Stupid-Awesome: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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.)

Lethal teabag

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.

Pretender Facial Creme™:
For those with dry and cracked
prosthetic outer shells.

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 The 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 was always 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.

Not many people get a late Christmas present
from their mother, posthumously.

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.

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. 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 comic books, etc. (And if it's a girl... She's gonna kick all their asses at being a super-geek.)

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?