Partial Education Presents
NoisyBangBangRobotOrgasm!!!!!!!!
Featuring Partially Educated Reviews of
The Transformers Series
and The Rock (for perspective's sake)
It turns out that 2014 was the end of an era, because Michael Bay has declared that he will not be directing another Transformers film. That's right, the torch is being passed on to another director; traditionally a sign that the series will begin to deteriorate in quality (see X-Men, Batman and a fair few others). My question: is it actually possible for it to get any worse?
Side Note: You know there's not going to be a lot of positivity in these reviews. Let's be honest, that's why you've come here and that's why my most read articles are a review of a Michael Bay film and my Top 10 Worst Films So Far. With that said, I feel context is essential. I watch Michael Bay films in the hope that they will be good, not just because I want to watch a great film, but because there was a time when he was capable of making them. Before you accuse me of barefaced lying, allow me to state my case with a review of…
Coming at a time when the only example of Bay's work was the solid (still not great) Bad Boys, his music videos and his (I'm sure classic) documentary on Playboy's Kerri Kendall (I feel no shame in not having the faintest clue who she is), The Rock was able to exist without stigma. There was no Pearl Harbo(u)r for people to bemoan, no Bad Boys II for people to somehow be surprised about when it turned out to be crap and no Shia LaBeouf for us to blame on him. Perhaps now it will be hard to believe me then, when I tell you that The Rock is a really great, completely batshit insane action film. That will be made even less believable when I tell you that Nicolas Cage is one of the lead actors, but it is true. When an Alcatraz tour is held hostage by Ed Harris' disgruntled general, he issues his demands with the threat of a chemical attack on San Francisco. Cue the enlistment of Cage's chemical weapons expert Dr Stanley Goodspeed (oh yeah!) and the temporary release of the only man who has ever successfully broken out of Alcatraz. The one, the only, Mr Sean Connery. The Rock bares all the trademarks of a Bay film; hyped up testosterone, persistent displays of manliness and female characters with less development than my grasp on maturity. Yet, a lot of his most irksome qualities have been kept away from it. There's no objectification of women (he just ignores them instead), the script is boosted by some excellent, but obvious ghostwriting from Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin and, simply enough, the plot is actually intelligible. Not only that, it holds decent characters too, particularly with Harris' villain bordering on genius. It's said that the best villains are those that feel justified in their actions and not only is it obvious to see why Harris is doing what he is doing, you will inevitable take his side from time to time. The Rock may bear the hallmarks of everything that people would come to hate about Mr Bay, but also makes it easier to see why people let him do what he does in the first place. Brace yourself, Bay haters!
FOUR out of five
And now breathe…
"We're now starting our first, but certainly not our last, Transformers movie that I hope will be an enduring franchise and we're going to be making many, many more Transformers movies in the future. But we're going to make the best one first because we want the best one to inspire everybody not to only play with these toys but to want to know about the further adventures of all of these characters, both human and machine alike."
Steven Spielberg
Well he wasn't lying when he said about making the best one first, but I'm not feeling all that inspired. With a plot that's essentially "Good Robots, YAY! Bad Robots, BOO!", Transformers marked the beginning of what would be my 613 minute (and didn't I feel every single one of them pass) descent into self-imposed insanity. The best thing to be said about Transformers is that it didn't fill me with as much despair for the state of the modern blockbuster as some of what was about to come. Boredom, on the other hand, was having a clearance sale. In keeping with the theme of backhanded complements, a good way to bring it into perspective is to compare it to the others. It has most of the same flaws that they do, but they're not quite as pronounced. Shia LaBeouf sets the groundwork for Sam Witwicky as the screechy plebeian hero. He also serves as the audience's way into the story, by way of his total ignorance opening up the path for excessive exposition. Megan Fox's Mikaela, meanwhile, shows Bay's own idea of feminism; so long as the chick's badass, people might not notice how many times I'm shooting her arse. The robots are where some of the fun is to be had (though I'm stretching there). Their characters may be crafted from some of the most cast-iron stereotypes going, but they at least have some humour about them. The focus is far too much on the good guys though, particularly when you take into account just how indistinguishable each bad robot is from the other. Quite honestly, it took me till the end of the third film before I was able to recognise Megatron and he's the chief villain that runs through all three films. If that's not a problem, I don't know what is. Then there's the recurring thread throughout all four of these films: the final battle. The problem here is one that dogs every single one of these films. It is indulgently long, damning unmemorable and just plain dull. Instead of creating memorable moments, Bay congeals into a mess of explosions, loud noises and LaBeouf's girly scream. It's a problem that only gets worse, so let's move on.
