This post is part of a longer series examining the god-awfulness of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. If you missed it, the introduction is right here.

When we last left Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a group of African stereotypes got stomped by a robot sometime in the distant past. Today’s installment begins 17,000 years later, with a shot of an industrial hellscape, and another friendly caption:

SHANGHAI, CHINA. 22:14 HRS – TODAY

And what’s happening TODAY at 22:14 HRS? Well, Shanghai is being evacuated following a toxic spill in the financial district. Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, some serious-looking officers are watching the evacuation on some serious-looking monitors, chattering on about Chinese airspace and strike teams.

Then, back to China, where a decrepit ice cream truck putts along a dirt road. A speaker on the truck’s roof announces – I swear – “Any bad robot out there’s better get ready for an ass-whoopin’,” in a voice that sounds like your racist uncle’s Flavor Flav impression. There’s an Autobot insignia on the front of the truck, and a sign on the side that reads – again, I swear this is all true – “[Decepticon insignia] suck my popsicle!”

You hear that sound? That’s the sound of hope dying.

Soldiers move into position, and Optimus Prime’s voiceover fills us in on the backstory: for the last two years, he and the Autobots have joined up with a group of human soldiers to form a “classified strike team called NEST” (which I assume is an acronym for something, although they never bother saying what). We meet a few of the team members: a sleek-looking car that will probably turn into a robot at some point, a group of human soldiers, the aforementioned ice cream truck, and – just to make things confusing – a trio of motorcycles (complete with holographic riders) referred to as “Arcee.”

Fans of the Transformers’ 1980’s incarnation will remember Arcee as the token girl Transformer. They will also remember that there was only one of her. Now, somehow, she is three motorcycles that turn into three robots, but who all have one name. This makes perfect sense, so be quiet and watch the damn movie and stop trying to confuse Michael Bay because you’ll make him mess up.

Also, those soldiers? They were in the first movie, and we’ll be seeing them throughout this one. For the purpose of this review, their names are Lead Guy, Black Guy, Third Guy, and Fourth Guy. Lead Guy explains that the “toxic spill” was just a cover story to get everyone out of the city so they can fight some Decepticons.

Finally, we get what we came for: a truck turning into a motherfucking robot. Unfortunately, the robot is standing so close to the camera that all we really see are unidentifiable bits of truck twisting around and blocking our view of anything else; he starts as a GMC pickup and ends up as an Autobot named Ironhide, but how he got from Point A to Point B remains a mystery. In his robot form, Ironhide looks like a collection of random metal parts welded together into something vaguely man-shaped, not unlike the sculptures that stand in front of office buildings. I wish Tyler Durden was in this movie.

The soldiers gather around some kind of power plant or refinery or something, where a nearby crane transforms into a very large Decepticon and starts smashing shit. There’s an explosion, a weird “BWAAAAAUUUUMP” noise, debris, gunfire, the anguished cries of wounded soldiers. For no reason, some cars go flying across the screen, although we did not see them take off, nor do we see them land. Through all of this, the Decepticon is off-screen. Not in the background. Not obscured by dust or explosions. Just not there. In a couple shots, the soldiers seem to be firing at nothing. When the robot finally reappears, it transforms into some kind of one-wheeled spidery thing and takes off.

Then bunch of shit happens that I cannot make myself care about. Two highlights:

ONE: A Decepticon breaks through a wall and the Arcees pursue him, crashing through the apartment of an elderly Chinese man in the process. Just as the laws of comedy predict, the old man is oblivious to the robo-carnage going on behind him – the robots destroy his home, and he goes right on eating his soup, barely mustering the energy to glance at the giant, burning hole in his wall. If you find this funny, you are my enemy.

TWO: During that same chase, the Flavor Flav ice cream truck returns to drag this movie down into the deepest pit of Hell. The back half of the truck breaks off and turns into a (relatively) squat robot, who does a slapsticky tumble into the side of the building. The front half turns into a similar robot with a similarly offensive jive-talkin’ accent, and he smacks his partner upside the head for his screw-up. If this were a just world, I could say that they never appear again after this scene. Alas, the world is a dark and wicked place, and I will have much more to say about these two in the future.

