As I scanned over Mike’s review of Michael Bay’s new — for lack of a better term — “film,” I lingered on his opening statement: “I am determined to give a straight up review of this film.” To him I ask, “Why?” Why should we treat this movie with a respect it never shows us? Well, I shan’t begrudge Mike for his effort, as I gave a stab at writing a serious(-ish) review for my school paper, an expanded version of which can be found on my blog here (shameless!). I suppose I should have been better prepared for this: I by no means loathed the first Transformers, but I was certainly bored stiff by its over-complicated yet skin deep plot, its wooden acting and confusing mish-mash of fighting robots indiscernible from one another. It favored its juvenile humor too much and the animation needed to be clearer, but there was conceivably a decent popcorn flick deep inside that, and guiding hands like executive producer Steven Spielberg could bring out the positive aspects buried within. Now, imagine the absolute opposite of that, and you’ve got this mess.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a film whose most ardent admirers — of whom there is a tragically high number — insist should be accepted for what it is, not some trumped up wannabe critic’s notion of what is should have been. What they fail to grasp is that people like me and the vast majority of honest-to-goodness critics who are paid for their work did accept this movie for what it was: a piece of shit.

The stereotypical image of a Hollywood sequel is that the filmmakers just make everything bigger, and that’s certainly true of this film, perhaps to a greater extent than any sequel in history. There are more robots, the explosions are bigger, the humor even more infantile, the racism is racier and the misogyny got breast implants. And the MacGuffins? Oh, the MacGuffins are so MacGuffiny Alfred Hitchock’s erection burst through his coffin. Remember the Allspark from the last film? The one that would spell doom for man- and robotkind if Megatron got it, only for it to actually kill Megatron and save the day? Well, Sam Witwicky discovers that he possesses a tiny shard of its remnant as he packs for college, and the thing imparts all its eons of robot history and knowledge into his head. Somehow, LaBeouf’s brain doesn’t liquidate, and soon he’s drawing strange symbols all over the place and even disrupts the class his potential molestor of a teacher (more on that later) to disprove the Theory of Relativity.

Meanwhile, the Autobots have teamed up with the U.S. military and even answer to the president, who sends them across the globe to clandestinely kill remaining Decepticons. Couple of things: 1) Why do soldiers accompany the Autobots at all? All they can do is put themselves in harm’s way as gargantuan beings made of steel and missiles duke it out. 2) The Autobots, who refuse to tell humans about their advanced weaponry to prevent terrible wars, answer to the United States? Not the United Nations, a peacekeeping organization that collects the world governments, but the US military? The only other soldiers we see besides Americans are a handful of British troops, because of course the Autobots are willing to co-operate with humans as long as everyone speaks English. This of course fits into Transformers mythology that states that Cybertron was once a great gated community of robots that was sullied when the immigrants took all the good jobs and moved in to their nice neighborhood. That happened, right?

Keep in mind that the Autobots must remain hidden — in their flashy neon vehicles, no less — because the world still doesn’t know about them even though they tore apart Los Angeles in the last film. How can you even attempt to explain that? Well, the film doesn’t, so I assume you can’t, but the idea that if robots shot up Hollywood no one would film it and that the entire population would just buy that it was a gas leak or something is insane. Does the government have access to those Men in Black roofie lasers that make people forget stuff? If that’s not enough, the Autobots decimate Shanghai at the start of the film hunting down a Decepticon that actually seems to be doing nothing remotely villainous. One might have used such a scene to comment on the War on Terror, how pursuing a goal of eliminating cells of enemies at the expense of innocent people and cities around them is not heroic, not noble, but instead perpetuates violence among those claiming to be spreading peace. But that’s what a film might do, silly! No, the only person who voices concern in this film is a representative of the president who is made to look like a shrill, bureaucratic asshole trying to stop all the fun because of some bullshit about “collateral damage.”

Anyway, back to Sam, since this is inexplicably his story; he’s just trying to transition into college, but those damn symbol seizures make things awkward. He must maintain a now long-distance relationship with Megan Fox, who looks like someone shot her with a botox dart sometime during production, and deal with his tired cliché of a roommate who is trying to uncover the truth about the Transformers but must make do with shaky phone camera footage from apparently the only person in Shanghai to own a cellphone. And the Decepticons want the symbols floating around in his head (the writers seem to literally view information that way) to lead them to some old weapon built when the Transformers came to Earth thousands of years ago that will destroy the sun. So they send a human female Transformer — yep — to seduce Sam so she can kill him while making out. What the sodding fuck. This Terminator — ’cause let’s call a spade a spade — is alone with him at multiple times over the course of days, yet she has to wait until they make out to kill him because that way Megan Fox can walk in on them.

Here's your golden god, Babylon.

