Harmonica
The Apocalypse of Darkness
Joined: 25 Jun 2007
Posts: 5685
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 Posted: Fri Jul 31, 2009 8:07 am Post subject: Part 4B: More Like, “Guantanamo Bay’s Transformers” |
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Basically, the Transformers, despite the fact that they apparently have ships and everything for their interstellar space travel, arrive on Earth via these flaming meteors that have no means of propulsion or maneuverability or anything.
This prompts some inbred retard fuckwit within the movie to loudly exclaim “This is ten times cooler than Armageddon! Ha ha ha ha!”
Do you get it? Do you get it?
Michael Bay made that movie! And he’s saying it was awesome! And this movie is ten times more awesome! That’s, like, Mega-Awesome Fuck Yeah Awesome!
Oh my god, I’m going to fucking kill myself. But not before I kill Michael Bay and most of the other people involved in this movie. Murder-suicide, baby.
Ironhide manages to land in a swimming pool, and when he gets out, this little girl comes up to him with these big, moist, doe-eyes with a satchel of teeth and asks him “Are you the tooth fairy?”
Yes, kid. He’s the fucking tooth fairy. The tooth fairy is a twenty-foot tall robot from space. He’s the one you’ve been waiting for.
I’m not certain how many drugs it took to conceive of a world where this
would manage to be confused for this
but I imagine it would have been enough for normal humans to overdose on. Fortunately, this movie was made in an industrial plant by machines under the direction of Skynet.
I digress. We return to the movie, where the Autobots have all acquired their alternate vehicle modes. Amazing coincidence that they’re all from fucking
PRODUCT PLACEMENT ALERT: GM.
This is actually kind of funny, now that I think about it, given how General Motors cars are so shit that no one buys them, which is why today we have to give tons and tons of our tax dollars to bail out a terribly mismanaged corporation. Yet when the Autobots land on Earth, they just happen to randomly land next to cars belonging to that exact brand (except for Optimus, who’s an old Peterbilt).
Anyway, as before, we see them driving around in a montage that’s basically been stolen from every car commercial I’ve ever seen, and then they arrive and Transform.
Now of the Autobots (shit, of all the Transformers period now that I think about it), Optimus is probably the only one who even bears a passing resemblance to his G1 counter-part, and I would have actually been kind of happy with his design if it hadn’t been totally gayed up by this awful flame paint job. I mean, it really is terrible, and this one I lay the blame for totally at Bay’s feet.
| Michael Bay wrote: | | Listen, I make my own movie. I don't have someone tell me what to do… I would listen to fans on the net. I really would. I would kind of hear their comments, but I'm still going to make my movie and I'll still put flames on Optimus. |
So then the Autobots all transform and shit, and Prime introduces himself, “We are autonomous robotic organisms from the planet Cybertron.”
Ha ha!! Get it? Autonomous robotic organisms… Autobots!!!
Like, did that really need to be said? You couldn’t have just had him say something “You may call us the Autobots”? That was really necessary? I mean, you don’t provide any fucking explanation for “Decepticon” even though that actually warrants some kind of elaboration, you know. Even I don’t know what it’s supposed to stand for. Deceptive connotation? Iunno.
This scene is pretty much the only real characterization of the Transformers in the entire movie. The non-Prime Autobots are given an introductory position, speak a line — one line — and then say nothing of interest for the entire rest of the movie.
Let’s start with Jazz, as I actually like movie Jazz. His introductory line is “What’s crackin’ little bitches”, which he spits out after break-dancing and then reclining on a car because he’s lazy. Now, I don’t have a problem with this, because Jazz was basically always the black guy Transformer. So with his character, the writers at least managed to capture the spirit of the character from the 80s. Which is essentially that he’s stumbled into this thing out of Undercover Brother.
Ratchet, on the other hand, is completely fucking useless. His one and only line of note is fucking “The male’s pheromones suggest he wants to mate with the female!”
Oh great, more of the hilarious comedic stylings of Michael Bay’s characters!
Please, tell me, what kind of personality is that supposed to be? Is that supposed to be analytic? Scientific? Nerdy? Matter of fact? Perverted? What?
