Michael Bay and His Sinister Attempt to Give Half The World Tinnitus

Michael Bay. Now there’s a man who provokes a reaction. On the one hand, he’s a renowned action film director who has more explosions in his movies than a crack addict has needles stuck in his lawn. And on the other, there’s the Transformers franchise.

With August being summer time we were treated to wailing children on their school holiday, our faces audibly crackling in the heat, and cinemas stuffed with films I’d rather eat lumps of poison to than waste time watching. It’s the latter of the three that brings us to Michael Bay’s porny Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which was released this summer.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love CGI. I love computer graphics. Sit me down to Jurassic Park, Spider-man 2, or any Pixar film and I’d happily chew through it like a cake, with a wide grin on my face. But I can’t do the same with Revenge of the Fallen. I can’t happily chew through it. Instead, it’s like trying to swallow a punnet of nettles.

The first thing you’ll notice is that only 12% of it is actually real. You may think that’s a good thing, having all that CGI must make it exciting. But it doesn’t, it’s boring. At 147 minutes long and with Snoozy LeBeef’s sour performance it’s almost coma inducing. It sounds like hundreds of angry, high powered pressure boilers all chained together and falling down a flight of stairs whilst an orchestra from Hell howls in the background. I’m convinced Bay made this film to give half the world tinnitus.

It’s still impossible to tell what’s going on during the fight scenes. There’s plenty of rolling around, and robots shouting “OPTIMUS!” and ”MEGATRON!” whenever a punch is thrown. A saucy frolic in a field of daffodils with Megan Fox is not what this film is. You’d be forgiven if you thought it was directed by Satan himself, and spat into this world through a haunted mirror. It’s a bloated, noisy, messy tosscake of a movie. Trashy robot porn that is completely out of control. They could have shown the robots stood on a moon behind Saturn kicking chicken bones into a tin bucket on Earth, and it would’ve been more interesting.

Revenge of the Fallen is proof that Hollywood has been shot in the kneecaps like a character from a Scorsese flick. It acted as a tent pole and kept Box Office figures up, and because of that financial success there will be a third movie, which is a) unsettling and b) really a concept that should be left bleeding at the side of the road.