Eventually, we get back to the giant killer Decepticon. He has somehow found his way to a bridge full of cars, and runs one over with his gargantuan tire. Now, let’s ignore the fact that the whole “evacuation” thing has been completely forgotten, and the fact that some civilians just got killed for the sake of a CGI effect, and focus on the insane hugeness of this fucking tire. Seriously, this thing is like four monster truck tires put together. And we’re just supposed to accept that?

Now, I’m not an expert on cranes. I don’t know what kind of tires they have. In fact, I always thought cranes had treads. So for all I know, some company really does make crane tires that are twenty feet tall and wider than an entire truck. But it’s a lot more likely that the people making this movie have no idea how big things are, and decided that Mister Crane-Bot should be big enough to crush everything in his path, even though there is just no fucking way that much metal could compact itself into anything resembling a piece of functioning construction equipment. But I digress.

At long last, Optimus Prime joins the fight, in the most absurd and unnecessary way possible. No, really: he drives out of a moving plane in truck-form, transforms into a robot as he tumbles through the air, deploys three parachutes, drifts the rest of the way to the ground, cuts the chutes, turns back into a truck, and pursues his one-wheeled foe. The Unicycle of Malevolence, meanwhile, has made his way to a crowded highway, where he is crushing cars, smashing overpasses, and almost certainly killing children by the busload.

And then, somehow, Optimus is climbing around on the monster’s evil head. I had to rewind twice to figure out how he got up there, and I’m still not 100% sure. It doesn’t matter; once he’s up there, Optimus does something that makes the Decepticon crash and die. I have no idea what the fuck just happened, but this sequence seems to be coming to an end, so I don’t care anymore. Optimus and Ironhide approach their vanquished enemy, who manages to croak, “The Fallen shall rise again,” out of his metal mandibles before Optimus blows his face off with a laser or something.

One of the soldiers says, “That doesn’t sound good.” He’s right. We are eight minutes and forty-nine seconds into Revenge of the Fallen, and only pain awaits us.

In our next installment, we finally meet the humans, their pets, and their robot sidekick. We do not, however, meet Mr. Dignity.

This post is part of a longer series examining the god-awfulness of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. If you missed it, the introduction is right here.

It’s not often that a movie starts sucking before it has even begun, but such is the case with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Before seeing even a second of the movie proper, we’re treated to an ominous hum accompanying the Dreamworks logo, and a series of beeping and whirring sounds as the stars in the Paramount logo fly by. This will become a recurring theme throughout the movie: things make noise when they move.

The first thing we see is a shot of some mountains somewhere, followed by a shot of something lumpy that may or may not also be a mountain. The credits – which make whooshing noises as they appear onscreen, naturally – tell use that this movie was made “In association with Hasbro.” Finally, in the third shot of the same mountains, Optimus Prime speaks in voiceover:

“Earth. Birthplace of the human race. A species much like our own.”

While he says this, two silhouetted, spear-wielding tribesmen ascend one of the larger rocks, effectively laying the groundwork for this movie’s attitude about race. They are either joined by several more warriors, or we simply cut to a shot of some different warriors – it’s hard to tell, since everything is still in silhouette. Optimus goes on, “Capable of great compassion… and great violence,” and a helpful caption informs us that it is all happening in 17,000 B.C.

We get our first look at our warriors, and indeed they are African. I have no idea if their war paint or weapons are even remotely authentic, and I’m sure Michael Bay doesn’t know either. There are at least seven of them now, and they are all staring grimly past the camera.

Some sort of big cat runs by silently, and the tribe (now up to nine!) charges it. We hear a guttural, feline growl as they do, even though the cat is no longer onscreen – clearly, the implication is that this animal-noise somehow came from one of the tribesmen.

So maybe this is what establishes the movie’s attitude toward race. In any case, Michael Bay is an asshole, the cat is revealed to be a tiger, and I have my first “What the fuck?” moment, because tigers live in India. In jungles. This scene, meanwhile, takes place in a craggy desert environment, presumably somewhere in Africa, where being stripey and bright orange is a tremendous evolutionary disadvantage, even for an apex predator.

Also, every shot of this chase seems to take place in an entirely different location, with the occasional presence of the tiger serving as the only nod to continuity. Eventually, an elderly (and therefore wise) member of the tribe makes the universal gesture for “I’m about to do something wise,” while Optimus narrates a bit more:

“For in our quest to protect the humans, a deeper revelation dawns: our worlds have met before.” You may notice that this does not actually follow from his previous statement. If you noticed, then congratulations – you are smarter than basically everyone involved in the making of this movie.

