High art … not!

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TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN

Where is it playing?: Sunset Drive-In, Downtown Centre, Fremont, Park, Stadium 10

What's it rated?: PG-13

What's it worth?: $$9.00 (Steve)

What's it worth?: $$6.00 (Glen)

In the first installment, he got the girl (Megan Fox) and saved the world. Now Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is off to college and hoping to maintain a long-distance relationship with his new squeeze. Before long, however, he finds he has bigger problems than midterms and nerd roommates when he starts seeing visions of strange symbols and must join with the Autobots to fight the Decepticons. (151 min.)

Glen In Transformers world, being fated to save the planet is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, you have to battle a group of evil robots hell-bent on killing you and the ones you love and snuffing out your sun like a cheap votive candle; on the other hand, you get a really bitchin’ Camaro and a girl so impossibly hot she actually looks airbrushed, padded, and collagen-injected. Such is life for the seemingly nebbish Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf), who in the first installment fumbled his way through a courtship with Mikaela Banes (the aptly named “actress” Megan Fox)—a courtship clearly fueled by mortal danger. This time around, Sam’s off to the Ivy League, where he finds himself rooming with Leo Spitz (Ramon Rodriguez), someone who’s even more nerdish and more romantically inept than he is. Cowardly Leo is there mainly as comedic filler, though he also supplies the tenuous connection that allows the now-disgraced Agent Simmons (John Tuturro, gamely giving 110 percent to a silly role) to re-appear, bringing with him his paranoia and patriotism. Such are the creaking machinations of this overly written plot that allows Director Michael Bay to fling his cast from one locale to another with little regard for reality. It’s an inherently silly enterprise, ear-damagingly loud and so hyper-kinetically filmed that most of the fight scenes can’t be visually tracked by the naked eye. In short, it’s everything you’d expect from a Michael Bay summer blockbuster: sound and fury signifying nothing.

Steve Truly, the people who really want to go see this movie are not going to see Transformers 2, they’re going to see Megan Fox 2. I’m among this group to be sure, as is Glen. The whole movie really is just one big backdrop with some exceedingly silly plot lines and some horrendously stupid characters all created to showcase the incredible biology of Ms. Fox. Glen’s drool splashed against the backs of the row in front of us a couple times in fact. It’s a good thing I brought an extra napkin, along with Glen’s generous allowance of popcorn, to clean the seat before we left. If I could ask one thing of Mr. Bay in the next installment, so as to make it not so obvious he, too, is in love with Ms. Fox, perhaps he could do some slow-motion takes of the robots (specifically in the battle scenes) like he did for her. The movie is quite long, two and a half hours in fact, but it moves briskly—almost as fast as one scene where they are in the Smithsonian reactivating an ancient Transformer and then they run outdoors to an aircraft graveyard somewhere in the southwest. Or maybe I should say the movie moves along as briskly as the drive from Petra in Jordan to the pyramids in Giza took the protagonists. I’m not so sure why there were such glaring geography problems in the film, but it does reinforce my view that the whole thing was really just about the girl.

Glen Oh come now, I wasn’t drooling that much, though I have to admit, for a girl being dragged all over the world in the same outfit without benefit of a shower, she sure looked fetching—makeup intact, hair perfectly tousled, spray-on tan evenly applied. You really do have to check your common sense at the door for this one, and for politically correct viewers, you may need to check your sense of righteous indignation as well. I speak of the jive talkin’ Step’n Fetchit, Amos & Andy-esque Autobots Skids (Tom Kenny) and Mudflap (Reno Wilson), who sound like a couple of grossly stereotyped African Americans. One even has a gold tooth; both admit they can’t read. Please! These are the Jar-Jar Binks of Transformers 2, and they’re wholly unnecessary. But that’s not all! Sam’s mom (Julie White) accidentally eats pot-laced brownies at a campus bake sale and goes berserk (Thanks for adding to the negative propaganda surrounding marijuana, Michael Bay!). Mikaela gets her leg humped by a small Decepticon (Almost understandable, considering the leg in question). We get a good long look at Agent Simmons’ jock-strapped buttocks (Some things you can’t un-see!). By the end of the film, Bay pushes his actors to really emote, desperately attempting to find a shred of real human emotion amidst this green-screen world. When Sam’s dad (Kevin Dunn) tries to convince Sam to abandon his quest, or when Mikaela is screaming her love for Sam over his near-dead body, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s clearly all ridiculous but nonetheless highly entertaining. I expect this to make hundreds of millions of bucks.

Steve Mr. Bay has also liberally recycled some other sci-fi movie plotlines and ideas throughout this sequel, which is rather unsatisfactory. There is a female killer robot all dressed up to look like a collegiate home breaker, an alien use for the pyramids, stone-age people enthralled by alien life forms, etc. The energy source that’s the core battle point of the movie also makes little sense, but then again why make sense when you can have big-ass explosions? I think it would be tremendously interesting to pair Bay with an erudite, artsy director and see if they could create something that’s not only fantastic in its visuals and effects but also intelligent and thought provoking. This will probably never happen, but one can wish. The pure entertainment value of this movie is extremely high, but only if you’re open-minded enough to be purely entertained without a lot of thinking. I look forward to Megan Fox 3!!! ∆

Glen Starkey is a New Times staff writer and Steve Miller is New Times’ staff photographer. Comment at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com and semiller@newtimesslo.com.