Revenge of the Fallen (Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Devastator’s Balls)
October 21st, 2010 |
Lethal teabag
Just so it doesn’t get lost, I just wanna remind people about the Halloween Costume Contest below. Now… I liked Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I actually get a lot of crap for it. People have talked down to me like I’m some kind of backwater simpleton just because I’ve said I liked the film. Now I have some reasons for liking the film and giving Michael Bay a pass on it, but before I go any farther, I’d like to point out three things:
1. I’m well aware how sub-par the film can be. And not even in that “stupid-awesome” way that I loved movies like Blood: The Last Vampire or Clash of the Titans. (The new one.) The movie was very minimal on plot and honestly wasn’t as good as it should have been. It had a lot of factors going against it, mainly the half finished script that was done during the writer’s strike. Even the stars and director thought the movie was weak. Does that excuse them for putting out a half-assed product? Not at all. For $200M, if you got plot holes, stop filming and fix them. Now that movie made a crap load of money, and it was flawed up the ass. How much would it have made if it wasn‘t? There’s a lot of stuff that needed explanation that was just left the audience scratching their heads. Like for example, that scene at the end where Sam “dies”? Okay, if you’re a hardcore Transfan like I am, you know what was going on. Sam went into the Autobot Matrix of Leadership. For the Chosen One and the Bearers of the Matrix, this is a common enough occurrence to know that. (See Rodimus Prime and Optimus Primal for other examples.) But if you don’t know that, then it looks like he went to “Robot Heaven and talked to Robot God” (Which now that I think about it, that’s kinda what happened… Huh.)
Pretender Facial Cream: For when your skin feels dry and cracked
2. Despite it’s PG-13 rating, the movie was still a toy commercial. Honestly, I’m a capitalist and I got no problem with entertainment doubling as a toy commercials. (Hell, even the original Star Wars Trilogy was dictated by toys.) But since it was a toy commercial, I feel it should have geared itself a little more all-ages. I’m not saying it should have had Optimus Prime pop his head out of the screen and say “Hey kids!” But there was some content in there that probably should have been geared back a bit. A lot of the mature stuff really should have been cut out. I’m not talking about crass stuff like the dogs humping or Devastator’s balls. (Kids love that shit!) No, I’m talking about just about all the stuff with Alice the pretender and the college scenes should have been re-written heavily. All the crude sex jokes probably should have been dropped from there, and there was some visuals like Scalpel’s Insecticon worm bug thing that went in through Sam’s mouth and was gagged up and stuff… It was no big deal for me, but I can totally see how that would be disturbing for kids.
3. The Twins. Yeeeeeeeah, they’re the Jar-Jar Binks of Transformers. I’m just going to leave that one alone.
But most of the other complaints are honestly common enough that every time they make a new series, the same bunch of whines and complaints pop up. Why isn’t Prime a snub nosed truck. Why isn’t Megatron a gun? Why can’t Frank Welker do the voice? Why isn’t Bumblebee a VW Bug? Why do we have to have so many humans? Why can’t it take place on Cybertron? Blah blah, etcetera to the ad nauseam degree. This may sound new to some of you, but Transfans have been putting up with this crap since “Trukk not Munky” from the mid-nineties. I usually disregard all these complaints as worthless because I’m sorry these people didn’t bother to notice that the franchise didn’t stop when they stopped paying attention, and that it kept going for 25 YEARS without them. Maybe the franchise might have come up with some new stuff that you fricken’ missed? (Allspark, The Fallen, Minicons, protoforms, ect.) The movies have some big flaws, but those kind of complaints aren’t among them. That’s like me being pissed off at Battlestar Galactica for Starbuck being a woman. Get over it.
I admit the movie had it’s big flaws, but you know what? I still liked it.
It’s the same reason I saw and loved the Expendables. It was the equivalent of a man-gasm for the nine-year old in me. Shit blew up, and when it got done blowing up, it blew some more shit up, giant robots blew up and got vivisected (Poor Sideways. But it’s okay, because I hear he’s a multidimensional hopper. He‘ll be okay.), John Turturro hilarious “One man” speech, and Optimus Prime just kicking all sorts of ass in the forest battle. And if I was a robot, I would so have gay sex with Sideswipe. Sure it had no plot, but I’m not too sure I needed one. It was like watching the last Rambo movie.
Honestly Transformers has never been a big “plot concept”. Transfans like to think it is, but really when you break it all down, it’s just one group of giant robots machine gunning another group of giant robots. Even the most respected and beloved Beast Wars pretty much broke down to this. It doesn’t mean it’s not fun… It just means it’s not Shakespeare. The original Generation One series was covered with gigantic plot holes you could drive Motormaster through. And it was full of the same silly stereotypes too. Revenge of the Fallen was pretty much a Generation One episode fleshed out to two hours. It was stupid, it was dumb… But I felt like a kid.