Anyway, they get the info, the race is on and they have to go to Egypt. Jesus. Be thankful I just decided to gloss over the hows and whys of all that, because it’s a good half-hour of exposition that rolls out with all the speed of molasses. At least the fights are good, right? Oh dear. I’ve been slamming myself against this wall for years now, but I’d like to address the notion that “Michael Bay doesn’t know how to make a good film, but at least his action scenes are amazing.” People seem to make the same mistake time and again, and that’s to equate the scale of his action scenes with a skill capturing said spectacles. The last film suffered from Transformers who looked too much alike to stand out when fighting, but that problem is only worse this time around with the addition of so many new characters. ILM could at least take their time with the handful of robots from the last film, but all the new ones look positively cartoonish when stacked up against Optimus or Bumblebee.

There is no sense of camera placement, movement or editing in these fights, all made worse as the robots must apparently punch each other to do any damage. Don’t they all have missiles? There’s a fight in a forest about an hour in (the closest this film has to an entertaining moment), in which Optimus Prime rips a tree from the ground to strike a Decepticon. He has swords that spring from his arms, but he needs to hit someone with a piece of wood? And why is he so hell-bent on destroying everything on this planet that he can to save it? Optimus dies in the fight and people were actually choking back real tears of real remorse in the theater: this undeveloped icon that proved to be more a rampant sociopath than a sage and heroic leader got actual tears. Sam resolves to bring Optimus back to life, so he uses his shard of the Allspark to revive an old Decepticon-turned-Autobot named Jetfire. Wait, that thing can revive someone? So why the the fuck not just use it on Optimus? It all culminates in a final battle in which all sense of taste and logic goes flying out the window in favor of slo-mo running, unidentifiable Transformers, a cheap hurrah moment for Optimus (that still got mass applause) and robot testicles. Yep, robo-balls. And when LaBeouf dies and goes to god-fucking-damn robot heaven for a few moments, I nearly yelled “fire!” in the crowded theater.

There are only three action sequences in the film, so what fills the hour not taken up by bad explosions and chunky expository dialogue? Why it’s the humor of course. Transformers is a jack of all trades, master of none, as it wants to take its half-hearted attempts to be a good action film and a dark character drama and mix it with humor completely inappropriate for children yet amusing only to a kid. Or a moron.

Take Sam’s mother: being emotional when your child leaves for college is natural, but she practically loses her mind. Then they help Sam move into his dorm and she buys pot brownies from the bake sale. OK, because a college student would totally sell pot brownies at an official bake sale, and he’d totally put a marijuana leaf logo on the bag and it’s totally plausible that Sam’s mother was in a coma for 30 years and thus has never heard of those jazz cigarettes that make the kids go crazy. She then immediately becomes hyperactive and runs around campus telling women about how Sam lost his virginity, because, as well all know, the reefer makes you hyper. There are also numerous shots of dog- and leg-humping, the pinnacle of sight humor.

But the film’s humor goes from atrocious-but-harmless to downright abhorrent in its depiction of both women and minorities. All the women in the film must be tanned, thin and buxom, and the party school Sam goes to (you know the one, Princeton?), is filled with them. Rainn Wilson plays a professor who takes a bite of an apple, rolls it on a floor that was just trampled by an auditorium full of students (for an astrology class? Really?) at a piece of adoring jailbait and tells her to “finish” it for him. Not only is this scene filled with terrible misogyny, it plays into the conservative notion that college is simply a place where teachers foist their opinions on kids to raise a future generation of stuck-up, educated assholes. Megan Fox has nothing to do but scream and look pretty, but they’ve dolled her up so much she looks like an alien fish, an alien fish that drew audible gasps when she showed up on-screen.

But the racism? Oh lord. In the last film, a jive-talking Autobot that was actually named Jazz was not only the first Autobot to die but the only Autobot to die. He wasn’t outright offensive, but it was just dumb for an alien robot to speak like a stereotypical gangsta. Well, now there’s two robots who do not settle for hinted stereotyping; nay, they are outright racist. Mudflap and Skids speak like ill-educated black youth, they cannot read, one sports a gold tooth and both have — I am absolutely serious — simian features. It’s outrageous. I cannot believe Chevrolet would actually agree to let their cars be used as the models for these disgusting caricatures. Meanwhile, there are the usual Bay shots of confused Asians and even a jab at Arabs and their silly language. John Turturro, who starred in the great race relations film Do the Right Thing, here must play the broken-down agent who now works in a deli run by his Jewish harpy of a mother.

Stanley Kubrick once said of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, “The Holocaust was about millions of people who died. Schindler’s List is about 600 people who didn’t.” Following that, the Transformers are a group of alien robots waging a fierce civil war who happen to crash-land on earth and one group must protect it from the other. Transformers the film is about a boy named Sam Witwicky, who just wants to get his wicky wet and pal around with his robot car. The Internet has forced people to take sides in nearly everything these days; one must hate a film or adore it, with no room for middle ground. The Internet would dictate that I say something hyperbolic such as “This film is worse than cancer,” which is just too extreme. But Ebola? Oh, definitely. Or E. coli? E. coli is completely fitting, as it’s a bacterium that essentially makes you crap yourself to death. That’s what Transformers is: the diarrheal stew of feces, stool water and the turned-out flesh sock that is your intestines. Eat up America; this is your last supper before the empire crumbles. Rarely have I seen a film so horrid.