We’ll never know, because that’s the only non-throwaway line in the movie he gets, and even *it* was a fucking throwaway!
Ironhide is worse, though only slightly, as his designated ‘personality’ is that he’s gun-happy or something. So his one line is a quote from Dirty Harry.
Now, here’s the thing I don’t get: is he like this because of all the shit on the internet he downloaded? Prime implies that this is the case for why Jazz acts like he’s stumbled out of a rap video or whatever, so does that mean that Transformers basically get their personalities from whatever they happen to find on the Web first? And if the *only* difference between the Autobots and the Decepticons given is that Decepticons have no problem with killing biological creatures, then what precisely differentiates them from Ironhide? And if their personalities come from the intraweb, then does that mean that Decepticon/Autobot is a crapshoot based on web surfing?
That’s the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard.
Incidentally, I’m not entirely certain when they were supposed to have accessed the internet. Both Blackout and Frenzy had to physically touch computers to hack through all that shit (although if you’re some kind of super hacker that make supercomputers look like those fridge-sized processors from the 80s, I don’t know why you need to be on a base or on a plane with a magical mainframe to hack a *network*). The Autobots, who couldn’t even communicate with Bumblebee without the use of the Space Bat-signal, just fucking arrived on the planet. When and how precisely did they learn an entire language from the internet?
“They learned it when they were robots and by being robots! Stop *thinking*!”
Fun fact: in the original script, Optimus initially spoke to them in Chinese, having found that most organisms on Earth were from China and determining that it was the most spoken language on the planet so he figured it had a high likelihood of being spoken by Idiot-boy. As far as I’m aware, this part was cut for time.
Anyway, I’m getting off my main point, which is that this scene’s worst crime is that… that’s it, man. That’s essentially all the personality we get from the Autobots. And it’s completely stupid. Like, they aren’t even really talking with *each other* at this point. And that’s more or less the extent of the actual non-retarded lines they get! ONE. A PIECE.
The name of the movie is Transformers, right? I’m not crazy, am I? At least about this? It’s called Transformers? As in, the giant robots are supposed to be the movie’s focus? No, really. I’m asking you. What is the title of the fucking movie?! Say it! Say its fucking name!
Trans. Fucking. Formers.
And now we’ve been introduced to them and…why is it that fucking Bernie Mack’s character had more lines than any of them? Or that fucking retarded police dipshit in that interrogation scene? Or the Aussie chick? Or Jon Voight? Or most of the soldiers? Or the fat nerdy computer hacker? Or Sam’s criminally stupid parents? Sam’s friend and the Cro-magnon football player had more lines than them!
Bay doesn’t seem to understand that what made the original G1 thing great was not the fucking human characters, dear fuck no, but the robots, and their individual personalities and how they interacted with one another. And beat the shit out of each other. You can’t have that when you have shit like characters who only have a single line of dialogue and then die. To Bay, Bumblebee’s not a character but a 2007 Chevrolet Camaro (Available at a dealership near you!).
Like, I realize that the cartoon personalities were pretty much these caricatures, like the robot who spoke fast, the robot that didn’t like fighting, the black robot… but even those were more well-developed than the majority of the fucking Autobots. Even they had *some* discernible personality, there. I mean, here, there are good Transformers and there are bad Transformers. That’s about the extent of the characterization. These the good Transformers, so we’re supposed to shut up and accept a single line each for that ‘characterization’ shit.
…
This is what happens when you have a guy who had never even heard of the source material helming the project. This is what happens when you task a sociopath to write some well-rounded characters. You get something hollow and soulless and dead.
You get
a robot.
I mean, by his own words, Bay did not even know what Transformers were before he was asked to do the movie. And the writers? They claim to have seen every episode, and Spielberg claims to have every figure ever made. But that makes no sense. If they *did* actually watch and love the show as much as they claim to have, I really can't fathom how someone would want to view every single episode, analyze everything that made Transformers awesome… and then kill it.
Yet that's what we have.
Bay, however, him I can understand. He can do that kind of thing, easily.
