Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and nominees and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies of all time. This time, we’re back to titles with colons for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, nominee for seven Razzies, winner of three including Worst Picture, and proof positive that some careers are simply impervious to destruction.
The most surprising thing about the Transformers film franchise is how long it took someone to make it.
An astonishingly popular toy line and TV show, with marketing and partnership opportunities galore, and no one had seriously tried it before 2007? (Okay, there’s The Transformers: The Movie, but I did say “seriously.”) True, 2007 was the mere cusp of the age when Hollywood began eagerly and exclusively consuming its own vomit, but the idea of such a money well going untapped for so long makes the megabudget summer smashes of the Official Transformers Film Franchise feel like the products of a quaint bygone era.
In a few ways, anyway.
Point is, we took a long and winding road to get to the 2010 Razzie winner for Worst Picture, so let’s take a much briefer trip down memory lane. In 1982, anime artists Kawamori Shoji and Miyatake Kazutaka created 28 designs for a line of vehicles, animals, and other miniatures that could transform into robots. They sold these designs to the Japanese toy manufacturer Takara, which began producing them as the Diaclone line. While they were showing off the Diaclones and their accompanying Micromen at the Tokyo Toy Expo in 1983, representatives from toy-and-game megacorp Hasbro were watching and salivating. Hasbro purchased the Diaclone line and a few other transforming toy molds, hired Marvel writers Jim Shooter and Bob Budiansky to create names and backstories for the toys, and in 1984, launched the Transformers line, which have been happily flying off toy store shelves into the hands of preteens (and teenagers, and adults) ever since.
Twenty years later, Natural Born Killers producer Don Murphy was toying with the idea of making a G.I. Joe movie, but the United States’s declaration of war against Iraq made that feel a bit tasteless. Hasbro, which did not become a toy-and-game megacorp by letting potential money-grabs fall by the wayside, suggested instead that Murphy adapt the Transformers franchise. Stephen Spielberg, a fan of the comics, signed on as executive producer in 2004, and a year later, he brought in former George Lucas intern and reigning box office king Michael Bay to direct. Transformers hit theaters in July of 2007. Critics pooh-poohed it. Audiences ate it up. A sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was greenlit before the box office receipts had even settled onto the desks of the DreamWorks C-suite.
Here’s where Revenge of the Fallen checks off its boxes on the Razzie bingo card: the production ran into some pretty significant problems, the worst of which were several potential guild strikes on the horizon. To Bay’s credit, he came up with several pre-production solutions (extensive storyboarding, scriptments, detailed notes for CGI animators) that would protect the film’s schedule in the event of a director’s strike. To Bay’s un-credit, he also created a gimmicky misinformation campaign to prevent and disguise publicity leaks that largely didn’t work and annoyed everyone. In any case, Revenge of the Fallen hit theaters on schedule, to even harsher critical contempt than its predecessor.
When one is grappling with a single piece of a long-existing puzzle of work, it’s important to address one’s own relationship to the previous body. So, here’s my previous relationship to the Transformers franchise:
Is this a Megatron?
It doesn’t exist.
I saw Transformers (2007) when it came out because a few of my friends wanted to see it, and I remember it as approximately one hour of the most brainless dialogue I’d ever heard, followed by another hour of things blowing up. Naturally, I loved it, but I’m not sure I could tell you a single detail of the plot or lore. Which is to say, I will not be commenting in this column about how Revenge of the Fallen fits into prior Transformers lore, because I have no idea and I don’t want to look like an idiot by pretending I do. As far as I’m concerned, it exists in a vacuum. Consider this the flip side of my column on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
My previous relationship to Michael Bay is far more established, and not just as filmmaker and filmgoer. You see, Michael and I are brothers.
And in Revenge of the Fallen canon, these guys are my brothers too.
