After Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen came out this summer, there was a lot of talk about how terrible it was. It was not merely bad, the reviews claimed, but a two-and-a-half-hour display of everything wrong with Michael Bay’s ideas about filmmaking. Beyond that, it (quite unintentionally) exposed our culture’s fucked-up ideals, on subjects ranging from race and gender to the relationship between the military and civilians. Or so I had read; I wasn’t about to pay money to watch it, and downloading a crappy cam version seemed like a huge waste of time.

Well. It’s out on DVD now, and I decided to undertake a project. I would obtain a copy of the movie, force myself to watch it, and then review it. But instead of writing another bad review in a field of thousands, I decided to analyze the entire movie. That meant full write-ups of everything wrong with every scene, every character, every insufferable joke — every single thing that helped to make this move so terrible.

Of course, before I could dissect the movie, I’d have to understand it, and that meant sitting down and watching the damned thing. The movie is 150 minutes long; I made it to 150 seconds before I needed a break. I needed several more breaks throughout, not because I had anything better to do, but because I just needed to get the fuck away from this movie to gather my thoughts. Unwilling to return, I would assign myself little tasks during my breaks — emptying the trash cans, writing emails, preparing some surprisingly tasty BBQ pork sandwiches (a process which takes up the better part of a day) — and spent much of the actual movie on my feet, pacing around and occasionally glancing at the screen when something seemed to be happening.

And Revenge of the Fallen isn’t just long; it’s slow. Once you’ve been watching it for a while, it becomes difficult to remember a time when you weren’t watching it, and just as hard to imagine that it will ever end. All the action sequences seemed to drag on for days, but in reality they rarely took more than a few minutes. Every so often, I would pause to see how much time I had left, and it was always a lot more than I expected.

When I started watching this movie, I was already planning this review series. But if I hadn’t, I’d be planning it now, because there is simply no way I can hold back all the righteous fury I have for this steaming pile of shit posing as entertainment.

Actually, no. If I hadn’t been planning this project, I never would have watched the movie in the first place, and I’d still be happy. As it is, I am not happy, and the first review will be arriving shortly.

I have seen Transformers. The world will pay.