It’s exactly like that scene where the Terminator is in a gun shop collecting weapons and stuff, and he starts to load a shotgun, and the store owner says "Hey, you can't do that!" and the Terminator responds "Wrong" and blows him away without hesitation or emotion.
He doesn’t care. He *can’t* care. That’s why he’s fine constructing these shallow, ersatz Transformers.
I guess what I’m saying is, I would like the Transformers to actually fucking TALK.
Incidentally, it was a *brilliant* idea to not even introduce the majority of the Autobots, including their goddamned leader until an hour into the friggin’ film.
At this point, the movie’s abominable plot rears its ugly, ugly head and it is just. Hideous. I mean, special congratulations are in order for the writers, who against all odds managed to write a story less creative than when child me built a fortress made out of Yoo-hoo bottles and discarded boxes of my mother’s feminine hygiene products and had the Decepticons defend it from the agents of Cobra. I’ve seen better plots in horrible fan fiction than I see here.
Okay, see, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… Well, actually maybe it was just a couple decades back on Mars or something, they’re not really clear. Anyway! There was this planet called Cybertron. Despite the obligation they felt to explain ‘Autobots’, no one seems to want to volunteer anything on how Cybertron got *its* name.
And apparently, everything was happy and awesome until Prime and his people were betrayed by the Decepticons in some fashion, which calls some serious scrutiny upon whoever thought it was a good idea to trust a race known as Decepticons. Come on!
Anyhow, there was this cube, and the Decepticon leader, Megatron, had it. And then he didn’t have it. And it landed on Earth. Megatron crash-landed on Earth, where Sam’s Great-grandfather or whoever stumbled onto Megatron, and activated the ship’s navigation system, which promptly lasered the location of the AllSpark onto the glasses, which is why everybody is after the fucking things.
I mean, they assume. None of the Autobots were actually there when it happened, so they really have no business knowing how the fuck shit down, and God knows why Optimus is having a flashback that he wasn’t even present for. This movie is absolutely loathsome.
Moreover, I’m not certain why Megatron’s navigation computer is set on “Automatically laser coordinates onto whatever free surface presents itself”, or why it gets activated when Great-grandpa Twitwicky touches Megatron’s hand, which is all the scene shows us happening.
The Autobots have somehow managed to extrapolate all this from seeing a grainy picture on the glasses’ sales page.
We know this because Sam asks Prime how he knows all this shit and he responds “Ebay”, and the fact that it’s actually, factually Peter Cullen’s voice saying the line successfully burdens my soul in ways I didn’t believe possible. It’s somehow worse than if they had got Fran Drescher to voice Prime and these words were coming out of her mouth.
Of course, “Ebay” doesn’t even come close to actually answering the question, as there are a gazillion products that are and have been on Ebay, so needle in a haystack doesn’t even begin to cover it. Are the Transformers just *that* fast at downloading shit? But that makes no sense, since Frenzy was clearly shown going through the Pentagon files one at a time. And oh yeah, the Autobots only just arrived! So when did this Ebay surfing go down? Was Bumblebee on the planet just going through the internet since the 30s or whatever? Did those meteors have free Wi-Fi?
Worst of all, not only are these uber-powerful robots unable to just enhance the picture of the glasses with the map on it to the point that they can determine the coordinates from it, but these robots who are so l33t that they can hack through defense firewalls that would take a supercomputer ten years to breach with a brute force attack can’t just set up an account and use the Buy Now feature!
God, I want to beat everyone involved in the writing of this movie with hammers.
Oh, and Megatron’s evil plan is that he’s going to use the AllSpark to turn all of Earth’s machinery into a new Decepticon Army and use it to conquer the entire universe. Or something. That itself I don’t particularly understand since later they will establish that *all* of Earth’s technology has been reverse engineered by Megatron himself, so what the fuck was his plan back in the 1800s? Transform all of the horse-drawn buggies and trains into Decepticons? Maybe that would make sense in the context of the other installments of the franchise, but in *this* movie, they explicitly state that the AllSpark only works on modern technology. Congrats on winning the Most Retarded Evil Plan Ever award.
All that to justify a Macguffin that’s going to lose the entirety of its value half-way through the movie — which we are almost at, by the way.