Two seconds later, none of that matters anymore; in the very next shot the warriors are calmly climbing over a ridge (the tiger now completely forgotten) and peering down at some kind of huge, pointy machine being assembled by a team of giant robots. A particularly ugly robot moves toward the camera, thus establishing himself as the leader, and the tribe decides to do something stupid.

We hear another animalistic roar, and this time there is no doubt as to its origin; it is clearly coming from the mouth of one of the warriors. We even get a slow-mo shot of him baring his teeth at his new enemies.

Just in time, it seems, since that lead robot is suddenly right on top of the tribe (he must have walked over while the camera was lingering on that one dude’s teeth), and he starts stomping on people. And then he’s somehow holding a frightened tribesman in his hand, despite never bending down to pick the guy up in the first place. He flings his victim aside, then roars directly at the camera while a set of metal feathers (?) around his face flutter back and forth.

The screen goes black, and a pile of metal scraps assemble themselves into the movie’s title – I assume that the intent was to show us the title “transforming,” but that’s kind of hard to do because it’s a title, and as such its robot form is nothing, and its vehicle form is a bunch of letters.

And that, dear readers, was the first two minutes and thirteen seconds of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I know it was somewhat joke-free, but at least you’ve seen the kind of stupid-to-watchable ratio we are dealing with. You’ve also seen exactly as much of this movie as I can tolerate for now. In our next episode, the story returns to the present, where we learn that robots can magically become bigger or smaller, depending on what needs to be smashed in a given scene.

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.

So I was reading the billionth article on Glenn Beck’s dumbass claim that Obama hates white people and “white culture,” and I began to wonder what the fuck he actually meant by “white culture” anyway.  It can, after all, mean two very different things.  While trying to come up with a joke to that effect, I thought about how that joke would look as a line in a blog post.  Probably something like this:

Hopefully, Beck was talking about this and not this.

And here’s my real point: you probably didn’t click those links. You just moused over them, glanced at the bottom of the screen to see where they went, and immediately understood the joke after you saw the Wikipedia URL’s.

In other words, Wikipedia links have become a type of comedic shorthand.  Everyone knows how to read a Wikipedia URL, so they just mouse over the link, spot the reference, and get on with reading the rest of the post.  Indeed, if they did click both links, that would actually be bad for the original post — aside from screwing up the pacing, the reader would end up confused when they clicked over to the next tab and found an entry on Barry Manilow. “Why the hell am I looking at this?” the reader would ask. “What link was that? Ah well, guess I missed out on that joke.”

Weirder still, when I wrote that line, I wasn’t thinking about any of this. I didn’t say to myself, “Well, they’ll check where the links go, and then move on.” I put the links in because, shit, that’s just how I’ve always done it. Many, many other people on the internet do the same thing. And chances are, most of them are doing it without being fully aware of how their audience will read those links.

So congratulations, internet. We did something that could never work in print. We are officially a unique art form. Take that, successful novelists!

First he attempted to indoctrinate our kids in their classrooms. Now, Barack Obama’s agenda is taking another Great Leap Forward (see what I did there?) to include paramilitary training and “fitness testing” for all American students.

Under the euphemistic title of the “President’s Physical Fitness Test,” Obama’s plan will require children to participate in military-style drills, including pull-ups and a “mile run”. These tests will occur in every school in the nation, and will be evaluated on a national level — in other words, the test results of every child will be on file at a central location, and freely available to Washington operatives.

Children who excel at the test will also receive a certificate from the White House, which educators are being instructed to treat as an “award” worth being proud of. This is a clear and unambiguous case of indoctrination; our children are being trained to seek the approval of “their” President (shades of the Hitler Youth). When the inevitable call for strong young volunteers goes out, don’t be surprised if the recruiters from the ACORN/MoveOn cartel give preference to the children who received these certificates.

On top of all of these concerns, this is also a transparent power grab on the part Washington. As stated earlier, results are to be judged on a national level, effectively placing every student in the country in competition with one another. This is a dangerous first step toward nationalizing the public schools, and demonstrates a callous disregard for school board sovereignty. Even private schools and homeschoolers are encouraged to participate, placing them once and for all under the thumb of big government.

