Spoiler questions, now that we’ve seen Transformers
June 29, 2009 at 12:04 pm by Curt Holman in Hollywood Product, movies & tv
Director Michael Bay’s concerns (elaborated in a famously misspelled email) that Paramount under-promoted Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen turn out to have been misplaced. The film’s opening broke records and it’s five-day gross comes second only to The Dark Knight —- and the Batman movie had the advantage of not totally sucking. At any rate, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen begs many questions, some of which are probably explained if you know the two decades of Transformers lore.
1. The Internet Movie Database “goofs” page for the film already lists dozens of continuity mistakes and factual errors for the film — but most movies have those, no matter how good or bad they are. However, one sticks out so blatantly that most reviews I’ve seen have mentioned it:
When Jetfire is reactivated at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, he blasts open a hangar door and steps outside, the exterior shot showing him and the other protagonists being in the “boneyard” at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona – the opposite end of the country.
Having taken such pains to establish the characters in the Washington, D.C. area, it’s a blatant disregard for continuity (sort of like the way night falls in a matter of seconds in X-Men: The Last Stand). Can this be explained consistently within the movie? Does the Center even have airplanes out front? In the movies alternate version of America with alien space robots, could the layout be a little different? Jetfire has teleportation powers, as shown by the subsequent scene, but when he uses them he makes the humans violently ill, so that probably wouldn’t explain it.
2. Even more than the disregard for geography, Transformers has been criticized as racist for its portrayals of two “young” Autobots, Mudflap and Skids, known for jive-talkin’, quick tempers, poor literacy and buckteeth (one featuring a gold grill). They’re clearly misguided attempt at comic relief, but they also beg the questions, Why are there young Transformers? How do Transformers breed, anyway? Not that I want to see robot copulation, but it’s actually a plot point: if memory serves me right, the evil Decepticons have a bunch of Transformer “eggs” (or something), but they need their power source, Energon, to bring them maturity. But how do they get the eggs in the first place?
3. Consequently, the Decepticons are motivated to find an ancient Energon factory, hidden somewhere in Egypt, and blow up the sun to hatch their eggs. Wouldn’t that kill the Decepticons, too?
4. What’s the deal with the shards of the Allspark? The Allspark was the all-powerful Macguffin of the first film, a combination of all-knowing computer and all-powerful energy source from the Transformers’ homeworld. Early in the film, Sam Witwicky found that he — somehow — still possessed a shard of the Allspark. It brings kitchen appliances to malevolent life and apparently taps into all kinds of alien know-how that’s been downloaded into Sam’s head. If memory serves me right, Sam and company use the shard to reanimate the ancient Transformer, Jetfire, and the Decepticons steal another Allspark chunk to revive their evil leader, Megatron. Then, both teams just kind of forget about them. Wouldn’t those shards be useful?
5. A helicopter-Decepticon kidnaps Sam, Mikaela and Shrill Comic Relief Guy in their car and drops them several stories into an abandoned warehouse. The airbags deploy and save their lives. Would airbags really protect passengers from such a fall?
6. Why do they need a Prime to stop The Fallen? The film’s prophecy states that only a “Prime” model Transformer, like Optimus Prime, leader of the “good” Autobots,” can stop the ancient, evil Decepticon called The Fallen. Really? In the first film, Optimus Prime seems evenly matched with Megatron, and in the second, Optimus gets killed in battle with three Decepticons. Once Optimus gets revived, upgraded and fights the Fallen, the bad guy goes down with little difficulty. Given that the whole last act hinges on bringing Optimus back to life, it seems like much ado about not much.
7. So when did the Fallen hook up with the contemporary Decepticons? Was he always there, but off-stage, or did they reconnect some time between the two movies? Because if he’s always been around Earth, and is sort of the Satan of the Transformers world, you’d think that would be a bigger deal.
8. Why so much attention to the military? Transformers would be significantly shorter if it didn’t have so many cutaways to the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. What’s more, the film contains allusions to Sept. 11, a final battle in a Middle Eastern desert and a civilian nemesis with a Donald Rumsfeld quality. Could Bay be trying to use Transformers to stage a symbolic victory over the U.S. military conflicts of the past decade?
June 30th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Great stuff — very funny! I enjoyed the movie for what it was, but I went in with very low expectations… And they were met.