Cue driving cars sequence (like a rock…).
The movie then subjects the audience to a scene that revolts me to my core. Remember how great the first Whacky Interrogation Scene was? Now we get to watch the redux version! With the added benefit of a nerdy butterball.
Hey, speaking of recollections, do you guys remember in Jurassic Park 3 when the dinosaur ate the guy with the phone and then the audience was subjected to a scene where they had to watch the protagonists root through the dinosaur’s shit? Do you remember that?
Do you remember how fucking HILARIOUS that scene was?
Yeah, watching this movie is a lot like that. In part because the movie is mostly shit and in large part because Michael Bay insists that I want to watch these unbearably unfunny, agonizing scenes that it’s fucking unbelievable that anyone on the set could have *ever* thought that it was a good idea. Or anything but a terrible, awful, horrific idea. It’s fucking unbelievable that anyone ever thought that that shit would work even on paper. Even fucking Communism works on paper!
Yes, that’s right; I just said this movie is worse than Communism.
Exhibit A: We return to the ongoing saga of the two imbecile hackers, Bitch and Tubs. Family Size, of course, hits upon the ingenious plan of stuffing his face with donuts for five minutes while giving these paranoid ramblings about why he needs to cram shit into his craw, and it’s freaking embarrassing for everyone involved, including the audience. I mean, you have a friggin’ whale and he’s eating and eating, and then Chubby starts whining and spazzing out and then gets all exhausted because ‘sugar rush’.
The only explanation for finding the above scene funny is that you have been brainwashed by the
robots.
The scene itself is completely pointless, since, like, the Pentagon was all “hey, hot chick over there, find a way to decipher this code” and she was all “okay” and she went to Fatso, and he did it! Problem solved. So she let the Blob in on the secret, that’s really not worth subjecting us to another five minutes of retarded, mad-cap interrogation. Especially since Blubber Butt isn’t even required here, since all he did was stick the code in his computer and hit like two keys.
God, this movie feels like some kind of friggin’ interrogation. And I’m ready to talk by this point. You want me to tell you where the bombs are? Done. You want me to sell out my country? By all means, just don’t make me watch any more of this shit. You want to know all the terrible things I’ve done in life? In third grade, I cheated on my history exam. In fourth grade, I stole my uncle Max’s toupee and I glued it on my face when I was Moses in my Hebrew School play. In fifth grade, I knocked my sister Edie down the stairs and I blamed it on the dog…When my mom sent me to the summer camp for fat kids and then they served lunch I went nuts and I pigged out and they kicked me out…But the worst thing I ever done — I mixed a pot of fake puke at home and then I went to this movie theater, hid the puke in my jacket, climbed up to the balcony and then, then, I made a noise like this: hua-hua-hua-huaaaaaaa — and then I dumped it over the side, all over the people in the audience. And then, this was horrible, all the people started getting sick and throwing up all over each other!
And the worst part of it is that this is time that could have spent with the giant fucking robots, but nooooo, Michael Bay just *had* to show us the comedy GOLD of a Porker shoveling donuts into his gullet.
Like, Bay gives us these characters, these horrible, horrible characters who are completely without any redeeming qualities, and he can’t even give them anything interesting to do or even really see things through to the end. So eat them donuts, Muffintop, eat them all up.
I really cannot overstate how much I hate this fucking scene. It’s one of the most worthless things ever put to celluloid. Unfortunately, I don’t even think that scene ranks in the top five worst scenes of the entire movie. It’s up there, definitely in the top ten of the most horrible parts of this movie, and if I had done this rant in the form of the ten things I hated more than any other about Michael Bay’s Transformers, I would have no real problems with listing it there. Oh well.
With that, I’m going to put a break here, because on that note, I’m about to get into what is, bar none, the most vile part of the entire film, of all film, and I don’t have the strength to take it on here. It’s not just in the top ten or the top five, either. It is *number one*. As it bears that distinction, its evil is one which I need an entire sub-rant to fully take on. Come back next time when I officially break 20,000 fucking words and fifty pages, finish up with the first half of the movie, and have my soul devoured by a scene whose shittiness is unparalleled anywhere else.
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