Transformers: ROTF

Funny. Explosions. Loud! That’s it, oh and the twins. Spoiler Alert!

The midnight showing. A gala event, held here in La Grande, that brings out the very best in people, fashion, and taste. Normally, such events are reserved for pre-mieres where stars litter the red carpet. We don’t have that here. Here we have kids in hoodies, bare asses hanging out of cars, loud mouthes, blow hards, smokers, smokers without smokes. Smokers forced to reside in the street as the general attending popu-lace threatened them with Nicotene patches if they didn’t retreat; forced to endure their habit in the company of other smokers like cars and semi’s. Where the brave cut in line and the weak watch them do it, intensely grumbling to themselves as they wrestle phi-losophical of the ramifications of a transforming thong; The Thongitron. Thus, my night of Bay Blandness was set.

This time the Autobots are working, in conjunction with the humans, to hunt down whatever Decepticons are still lurking about on the planet. Traveling as far as Shanghai to eliminate any and all possible threats. They stumble upon rumors of the rise of The Fallen and Optimus stands defiant after slaughtering another Decepticon. Elsewhere, Sam and Mikaela are trying out long-distance love as Sam attends a non-descript, Ivy League school and she stays behind to help her father, freshly re-leased from prison, get back on his feet in his repair shop. Upon packing, Sam comes across a sliver of the cube and all crazy-Michael Bay slow-motion explosiveness en-sues. Sam, Bumblebee, Mikaela, and the twins (Mudflap and Skids) race around the globe trying to keep what information Sam downloaded from the sliver out of Megatron’s hands. With Optimus out of the picture, yup you guessed it; muffler exam. They found rust in his manifold. It’s terminal. The crew is on their own. After awakening an old pirate transformer, they learn that Megatron and the Fallen are really after the Matrix of Leadership to power a giant sun-draining machine. The battle rages in Egypt as they leave gigantic carbon footprints everywhere!

Now, like all of us from the eighties, I love the Transformers. They rocked my morn-ing, everyday before school. It definitely got my days off on the right foot. That said, I too was excited when the first film was getting made. Just to see them on the screen, real and alive, was a geek wet dream come true. But the honeymoon is over. The first film blew more than a hooker offering two for one shots. It was fun, loud and nothing else. The characters weren’t even skin deep. Optimus’s character motiva-tion was “Try to get crucified!” And let’s not forget the women in the blue dress that Iron Hide oogles as he dives over her trying to kill a Decepticon. Seriously. Now, the sequel. Pretty much a lot of the same but no lady in a blue dress, clearly a victim of some radiation poisoning she received by being stared at by Iron Hide. I wasn’t surprised much. The side story with Optimus was surprising but not so much. When you’re surrounded by Megatron and others, all by yourself, yeah…you’re putting up a headstone as well.

The twins. Mudflap and Skids. Huh. Gold tooth…hip hop language…inability to read…yeah, what? Deven Faraci delved into the twins issue quite heavily, so much in fact that anything I state would be an unoriginal thought and could never be put to type as well so check out his thoughts on the twins and their relation to a certain racist stereotype. Otherwise, they were not funny. They were oozing with so much boring, unoriginal demeanor and character that I practically begged the douche bag sitting be-hind me, or as the German’s would say “Douchenel” or however the hell you spell it, tea-bag me until my eye’s bled and my butt whistled dixie (don’t ask me how). Back to the twins. No, Michael Bay, creating them as these stereotypes does not allow them to connect to younger audiences. It tells younger audiences what you think of them. Now if you’d have stated that from the beginning as your own character choice, you would have been hated but heralded as brave. Since you tried to cover it up with so much BS, welcome to the bag, Senor Douche.

Call me Dr. Hater, yeesh.

I have to say, the humor was quite good. The well handled, snide remarks made by characters heading off screen were well timed and really funny. Sam’s mom, holy cow, did they let her off the leash. That woman was ridiculous. She was stealing scenes and dropping beauty lines anytime she was any where near the scene. Bra-vo. I like looking at Meagan Fox. We all do. FTW. It was really nice to see new characters brought in, some I was really excited about like RC but, again, the fail as they don’t ever let us get to know them. They’re there to fill the gaps in the screen where no story is taking place. Sad. I was glad to see this film because it is suited best on the big screen. It’s so epic that even a large Hi-Def or plasma would not cut it at all.

Okay, the film was fun. I laughed a lot. A whole lot, not just a lot. The circle of Primes…yeah no. We don’t need that. We don’t need to be reminded that Optimus’s and Sam’s futures are linked by five rusted out robots who are hanging out…in robot heaven? Robot Heaven, apparently, is a barren world of vast nothingness where the wind constantly tries to blow you over with a piercing sun…and somehow Sam ends up there? Didn’t that look more like robot hell? Should a pitchfork have been hopping around that transformed into a little Adolf-Hitler-tron and banished all back to making cheap video games for the new consoles?

I’m done. You need to see it in the theaters. It is fun, it’s just so wrong. Head to the Granada.