Really. Michael Bay and I belonged to two different chapters of the same college fraternity, and I’m pretty sure he is by far the biggest household name of any of our members, with President and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft a distant second. My feelings on this matter are…mixed. On the one hand, I have a soft spot for Brother Bay’s gleeful mad scientist approach to filmmaking, where the cut changes every .3 nanoseconds and booms and bangs and kapows make up more of the intelligible dialogue than actual words. On the other hand, I always seem to leave Brother Bay’s movies feeling like I need a very long shower and an even longer nap. So I never know quite what to expect from him, here included.
These days, Revenge of the Fallen is one of those movies that everyone and no one has seen. It played to packed theaters upon its release, but almost fifteen years later, its main legacy is as “the bad one” in a series that wasn’t exactly running over with “good ones” in the first place. It’s certainly the only Transformers movie to have been a big Razzie winner. So how did they do? Did they get it right?
THE STORY
As God is my witness, I watched this movie. All 149 extraordinarily long minutes of it. All seventy-three bazillion quick cuts. All 372 neverending scenes of Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox making Dutch-angled schmoopy faces at each other. And I still had to read the plot summary on Wikipedia to be able to tell my fine readers what this thing is about.
Revenge of the Fallen opens on a discarded shot from the original Planet of the Apes, full of silhouettes of cavemen unga-bunga-ing about their daily business, while some bored narration informs us that in the days of yore, the Primes, who are the ruling Cybertronians, used to harvest Energon from stars, and good luck figuring out what all that means if you don’t already know. One of the Primes wanted to harvest Energon from our very own Sun, but he’s not supposed to do that because the Sun is a life-sustaining star. When the other Primes found out, they beat him up real bad, and he became “the Fallen” (Tony Todd), the Transformers version of Lucifer and the first of the evil Decepticons. Eventually, I figure out that a Decepticon is a bad transformer.
He looks like a big indistinct pile of scrap metal.
In the present, Sam Witwicky (actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf), the boy hero of the last Transformers outing, wants to be a normal guy and do normal guy things, like go to college and fight with his girlfriend Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox) about who’s going to say “I love you” first. Sam’s parents (Kevin Dunn and Julie White) have all kinds of feelings about their baby boy growing up for an outrageously long time, as does Bumblebee (Mark Ryan), a yellow Camaro Autobot who lives in Sam’s garage. Eventually, I figure out that an Autobot is a good Transformer.
He looks like a big indistinct pile of scrap metal, but yellow.
Elsewhere, the other Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), have teamed up with the international armed forces in a taskforce called NEST to eliminate the remaining Decepticons. This taskforce is lousy at their jobs, because the three things we see happen on their watch are 1) Sam’s house gets invaded by tiny Decepticon gremlins; 2) a dying Decepticon cryptically announces that “the Fallen shall rise again,” and 3) the Decepticon forces steal a piece of something called the “AllSpark” that seems to be the Transformers equivalent of the Infinity Gauntlet. They use this piece of the “AllSpark” to resurrect Megatron, who is not the leader of the Decepticons but they sure treat him like he is, and he and another Decepticon are supposed to kill Sam, because he has some secret code embedded in his brain now, and I dunno, I kind of stopped paying attention during this part and several others.
He looks like a big indistinct pile of scrap metal, but patriotic.
So Sam will not be allowed to have a normal guy life. In addition to the robot wars that he can’t help getting involved in, he also has a crazy roommate named Leo (Roman Rodriguez), a conspiracy theory nut who is obsessed with the Cybertronians, and a girl named Alice (Isabel Lucas) who wants herself a juicy piece of Shia LaBeouf-cake (sorry) because she is actually a Decepticon in disguise.
No, this is not an unauthorized Thing sequel, why do you ask?
Through the machinations of the Decepticons, Sam, Mikaela, and Leo all get captured, Optimus Prime dies to save Sam, and the Fallen sends the entire human race a ransom note that either they hand over Sam or he’ll break their nice little life-sustaining star. The human race hands over Sam, clearly recognizing this as the superior option.
