Culture Surfing

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.

Continue reading “Spoiler questions, now that we’ve seen Transformers” »

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GENRE: Rock ’em, sock ’em robots

THE PITCH: The Autobots, those heroic space robots, must protect Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) from the evil Decepticons when the all-American teen journeys from college campus to Egyptian desert to find an Earth-shaking artifact called the Matrix of Leadership. No, really.

MONEY SHOTS: Cool robot shapes include a mechanical tiger; a parasitical satellite; a flat, origami-like thief; and the giant Devastator made of multiple pieces of construction equipment. Decepticons rain from the sky and destroy an aircraft carrier. Some of the battles are great in theory — like Autobot leader Optimus Prime brawling with three Decepticons in a forest — but the robots have so many moving parts, and there’s so much editing and camera movement that watching the fight scenes is like trying to watch rollercoasters screw.

WORST LINE: “You’ll always be my first car,” Sam tells the Camaro-robot Bumblebee in a dopey semi-break-up scene that is, nonetheless, less boring than a subplot over whether Sam will say “I love you” to his mechanically inclined girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox).

Continue reading Hollywood Product: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen »

(Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures)

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