TWO out of five
"Steven Spielberg sat next to me in a big 100 person theatre at Sony today. There were 98 empty seats. The lights came up after we just watched my cut of Revenge Of The Fallen. He turned to me and said 'It's awesome'. He felt this movie was better than the first - and probably my best, who knows - at this point in a movie you start to lose your objectivity'
Michael Bay
The only reassuring thing about that statement is the idea of this film only selling 2% of it's allocated seats. Within the first half hour of Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, we have been subjected to all of the following. The return of Megan Fox's arse, shot from any angle you could imagine. The increasingly annoying antics of the Witwicky parents, culminating in the female counterpart getting stoned and proving that just when you thought you'd been mentally tortured enough, there's always a way of making things worse. The introduction of LaBeouf's roommate Leo (Ramon Rodriguez), perhaps the most annoying character ever presented to us by Bay. You also get the questionable inclusion of jive-talking robots. Worst of all though, we come to the slow and painful realisation that the addition of Ehren Kruger in the scriptwriting team is about to achieve the impossible and spiral this series further down than you could ever imagine. There are two critical differences that help to make Revenge Of The Fallen the worst film in the series and the script is the first of them. It is fatally convoluted, much more than the original. At least in that, you felt as though you'd picked up the gist of the story. Revenge Of The Fallen is practically impenetrable, which would perhaps be forgivable if the story was worth bothering about, but I've checked and it isn't. It focusses on the Fallen, who basically wants to destroy the entire human race. Not only is he as one-note as it comes, he serves as an extra villain to a series that needed anything but. Again, Megatron is completely stripped of any identity, meaning that Bay officially squanders the voice of Hugo Weaving for a second time. This leads me on to the second issue as this film isn't Michael Bay on his standard levels of ineptitude. No, this is Bay disrupting the time-space continuum through the application of previously untold levels of abundant incompetence. His artistic vision is so focussed on Fox's derriรจre that he loses even the few skills that he previously held. The framing of the action scenes is horrific, making it practically impossible to tell anything that is going on, or even work out which is the good robot and which is the bad robot. His use of music is horribly distracting, not only re-using Linkin Park's New Divide to the point of exhaustion, but clumsily throwing in hit songs without any apparent realisation of what they're actually about (Green Day's 21 Guns being the most notable). This smacks of a director knowing that he's got both a pay check and hit film on his hands and deciding "You know what, let's blow some shit up. No one would ask for anything more". Michael, though it may be my own fault, I want my 150 minutes back!
ONE out of five
"What we did with this movie is, I think, we have a much better script and we got back to basics. I think there's some really cool action in this movie, there's some very cool conspiracy, there's great robot stuff in this that people were missing in the second one, you've got great robot conflict."
Michael Bay
If you take out all the "greats" and "cools", he kind of has a point because, if nothing else, Dark Of The Moon is at least better than Revenge Of The Fallen. That said, shaving your scrotum is probably better than shaving your eyeballs. It doesn't mean you should try it. The key thing that makes Dark Of The Moon superior (I'm in danger of being positive here) is the plot. There's a bit more to it this time around. In fact, the middle hour almost made me feel that this could be quite good, packing some pretty solid twists and turns. They're all fairly basic, but executed in a way that's not too shabby, serving to add a little something to the film. Before you get to that though, you have to get through the first hour and, though Revenge Of The Fallen is the worse film overall, it's never quite as bad as Dark Of The Moon's first moments. LaBeouf is at his most annoying, literally shrieking his way through half of his scenes and then indulging in self-entitled groaning the rest of his time. Bay also outdoes himself by going from the slightly pervy treatment of Fox to full-on objectification when it comes to Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. For those who don't know, Rosie H-W came in for a lot of stick in this film when it became apparent that she held as much acting ability as she did natural ugliness…
…and you're not going to hear me argue with that. She's terrible and has blatantly been cast for her looks. As if it wasn't obvious enough though, Bay drills home the point with angles designed to show off as many curves as possible. As I've said, a lot of these issues subside with the superior second act, but the film lets itself down again with the typically lacklustre final act. First off, the sound is shocking. From a standpoint of innovative creation and technical prowess when it comes to sound design and effects, it's exceptional, but it forgets the cardinal rule of dialogue coming first. A number of lines are impossible to hear in this film. Sure, they may not be that important, but that's not exactly the point. Also, the final fight makes previous entries feel modest when it comes to excessive length. It has one memorable set piece, but that's far from enough. So there you have it, proof that the use of better as a recommendation is very much dependant on the quality of the alternative.
TWO out of five
On whether Michael Bay would return to make a fourth Transformers film…
"I hope so, because I think he made the best of the three with this last one. I certainly can't imagine anybody other than Michael being equipped to make another Transformers. He's invented a genre and he's got the secret formula."
Steven Spielberg
I feel I should come up with a name for that genre, but words are kind of failing me. After the last three reviews, you'd have thought there wouldn't be a right lot left to say about this series and you'd probably be right. There's some differences with Age Of Extinction though. First off, there's Mark Wahlberg taking over as lead actor. All I'll say is that when you're sat there thinking I wish Shia LaBeouf was back instead, you know something's gone hideously wrong. Then there's just how misguided the film is in what it believes to be it's strongest assets. With Kelsey Grammer having ordered the extermination of the Transformers, he has enlisted the help of a rogue Transformer, Lockdown, who holds allegiance to neither the good guys or the bad guys. The rogue bot is voiced by Mark Ryan and he actually borders on awesome, with real malevolence and menace adorning his every word. It's not subtle, but it kind of works. The character, however, gets frequently sidelined in favour of the story concerning a new enemy named Galvatron. Bay so desperately wants us to accept Galvatron as the film's chief nemesis, despite the fact that he's nowhere near as interesting. With that plot being sidelined, it also means that Grammer often gets ignored in favour of Stanley Tucci. Now, I love Stanley Tucci as an actor and respect him for the fact that he will always give his all, when the film itself is perhaps underserving of his talents. Here though, Grammer is definitely the better option and his lack of appearances as the film progresses means that this gets lessened. Another issue lies in the use of the Dinobots, one of the film's biggest selling points, but they're barely in it and still manage to outstay their welcome despite the briefness of their appearance. Transformers: Age Of Extinction is not Revenge Of The Fallen, but it's just so grotesquely dull and passes without anything close to a reason to care. Like a moderate fart, it's unpleasant and unwanted but, by the end of the day, you'll have forgotten all about it.
ONE out of five
Next Time (29th January)
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