We must also ask whether this new found obsession with “fitness” figures into Obama’s socialist health care plan. Will poor results on the test result in a child being deemed “unfit” for medical care? Will failure to participate affect a child’s grades and potentially endanger his or her academic future and “worth” to society? Will Obama’s good squads take action against the parents of husky children?

Unfortunately, this plan has overwhelming support from both parties. Indeed, advocates of the plan are making the baseless claim that it dates back to the Johnson administration. All we can do is prepare our children to resist this indoctrination effort posing as “Physical Education”. Fortunately, history is on our side; I don’t know about you, but I fucking hated running the mile in gym.

Forgive me if I have a hard time forming coherent sentences, but holy fuck.

Ho. Lee. Fuck.

And if you want a little more context for that link, here it is: Barack Obama plans to make a speech to America’s schoolchildren, urging them to stay in school. But, as I linked above, conservatives are freaking the fuck out. They are seriously saying this is some kind of effort to indoctrinate children, possibly to prepare them for some kind of Hitler Youth scenario. I am not making that up. Even I have some standards, and I would not joke about that, partly because it’s offensive, but mostly because it’s so fucking stupid that there is just no way anyone would believe me.

Okay, couple of points here. First, this is the least controversial thing a human being could possibly do. If you went on TV and announced that kittens were cute, that would be more controversial than telling kids to stay in school, because you’d be excluding all the people who prefer puppies. But talking about kids? That’s safe. Most people love kids, and even the ones who don’t (e.g. me) still want them to go to school, so they can grow up to not be fucking dumbasses. Smart kids = smart adults = less bullshit for me to deal with.

Second, the whole thing is actually pretty insignificant, and we can’t stop it. You know why we can’t stop it? Because the technology to do it exists, and someone’s goddamn well going to use it. Remember on election night, how CNN had those fancy Star Wars-looking holograms? Guess what? They did not have fucking holograms. They had a green screen and some extra cameras pointed at a reporter. Wolf Blitzer could not see the hologram. Wolf Blitzer was talking to the reporter on the phone while staring at an empty spot on the floor. He was pretending. It’s like when Elmo is a presenter at the Emmys, and everyone just pretends like they don’t see the dude squatting behind the podium with his hand jammed into Elmo’s legless torso. The point is, they could do it, so they did. Compared to fake holograms and tuxedo-wearing Muppets, broadcasting a speech to thousands of schools is a fairly simple affair, so why let the technology go to waste?

And you know how I know it’s simple? Because George Bush did that shit in 1991! That’s old George Bush. Daddy George Bush. Shit, when I was in elementary school, I saw Old George Bush all the fucking time. Every other week, the janitor would wheel in one of the school’s sad little television sets, and the teacher would pop in a tape, and there would be Old George Bush, telling us to say no to drugs because otherwise Slimer and Mr. T would be very disappointed with us. You wanna talk about indoctrination? He had fucking Slimer. Our tiny child-brains didn’t stand a chance against that. Most of us already had Ecto-Cooler in our lunches. Bush could’ve told us to steal all the money out of mommy’s purse and mail it to 123 Suspicious Ave., Cayman Islands, and we would have done it as long as Slimer showed up after the speech and did something wacky.

Also, indoctrination? Isn’t that a bit dramatic? I mean, maybe if he was saying something really controversial, like “Racism is bad” or “I’m not evil,” because at least there’s a hint of ideology there. But “Stay in school”? Fucking seriously? The only thing kids will learn from this speech is that the President was on TV for a few minutes, and it was boring. Is that what we’re trying to hide from them? Are Republicans trying to somehow prevent their children from finding out that Obama is President, as though simply seeing him or hearing his name will be enough to ensnare them? Do they think he’s fucking Voldemort or something?

For fuck’s sake, can we wait until the guy does one evil thing before we start talking about all the other evil shit he’s planning? It wouldn’t even have to be big. If he gets on TV and tells the kids to rat out their Republican relatives to the Secret Socialist Robot Police, fine. Then you can have your little revolution and homeschool your kids in the art of teabagging or whatever the fuck you people are always going on about. Until that happens, please calm the fuck down and assume that nobody is trying to recruit your slow-witted and presumably ugly children.