I am determined to give a straight up review on this movie. I really am.

Tuesday night I went with a few friends to the midnight premiere in Grand Rapids, MI, of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. We arrived around 11:15pm and managed to find four seats for all of us. Immediately I remembered why I hate the general public: non-stop douche-baggery for 45 minutes until the previews started, and then of the 560 people (not including myself and my three buddies) could not shut up even into the previews and through the movie. This is a major annoyance for me, but the atmosphere isn’t really the point here.

Coming into this movie, I had just watched the first Transformers movie about 8 hours before because I hadn’t actually sat down and purposely watched it in the past given my extreme disgust with Michael Bay. So, I had the plot in my head: Megatron was beaten, Shia LeBeouf proved he can scream a lot, there was a yellow Camero Transformer (Bumble Bee) that was pretty cool, and Optimus Prime was a totally awesome dude.

The movie began… and I cried. (spoilers abound)

I cried watching this movie. Not out of sadness, but out of confusion. If Transformers: ROTF is anything, it’s a movie that puts you back to infancy where nothing makes sense and all you see is boobs and a barrage of colors. That’s not to say there wasn’t a plot or anything in this film because there was… and it was mediocre.

The movie begins with this 2001: A Space Odyssey-like intro with something about how humans and Transformers have known each other for a long time, then they cut to the “this always happens in sci-fi sequels”: the US Government began working with the Autobots after the last movie and their goal was to eliminate the remaining Decepticons on Earth. Pretty straight forward. Enter Shia LeBeouf’s character: off to college then BAM plot point: A shard of the all-spark was in his coat! What a crazy-random-happenstance! Enter funny and ridiculous house-hold machines turning into blood-thirsty Transformers followed by Bumble Bee kicking some major butt and nearly blowing up a house.

So, there’s some more mini-plot and some college jokes and more ridiculous college stuff followed by crappy plot which ends up bringing in this all-encompassing conspiracy involving the Decepticons and this guy called The Fallen.

To not just destroy this movie for people, I’ll give you some more of the vague and angry (as I tend to usually do) instead of open spoilery:

This movie is full of blatant racial stereotypes on the Jar Jar Binks level–if not greater–from two very deus ex machina characters and it had me doing the favored internet meme “face-palm” effect for about 45 minutes straight during the last portion of the movie as the action becomes so disorienting it’s maddening. After some discussion with my movie-goer friends we ended up on the conclusion that people must love that confusing state that Michael Bay puts you in during the action sequences of this movie–which is seriously a good two-thirds of the movie–and thus explains his mass success. The whole film centers around this as well as one almost, but not quite enough for me to say so, redeeming quality: Optimus Prime simply beats the living crap out of everyone. He is straight up incredible, but outside of that, there wasn’t much about this movie I liked.

And that really sums up Michael Bay and summer box office hits like this: they have one good idea but everything just sucks regardless. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a barrage of explosions, transforming machinery (aka CGI), Megan Fox’s boobs and blatant racism that the general public seems to eat up. There’s nothing great about this movie (save Optimus Prime) that really kept me wanting to watch the movie and I’m pretty angry at myself for spending cash on this. I knew the outcome of the film before it was done, I came out more confused than I was going in, and my nerd/jerk-wad-movie-critic instinct had me hating so many little discrepancies in the movie that I’m surprised most people could really follow the plot and not sit back and ask what exactly was going on. I wouldn’t tell anyone to see this unless they really need that testosterone fix that fantastic movies (ie. Die Hard) could give easily and not make them dumber after watching.

I hope this was straightforward enough for you guys.