No, of course that doesn’t happen. Sam and his buddies team up with an angry ethnic stereotype named Agent Seymour Simmons (John Turturro), to hunt for the great secret of the Primes in the Egyptian desert. They meet a nice Decepticon named Jetfire (also Mark Ryan). They shoot some stuff and get shot at. A robot gremlin named “Wheelie” humps Mikaela’s foot, and the movie demands that we take note of it. Punches are thrown, many of them at the Pyramids of Giza. The story really, truly does not matter, which does not stop it from being as complicated as these people can possibly make it.
You know what does matter, though? This robot humping Megan Fox’s foot.
THE BAD
Think of all the movies out there famous for being glacially paced or butt-numbingly long. Almost every one of them, including those an hour or more longer than Revenge of the Fallen, zips by like a bullet train in comparison. It’s amazing how slowly a movie can go when every single shot fades out long after wearing out its welcome. And there’s plenty of blame to go around for it.
No one was expecting a Transformers movie to take home any Best Screenplay awards. Plus, Revenge of the Fallen co-writer Alex Kurtzman now spends his days rubbing his greasy fingers all over the Star Trek franchise, and it should not surprise anyone who has seen his work thereupon that he was a talentless hack in his Transformers days too. But even armed with that knowledge, it’s a bit startling how bad the story by Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and franchise newbie Ehren Kruger turns out to be. The only excuse I can think of for lines like “Earth! Terrible name for a planet. Might as well call it dirt” and “I’m ugly? Well, we’re twins, you stupid genius!” and “Decepticons: suck my popsicle!” and “The Fallen shall rise again? Sounds to me like something’s coming!” is that Kurtzman, Orci, and Ehren were all ten years old at the time of their hiring.
It should also not surprise anyone that a large plurality of the wretched dialogue comes from Skids (Tom Kenny) and Mudflap (Reno Wilson), twin Autobots whose entire purpose is to be obnoxious and racist, and therein lies the biggest problem for a Transformers movie: the Transformers themselves are horrible characters, just the most wretched half-assed disasters. Only Tony Todd as the Fallen is doing anything remotely interesting with his vocal work. Peter Cullen as Optimus sounds half asleep, Hugo Weaving as Megatron is a generic growling bad guy, and everyone’s robot lines are so garbled and buried so far down in the sound mix that subtitles are practically a necessity. They’re also ugly, heavy lumbering heaps of metallic shards from which no charm or personality can hope to escape, like a mad scientist merged a rejected BattleMech with Dobby the Elf. Every time they appear onscreen in non-car form, plodding their way through some incoherent fistfight, the movie curls up and dies.
The humans fare little better. Shia LaBeouf, who has shown signs of talent in other projects, here displays a range of two emotions: “confused” and “confused but surprised about it.” Julie White as Mrs. Witwicky, who won a Tony Award for Best Actress, debases herself in every one of her scenes. A wretched sequence in which Sam’s mom eats a pot brownie and embarrasses him in front of his new college acquaintances might make viewers wonder if someone involved in the film actively wished her harm. Kevin Dunn as Sam’s dad fares a little better by virtue of having less to do. Ramon Rodriguez as Leo at least shows some enthusiasm for his role, but his enthusiasm is that of a five-year-old playing cowboys and Indians on the playground, not an actor in a motion picture being released in theaters.
He’s emoting more than Shia, in any case.
In a movie with money oozing out of its pores, you might think the technical elements would at least be impressive, and you would again be wrong. Thank goodness Hollywood hadn’t yet adopted the lightless aesthetic now popular for lazy blockbusters, because then we really wouldn’t have been able to tell what was happening; then again, given how messy and smeary the CGI is, that might be a blessing. The complementing score by Steve Jablonsky is sleepy and flat-footed, except during quiet moments, when Jablonsky transforms into Hans Zimmer on PCP.
Also, at one extremely memorable moment in a deeply unmemorable film, the camera lingers lovingly on a huge pair of wrecking balls dangling between a Decepticon’s legs. And in case we didn’t get the implication, John Turturro is there to inform us that he is “standing below the enemy’s scrotum.” I also considered putting this detail in the “good” section.
You’re welcome.
THE GOOD
I did not, in fact, put the robot testicles here, because believe it or not, there are a few non-ironically good things in Revenge of the Fallen.
