]MapID=1188000&MapTypeID=2&photo=25&legacy=1[/rtimage]
Even next to its hardly-timid predecessor, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is bigger, longer and uncut — in the very literal robot anatomy sense — a tour de force of blowin’ shit up that also works as a comedy more hilarious than Team America. It’s as though Bay saw Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s film and took it as an affectionate homage, not a satire.
The magnitude of the destruction defies expectations, just as the screenwriting defies any sense of narrative logic — trust us, the ‘matrix of leadership’ and magical robot pixie dust make the Allspark seem plausible — which, brought together with characters whose most banal conversations are filmed with whirling, 360-degree cameras or against cheeseball sunsets, pushes the film toward some kind of lunatic-art euphoria.
[rtimage]MapID=1188000&MapTypeID=2&photo=10&legacy=1[/rtimage]
Seriously: where else are you likely to see wonders of the ancient world reduced to rubble while jive-talking robots yammer in grotesque caricature, or a film in which a slow-mo shot of Megan Fox bouncing away from danger sidles up to Iraq War-cinematography, sound grabs from Forrest Gump and earnest plays for Saving Private Ryan battlefield poignancy? In a movie abvout giant alien robots from Cybertron. Hell, it’s even got Obama and Swine Flu references, as though Bay was mixing ADR while watching a live feed of trending topics on Twitter.
Which is all to say: do not miss it.
Revenge of the Fallen is hysterical, hyperbolic, hubristic and almost transcendentally silly; Z-movie heaven writ large with the sort of budget most freaky fringe auteurs could only dream of. Critics will no doubt decry its cacophony of robot-on-robot noise as the end of cinema, culture, and life as we know it, but in an alternate universe this could assume the status of bizzaro classic — when the machines take over, it’ll be their Citizen Kane.
[rtimage]MapID=1188000&MapTypeID=2&photo=30&legacy=1[/rtimage]
But what of the critics? So far, reviews have been mixed, to put it kindly — much like the responses to the first film, which ended with a 57 per cent ‘rotten’ rating on the Tomatometer.
“Fan boys will no doubt love it, but for the uninitiated it’s loud, tedious and, at 147 minutes, way too long,” groans The Hollywood Reporter.
“With machines that are impressively more lifelike, and characters that are more and more like machines, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen takes the franchise to a vastly superior level of artificial intelligence,” adds Variety.
The UK Times are even more blunt: “It’s like being hit over the head repeatedly with a very expensive, very loud train set.”
[tomatometer]MuzeID=1188000[/tomatometer]
Keep your eyes on the Tomatometer. The next week will decide the film’s fate.
Want to see the film at Sydney’s IMAX theatre? Click here to win one of 10 in-season double passes.