And it reminded me of times with my mom.
My mom bought me a GoBot when I was nine years old. (It was Turbo.) She thought that toys cars that turned into toy robots were really neat, and she encouraged it. You know how when you’re growing up, you would talk to your parents about stuff, and you’d talk to them like they knew all about it too. You’d mention Star Wars characters or whatever, and they’d smile and say “That’s nice” and not really care? Well, not my mom. She knew who the characters were. She knew who Bumblebee was. He was the cute little yellow car. (Which was her favorite of them, since she could actually transform that one, and it reminded her of her first car, which was a VW Bug.) I mean, she didn’t know finer details, but she knew what the names were and who was an Autobot and who was a Decepticon. She knew which ones I had and didn‘t have. They used to come with these little catalog books that listed off all the available toys and she used them. She didn’t have to. She just did. Even though I grew older, got less into toys and more into girls, art and other stuff… she still bought me Transformers, because it was something for us. Yeah, we argued a lot and drove each other nuts a little too often, but this was our little mother-son bonding thing. Now my mom’s favorite car has always been 
the Camaro. She always thought they were beautiful machines, and wanted a yellow one, because it was her favorite color. Can you imagine how excited she was when she found out that Bumblebee was going to be a yellow Camaro? She thought it was so awesome looking, and she was so happy when she found a Bumblebee two-pack at Target. She bought the movie when it came to DVD and she bought all the versions of the Camaro Bumblebee toys that got released. Sure she couldn’t transform them, but she loved it, and she really liked the first movie. Mainly because of Bumblebee and it wasn’t just that he was a Camaro, but because he was Bumblebee. She remembered him from my youth. It was special to her. And thus it’s special to me too.
I’m sure either you already know or you noticed my usage of past tense to know where this is going. My mom passed away in March of ‘08 due to kidney failure complications. When cleaning the house sometime later, I stumbled across a Target bag, and in it was Offroad Ironhide… A Christmas present she forgot to put under the tree. Not many people get a late Christmas present from their mother, posthumously.
Look, I know the second movie was dumb. I’m a redneck, but I’m not an idiot. But you know what? My mom’s Bumblebee was in it, I still enjoyed it and as far as I’m concerned, Michael Bay gets a pass from me. I’ll go see Transformers: Dark of the Moon and I’ll hope it’s better. I’ll watch Transformers: Prime. And if I have a kid, I’m going to raise them on Transformers. (And Nerf guns, and Star Wars and old classic horror movies.) And if it’s a girl… Well, guess who’s gonna have more robot toys than the boys in her class?
So yeah. I like the movie. But all that aside, TF:ROTF wasn’t even the worst Transformers has ever been. If you’ve never heard of Kiss Players, be VERY thankful. And whatever you do, don’t Google that at work. It‘s NSFW and very creepy. It’s from Japan.
Where else?
+1.
I made the mistake of Googleing that after reading, and I must say, kiss players should never have been made.
Told ya so!
Being the youngest in my family and the only girl after three boys, there are certain things I developed a fondness for that people look at me and shake their heads at. The transformer movies being one of them. I watched the cartoons as a kid, also my older brothers had the toys and would never let me play with them….they’re a lot older, seven, twelve and thirteen years respectively.
When Transformers came out my nephew fell in love with it immediately, everything was all about Bumble bee “He’s so cool”. And then the toys started coming and he couldn’t transform them himself, so he’d run up to me and get me to help him “change it to a car” or “I want it to be a robot”.
I’d moved away by the time Revenge of the Fallen had come out, but the idea of another transformer movie brought out the kid in me and so of course I went to see it. I enjoyed it. I watched it with the glee that it was giant robots, explosions, and that most of the characters that I enjoyed from the first film we back for round two.
I didn’t like the brain worm scene and I wasn’t particularly into the twins. And even though I haven’t seen the Autobot Matrix of Leadership before, I understood that Sam was talking to the dead Autobots who had given their lives to hide/protect the matrix. I’ve seen enough Japan animation that it takes more than a death/dream sequence to make a story incomprehensible.
You want a devious, detailed and thought provoking plot, try watching something not based on kids toys. I admit that the story for the Revenge of the Fallen was a bit jerky. Either they skimped in the writing department for the sake of effects or the edited out bits and pieces that would have made it more consistent. I hadn’t thought about the writers strike affecting it until you mentioned it, but that very well could be what happened. Whatever the reason you would think that a person going to watch a movie about giant robots is going to be more interested in the special effects than the details of the plot.
