It seems to be the theme for this summer's comic book adaptation-spin-off films. X-Men: Origins achieved a simliar feat by attempting to cram twelve hours worth of story, action, and characters into a mere two. Michael Bay's Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen defines this unfortunate cheap trick - an unfortunate cheap trick that has worked. Thus far it has been a wild success at the box office and at IMDB, despite being widely panned by critics. It was designed for a huge audience aged maybe 12-19, an audience that is not looking for cinematic achievement, originality, complex storytelling, or characters with more than one layer. Transformers is simple and bright, and simple and bright is what makes money in this world.
To Mr. Bay: we get that you were trying to get by on nothing but flash and pomp...AKA Megan Fox and huge explosions. But the sad thing is, you didn't even have to. You had a compelling storyline with the Transformers saga, and you had, with your kind of budget, whichever writer(s) you desired. Why, then? Why:
did the film never stop to take a breath?
did it feel forced every time it actually did pause, for the sake of character development?
was everything about the depiction of college wildly unrealistic?
were Sam's parents ever brought back into the final scene?
were his parents even major characters in the movie?
was so much energy spent on eliciting cheap laughs?
have the film narrated by Optimus Prime?
allow the robots to talk so damn much?
The last one really hits home for me, because it makes the film seem cartoonish and childish. Every time Optimus launches on one of his introducting or concluding segments, I cringe because I think I'm watching a poor Japanese anime on Cartoon Network. Maybe the overdone mechanical voice works for kindergarten daytime T.V. watchers, but for a film in the theatres, it is incredibly trite and unneccessary. Aside from Optimus, having the Decepticons (evil robots of the film) talk takes away all of their mystery. I would have been happy not to hear the evil leader say he was psyched for revenge, because it's already pretty obvious, seeing as he's trying to blot out the sun and all. The voices of the smaller robots aren't quite as bad, and can actually be amusing because they are significantly more believable and actually original. The scene where Bumblebee plays clips from Forrest Gump and other events in cultural history to encourage Sam is (shockingly) pretty well done. Whereas the generic evil leader has his generic evil voice with his generic evil plans, and you want him dead not because he's the bad guy, but because he's a walking, clanking, stereotype.
From that list of questions, the other major point seriously effecting this movie's ever being classified as 'good' is character development. From the beginning, every line of serious dialogue between any two characters feels rushed. You feel uncomfortable with the obvious impatience of the story to move quickly on to get to the next shot, with the nervous camera that can never stop moving, circling far too often in 360 degree circles just for the hell of it. No, it's not artistic flair. It's a cheap directorial trick designed for an American culture with self-inflicted A.D.D. If the camera stays still for too long, if one shot threatens much beyond the Hollywood average of five to seven seconds, Bay and co. are there to snap you out of whatever deeper appreciation you may have dared glean from the subtlety of a still shot and are ready to refocus your numbed brain on further aspects of the shallow entertainment being dispalyed.
That's a bit harsh. There are much worse movies than Transformers 2. Namely, with Bay in mind, Bad Boys 2 and a slew of other action flicks that have no upsides. On upside of this film, the special effects were incredibly done, the storyline was, for the most part, enough to keep you entertained, and the final battle scene (though far too drawn out) was impressively shot and quite exciting. The scene where Sam and Mikaela are crossing the desert, hiding from the Decepticons, is very good. Moreover, the acting is far from bad. Shia LeBouf is not a bad actor at all - he has just been in some not so great films (Eagle Eye, the Transformers saga, but more specifically Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of This Title Should Have Told You Just How Bad the Movie Was Going to Be). However, he's also in Disturbia, a great cross between The Shining and The Girl Next Door, and hopefully he is given better scripts in the future.
I haven't looked up the rumor sheets, but I'd say it's pretty likely that a Transformers 3 will come out to complete the trilogy. This franchise is not so far lost that with a serious director intent on making a serious film, it could be resurrected from the critical grave which this sequel has now dug.
Song of the Day: Supergroup indie band The New Pornographers' "Challengers", off of their most recent 2007 album of the same name. Normally I look for live clips to show artists without any auto-tuning or digital enhancement, but there are not any good quality videos of this song live out there.
The music video, however, suggests several possible meanings for the song. The world is shown as black and white, Pleasantville-style, at the start of the scene. Only small things have color, small aspects of life: the color of the hair and beards of the band members, a plastic horse, a cup of red juice. But the explosion of color comes when the couple sitting on the couch touch their hands together. Before their touch, everything is plain and and colorless and easily organized. As their hands fold into each other the colors multiply in a gooey liquid stream, and their skin and clothes suddenly have color. The rest of the world of the video begins to bleed colors as the couple grows closer, and it is not exactly a graceful transformation. The colors run like paint, are sticky, messy, drip everywhere unevenly, seemingly suggesting that the transition to greater feeling and real emotion is powerful but not controllable, and certainly not neat and organized. The refrain, we are the challengers of/the unknown seems to support this idea of emotion experienced and not yet experienced - as they melt together, the two on the couch are challenging the unknown that they do not know from their colorless world.
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, widely hailed as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, deals explicitly with the human fear of natural chaos. In the novel, characters choose simple, strange lives to give themselves the illusion of order and control, bypassing the dangerous uncertainties of the real world. Characters that are bored with society's banal attempts at order and control, such as one aptly named Mucho Maas (meaning "much more" in Spanish), attempt to seek out something more deep and meaningful - only to find that things are so complicated, such a search is almost impossible. Later in the story, the main character, Mucho's wife Miss Oedipa Maas (who has been charged with organizing the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a mysterious man of wealth), comes across a group in San Francisco called 'Inamorati Anonymous.' One of the group's members explains: "An inamorato is somebody in love. That's the worst addiction of all...the whole idea (of the group) is to get to where you don't need it." The whole point of the group is to bring its members to the point where they no longer 'require the services' of love. Strangely similar to Margaret Atwood's dystopia in The Handmaid's Tale, or perhaps more famously, Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World, Pynchon's society is obstensibly 1960's USA with nothing more than a slightly absurdist slant. The suggestion, is, of course, that a comfy, simple world without messy things like pain or love is better than the chaotic alternative.
From Brave New World:
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "You're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
Song cannot convey ideas and philosophies as effectively or as broadly as literature can, but at its best, good music subtely captures the emotion behind a feeling of some depth and meaning:
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