The “witless” movie Roger Ebert called “a horrible experience of unbearable length”
Some movies are just poor excuses for cinema, existing as nothing more than the adult version of a baby sensory video that parents shove in their kids’ faces so they can get their grocery shop done in peace.
While you’re just trying to buy some bread, you’ll hear the irritating sounds of one of these videos emanating from an iPad inside the pushchair, and you’ll wonder if this new generation will all grow up to be both short-sighted and short attention-spanned.
The same goes for terrible movies that serve no purpose other than getting audiences to switch off their brains, only leaving space for massive explosions, huge cars, and, as Roger Ebert puts it, female characters who “look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines.”
He was referring to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Michael Bay’s terrible toy-based movie that promotes a lazy, capitalistic view of filmmaking, which is utterly depressing. Like these overstimulating baby sensory videos, if you watch enough movies like this one, your eyes will start to go square and your brain will become numb to art that is actually stimulating and, well, good.
Ebert started his one-star review of the movie brutally, writing: “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meagre joys.”
Calling the plot “incomprehensible” and the dialogue nothing more than “meaningless world flap”, he described the appearance of the robots as “junkyard throw-up,” adding, “They are dumb as a rock.” He continued his written tirade with critiques on the human characters, too, claiming that they are simply in a “witless sitcom part of the time, and [a] lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions.”
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a box-office hit, grossing a whopping $836.5million. Clearly, people couldn’t get enough of the huge robot cars and Megan Fox, but critics, like Ebert, just weren’t sold on this poor excuse for a movie.
When you base your film around mindless entertainment and forget to include any layer of depth, you’re doomed for critical failure. It seems like Bay didn’t mind, though, because in spite of the Razzie nominations, he earned enough money to never have to work again (although sadly, he has).
“The battle scenes are bewildering. A Bot makes no visual sense anyway, but two or three tangled up together create an incomprehensible confusion. I find it amusing that creatures that can unfold out of a Camaro and stand four stories high do most of their fighting with… fists. Like I say, dumber than a box of staples,” Ebert added.
That says it all, really. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is just cinematic slop, lacking in intelligence or enjoyment factor. Well, that’s unless your idea of fun is watching movies based on toys for little boys.