As I am so often called to do in these parts, I am going to stick my neck out for the female lead. Is Megan Fox a gifted actress? Not especially. Is she extremely attractive? Yes. Does Michael Bay exploit her attractiveness by spending at least a fifth of his movie using her to tickle the collective teenage male libido? Of course. Does that make her the worst thing in the movie? She’s not even in the bottom hundred. Indeed, she looks more at home in her scenes than LaBeouf does in any of his, and her line delivery outclasses his at almost every turn. Mikaela as a character is an empty husk with breasts and buttocks attached, but Fox seems to take her seriously anyway, which is more than can be said for anyone else. I don’t believe for a second that she’s in love with Shia LaBeouf, but what is an already-struggling actress to do with an impossible task?
So Megan Fox got done dirty. Not surprising, considering that this is the Razzies, but still.
She’s emoting more than Shia, in any case.
A few other performers also manage to escape Revenge of the Fallen with minimal shame. Robot testicles aside, John Turturro brings his standard bug-eyed manic charisma to the ethnic stereotype he has to play, and a conversation between Simmons and Leo about Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is the film’s only genuinely funny moment. Mark Ryan’s reformed Decepticon Jetfire is absolutely a type, the grumpy-old-robot-growling-grumpily, but he’s a good example of that type, and his introduction is a turning point in the movie’s overall watchability. It picks up considerably in Act III, when it gives up on having a story and Michael Bay can do what he really wants to, which is blow a whole bunch of stuff up.
I guess, since I’m eternally bound to him by the bonds of brotherly love and whatnot, that I should say something nice about Brother Bay too. Okay, here goes: Bay knows how to direct a big stupid action scene. Once the movie takes to the skies and he can fill it with grand sweeping overhead shots of bots and bombers and ancient sacred sites blowing up, signs of craftsmanship and, more importantly, joy begin to peek through the refuse.
YEAH PUNCH THAT PYRAMID wait are you a good guy or a bad guy
Several other reviews of the film, including Roger Ebert’s, Peter Travers’s, and that by our very own critic in residence, have slammed Revenge of the Fallen for its noisy incoherence, and they are wrong to do so. Revenge of the Fallen is better the noisier and more incoherent it is. It should be noisy and incoherent for its full runtime. I’m not sure feeling like you’ve had your ears boxed by a pair of F-22s is a pleasing sensory experience, but it is at least an experience, and a distinct one that I won’t forget any time soon. If you need further proof, go watch the movie’s actual finale, which consists of a bunch of static shots and lumbering angel-robots and Mikaela weeping unconvincingly over Sam’s lifeless body, and tell me you didn’t hate the movie less ten minutes prior.
In any case, Michael Bay would go on to direct the third film in the franchise, the Megan Fox-less, Ramon Rodriguez-less, Skids-and-Mudflap-less Transformers: Dark of the Moon. It would become the 2nd-highest grossing film of 2011, losing out only to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and the 32nd-highest grossing film of all time. So let us not weep too much for him. He’s doing just fine, and he doesn’t care what I think of his movie.
I’m proud of you, bro.
For those who do, I’m afraid the spiciest take I can offer is “it’s not that bad,” where “that” suggests “one of the most heinous crimes ever perpetrated with cameras.” I can hardly offer a rousing defense of the film’s merits; you’ll have to go to Armond White for that. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, for all its pretensions to epic grandiosity, is an aggressively average and mundane summer blockbuster brought even lower by its punishing runtime. It could have been a great bad movie if it had committed harder to foot-humping robot gremlins and gigantic metal scrota. And really, isn’t that the saddest wasted potential of all?
Quality of Movie: 2.5 / 5. It’s nowhere close to as bad as its reputation would suggest, but its reputation would suggest that it spontaneously causes brain aneurysms, so make of that what you will.
Quality of Experience: 2 / 5. The charms are few and far enough apart that it’s really not worth sitting through the rest.
You can read Tim’s review of Revenge of the Fallen here!
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.