Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Poor planet Earth. It's always being invaded by strange creatures, or getting in the way of asteroids from outer space, or - for the umpteenth time - threatened with the Apocalypse. Earthlings are scorched in vast numbers as their cities crumble. Survivors do not fare much better - men are abducted, women raped, children enslaved. If it's not aliens, it's the environment. Earthlings pay the price for ignoring signs of global warming (and who can blame them when those signs are freezing snow, pouring rain, electrical storms and a President - in The Day After Tomorrow - who looks like Dick Cheney?)
Michael Bay's latest addition to the Hasbro Transformer toy genre is the second film in the series and begins by laying waste to Shanghai. There's no organic connection between this and anything else. But it doesn't matter anyway because this teaser is really a revenge fantasy of the American worker against outsourcing toy manufacturing to China (even if the Shanghai scene was shot in Pennsylvania). However I doubt if that's what the censor at 国家广播电影电视总局 (aka State Adminstration for Film, Radio and Television) had in mind when he asked for trims of a Chinese police car being crushed.
It takes Michael Bay about two and a half hours to explain these aliens who have insisted yet again on bringing their battles and personal hang-ups to earth. The mythology is not too different from a Star Wars movie and to be fair to Michael Bay, it also took George Lucas about the same amount of time to explain the same story. Revenge of the Sith, Revenge of the Fallen - same difference! But I think the Cesar-inflected hard-edged look of Michael Bay's Autobots are preferable to Lucasarts' soft-toy floppiness of Jar Jar Brinks. (Cesar was the French artist who made a career out of exhibiting blocks of crushed, compacted cars in the 1960s.)
Reportedly Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of the worst reviewed mainstream films of recent times so some critics may dispute its characterization as a movie. I'm not one of those but the film should be seen as a component of a totality that includes - and this was a surprise even to me - hands-on playing with toys.
Now, just as not everyone has directed a movie, not everyone has played with Transformer toys. It's not that difficult. As a prelude you "deconstruct" them from familiar Earthling vehicles (truck, sports car, compact) into creatures that could have been Masters of the Universe until the onset of the Great Recession (more of a threat than Aliens or Global Warming). In this supreme mode, your toys are ready for battle. You hold one in the left hand, and hold one in the right hand. Then you weave and bob them around each other, exchanging glancing blows which sometimes knock off an arm or a leg. It all leads to the inevitable climax which is to smash one figure into the other in any number of creative ways (feet first, head down, crotch angle and so forth) all the while making a range of sounds that go from squealing to spittle static to full-throated explosions. And you have to do this all before bedtime.
There is collateral damage of course. Other toy figures (often of the military variety but occasionally some hapless barnyard animal types or dinosaurs) scattered on the carpet are crushed underfoot, upholstery gets ripped, that oh-so-precious china handed down for generations is smashed.
So too with Michael Bay's choreography in his latest action ballet. In fact I have not seen a film that quite so accurately simulates the feeling - albeit on a fairly gigantic scale - of playing with toys. The toy characters - by which I mean the Autobots, Prime, Decepticons but one could also include star Shia LaBoeuf (where's the beef?) Megan Fox (what's with all these animal names?) - are all brought to life by the swoops, dives, jumps, barrel rolls orchestrated by CG and camera technicians. The Transformers beat each other up from California to Egypt flattening ancient temples and passing camels with wanton abandon. The intervention of US airforce planes and ground troops, despite heroic background music, is rendered as irritating as gnats at the end of their short lives.
Probably for the first time in film history, we have a film whose mise en scene is wholly based on playing with toys as opposed to playing with story, or even girls, both of which Bay tiredly includes. It's obvious that he's more interested in the movement and grinding conflict of robots, the transformative arcs of cars and motorbikes. For example, the camera lingers on the curves of a motorbike as much as the nubile Megan Fox. And the dynamics of twisted, clashing, clanking metal as Prime engages Decepticon in gladiatorial combat is more interesting than LaBoeuf's TV soap opera struggle with his dumb parents.
In truth, the sensation of watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is overwhelmingly like reverting back to childhood and playing with toys in your hands while running amok in your parents' living room making strangulated dog sounds. To some, it is pure nostalgia. To others (usually big sisters with bratty brothers), it is as irritating as it ever was. And still to many more, it evokes irrelevant bemusement (aka entertainment).
While Steven Spielberg (a producer of this film) evokes childhood as a state of innocence (think: starchild at the end of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey ), Michael Bay presents childhood as a state of violence without consequence. Toys serve the will of the imagination rather than the circumstance of reality. With all its desert war scenes, and apocalyptic ideologue-driven inter-galactic war, it suggests that recent American foreign policy has been something of a childhood phase which we've all grown out of. You might say that's one of the reasons why this movie - apart from its politically-regenerative title - has been one of the fastest and largest grossing box-office movies of all time.