I think some people have trouble separating that whole “just because it’s fun, doesn’t mean it’s good” thing. We’re so used to the idea that “mindless fun is bad” that we often forget to pull the stick out of our butts, and we take things that we shouldn’t way too seriously. That’s obviously a generalization, but not much of one, it seems. Let’s take Batman for example. There’s Batman, the Dark Knight vigilante that sneaks around on rooftops alone in the shadows, fighting psychotic murderers like Joker with his Glasgow smile and Killer Croc, who’s possibly a cannibal. And then there’s the Batman, the Caped Crusader that teams up with Blue Beetle and Aquaman to fight Gentleman Ghost and Gorilla Grodd. They’re both Batman and they’re both good, and neither one of them is “wrong”, and that some ideas (like Batman) are big enough that it can be both. He can be both the dark and serious Dark Knight and the light hearted dry-humored Caped Crusader. (Just maybe not in the same universe.) Often though, that’s just not good enough for some people. The vision must be pure, there cannot be two sides to the coin. Not only MUST one person be right, the other person MUST be wrong.
In the case of Transformers, I honestly could be wrong here, but I think a lot of the antagonism toward that movies comes from the fan base that has been trying to get this franchise taken seriously for a decade or two. They’re not realizing it’s going to take steps to get there. When the first Batman movie came out, the goal wasn’t to make the most accurate and realistic Batman movie… It was to make a Batman movie that could be taken seriously. It took almost twenty years after the Burton movie for the franchise to be taken seriously like it is now. It’s gonna take time for Transformers to be taken as seriously as fans hope it will. It’s not going to happen over night or even this decade. It’s going to take a while, but if there’s any true foundation and strength to the franchise, like I truly believe there is, it will happen in time. It’ll just take a while.
But I could be wrong.
I totally agree, especially when you bring the Batman franchise into it. For instance the latest two are just plain awesome. The Tim Burton films were…well let’s face it Tim Burton’s take on Batman, he has a style all his own. However when you look at Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, well I know batman cartoons that were better. However even then a movie can have it’s entertainment value, for instance my friends and I once rented Batman and Robin just to see how man bad puns we could count. I can’t remember the total…I think it was over 100, maybe 200.
As bad as someone thinks a movie is, sometimes they don’t realize it could have been a lot worse. I think you’re pretty much on the ball though with how long it’s going to take to make a transformers movie that makes everyone happy. Then again that may be impossible. Or they could learn with each movie that they make from this point out and they could get better.
Either way I’ll be in the theater to see the next one going “hehehe giant robots”…”What are the bad guys up to this time?”
Dave,
I’m going to start this by saying that I personally didn’t enjoy T:ROTF that much, but not for the reasons you mentioned. I personally found the human cast to be unsympathetic at best, obnoxious at worst (except for the soldiers, those guys were awesome), the script was bad… I could go on and on.
But… like you, I lost my mother a few years back, and I do truly understand the need to maintain the connection. And I certainly won’t begrudge you for liking a movie (unless it’s Gosford Park…. seriously that movie needs to DIE), and you shouldn’t feel afraid to air your opinions. We all have a right to them.
I love this comic, I love your work, and I just want to say that despite disagreeing with you on this one issue, I greatly support what you’re doing with this comic, and any “fan” who says that they hate your guts because you disagree with them – a practice that is all too common today – they simply don’t deserve your stuff.
So, in short, thank you for the great work you’re doing. And thanks for not being afraid to speak your mind.
I have the movie on DVD. Why? Not for Megan Fox (God forbid). Not for the Twins (Primus, STRIKE THEM DOWN!). Not for the Devastator’s balls or John Tuturro in a jockstrap. I bought it because I enjoyed it DESPITE all the stupid stuff (like Sam’s Mom, who is just mindless space filler) and Bay’s desperate attempt at humor. I liked the action, even if they did try too hard to make Prime “bad-ass” in a Frank Castle sort of way. I got sad when Megs blasted Prime in the chest and Peter’s Cullen’s “NNOOOOOOOO!!!” made me sad, BOTH times I saw it in the theatre.
I’ve never been one to say I like nothing but excellent, poetic, deep, thought-provoking material. I’m buying the Dragon Ball Z box sets, and watching DBZ: Kai at the same time! I own Ghost Rider!! But sometimes you don’t want to over-think this stuff. Sometimes, it’s okay for entertainment to be a little mindless or not take itself too seriously (naturally, there is a limit).
Come on…these are giant robots from outer space, not an introspection on the state of mankind.
Dear Dave Reynolds,
Your movie is terrible, and WALL OF TEXT doesn’t change that. Deal w/it.
Well, I apologize for having the “WALL OF TEXT” up there obscure the purpose of the post. So I’ll sum it up in a single “Twitter-friendly” sentence to get the point across easier:
“I am aware the movie was a very stupid and mindless action film, but it reminded me of happy times with my late mother, so I still liked it.”
In the future I shall refrain from writing so many “words” and just stick with internet memes and lolcats pictures.
That still implies it was anything beyond a celebration of how bad movies can be.
Accurate handle is Accurate.
I couldn’t agree more