Recently, a fellow blogger started a blogathon and posed a challenge: write a bad review of a good movie or a good review of a bad movie.
To be mean to something good is more commonly known as trolling, which isn’t difficult at all. To write something good about a bad movie on the other hand did not mean to lie, but to play fair. If I was going to do so, I thought how great it would be to pick something not just bad, but monumentally awful. And if I picked the worst movie I’d ever seen, what could be a greater challenge?
So, with that said, is “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” the worst movie I’ve ever seen?
I used to think so. More than many other film experiences, seeing the second “Transformers” was a watershed moment for me as a critic. Rarely had I seen a film that had such a strong disconnect between critics and fans, a 35 on Metacritic and yet $400 million domestically at the box office, the second highest of 2009. I had arguments with friends and family and got in trouble at work for ranting. I began using the expression “action extravaganza” liberally to describe it, a term I borrowed from a video game critic who used it to describe games like “Call of Duty” that were so intense and heavy handed in gritty, modern warfare that people foamed at the mouth.
Roger Ebert famously wrote that the film was so bloated that film classes would look back on it fondly as the end of an era, but hindsight has shown that CGI heavy blockbusters such as this have not disappeared.
In fact, the third movie, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” is possibly as bad, if not worse, despite a mild uptick in reviews. The plot became more convoluted, it takes more liberties with historical moments and landmarks, it turns Sam Witwicky (Shia Labeouf) into an egotistical prick, the fight scenes got even louder and bigger, and it even adds four minutes to its run time.
The only distinct difference is the lack of “ROTF”’s embarrassingly racist robot twins, two souped-up spitfires who slung hip hop epithets, fought constantly and could not read. But “DOTM” includes everything but the “black” robot, resorting to British and white-trash stereotypes instead.
“Revenge of the Fallen” has the place in history because it surprised us all. The action blockbusters of the 2000s seemed to grow to this point, a film that really was louder, busier and heavier than any that had come before. Only the previous year with “The Dark Knight,” it had felt as though the comic book genre really could be grandiose and brilliant at the same time, but “Transformers” sent the genre the other way in titanic fashion. Continue reading “Revisited: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”