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.

This afternoon I was inspired to grab an old burlap sack, stitch some little eyes onto it, fill it with dog shit, light it on fire, and leave it on Shane Acker’s doorstep. I didn’t actually do it, but it would have been an adequate expression of my profound disappointment with his new film, 9.

I’d been wanting to see 9 since I first saw its trailer at Coraline way back in February. It looked fucking awesome, with gritty little steampunk robots running around a post-apocalyptic world devoid of life. Hell, it looked a lot like WALL-E, and WALL-E was brilliant. But imagine if WALL-E had sucked. Imagine if the robots hadn’t acted like robots, and the action hadn’t been well-paced, and they threw in a lot of inane metaphysical bullshit. That’s 9. Oh, it looked as beautiful as promised. The landscape was indeed littered with the tragic remains of an annihilated human race. Corpses were strewn throughout the streets. Cars were tipped over and rusted out. A sunless sky hovered over bomb craters and gutted cityscapes. It looked every bit as brutal as I could have wished. But that’s the only good thing I have to say about the whole bloody thing.

Spoiler alert: I’ll probably do some spoiling in the paragraphs below. But I won’t spoil your fun half as much as Acker spoiled a good idea.

So. It’s World War III (or whatever) and in its zeal, the scary generic future government (probably a corrupted version of the U.S., though the film never gets that specific) builds a supercomputer that can design and build giant battle robots, and the robots eventually turn rogue and destroy all organic life on Earth, including humanity. There are shades of the Terminator series here, and there are also shades of an anti-science stance in the exposition, and both are handled with about as much grace as a T-1000 employed as a dog catcher. As the film opens, a dying scientist has just finished building 9, a rat-sized anthropomorphic robot with high-tech eyes, wood-and-metal steampunk arms, and burlap skin. 9 soon learns that he is the last in a series of similar robots built by the doomed inventor, and gradually encounters his eight mechanical brothers and sisters. Each robot displays a one-dimensional caricature of a personality (one robot craves battle, one craves power, one is a coward, etc.), and each reacts to stimuli with far more emotion and empathy than any real self-respecting robot ever would. They react to corpses with revulsion, to sunshine with awe, to perils with fear, and to death with ceremony. In other words, they react like poorly-written humans, rather than cleverly-designed homunculi.

The dialogue is vile and mostly unnecessary, and the reason is made clear by the film’s origin. Before it became a 90-minute disappointment, 9 was originally a 10-minute short film released in 2005, which is still available for viewing on YouTube. It still contains some of the same elements that annoy me in the long version, though as Varius pointed out to me, in this version they, “don’t fuck it up by talking.”

I don’t want to give away too much of the film’s action. Luckily, there’s not much to give away. You know how, in almost every action/adventure movie you can think of, one of the main characters gets captured at some point in the middle? The rest of the characters always say, “we have to go rescue them!” and, heedless of Spock’s assertion that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, the whole crew hurries off to endanger themselves. Well, this happens in 9, too, only it happens over and over and over again. “Oh no, so-and-so was captured, let’s rescue him! Oh no, such-and-such got captured while we were saving so-and-so, let’s rescue him! Oh no, now whatserface got lost on the such-and-such mission, let’s go back for her!” And so forth. That’s ninety percent of the goddamn movie, though the action does pause briefly so that the robots can dance to a Judy Garland record.

But no amount of repetitive action or clichéd dialogue could have prepared me for the ending. As Jhonen Vasquez said on Thursday,

“If there was one good thing about 9’s ending is it was so stupid it roused me from the impending sleep the rest of the movie brought on.”

Yeah. You want to know how stupid that ending was? Fuck it, I’ll tell you. Souls. The goddamn robots had souls all along. And their souls were saved. The end. To quote the words immediately spoken by my girlfriend as the credits began to roll, “What the fuck?” Does a story about the shabby remnants of a doomed society need a messianic element tacked on at the end? The answer is no. Does a cool science fiction idea need a bunch of metaphysical bullshit glued to its ass like tits on a fish? Again, the answer is a resounding no. Did WALL-E have a soul? No, he fucking didn’t, and we liked him that way.

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for a movie that came out over a week ago, and that you’ve probably already seen, or at least read about by now. If you haven’t, but wish to remain unspoiled, read something else.

After putting it off for far too long, I finally saw the new Star Trek. My reaction to the movie itself — the plot, the performances, the ways it diverged from the original series — is about the same as what you’ve read everywhere else, and you don’t need to hear another nerd waxing nostalgic over DeForest Kelley. Just trust me when I say that, if you’re a Star Trek fan, or a science fiction fan, or just an average schmuck who likes big summer movies, this is a pretty safe bet.

Before it even came out, I spent a lot of time hoping it succeeded, partly because I’m a (relatively casual) Star Trek fan, but mostly because I’d be willing to attend a convention if it meant an opportunity to hang out with Simon Pegg. After seeing it, though, I’m not sure he, or anyone from the new cast, will be doing conventions. Indeed, I’ve begun to wonder if conventions will even be necessary after this. Star Trek fandom, despite the enthusiastic community that has sprung up over the years, has often been a lonely pursuit. Fans gather at conventions, and are amazed at how many fellow fans they meet, but during the rest of the year, they often have no one to talk to about their obsession.

Now, Star Trek has found a level of mass appeal that had previously eluded it. Some of the infamous Trek sermonizing was lost in the process, but the franchise’s fondness for exploring morality still comes through. The new film gives us a story about the futility of revenge, the acceptance of one’s limitations, and the ethics of dicking around with time travel — all themes that would feel perfectly at home among the redshirts and papier-mâché rocks of the original series.

Comparisons to Star Wars, that other venerable sci-fi franchise, are inevitable, and for good reason. This new Star Trek gives us fast-paced space battles, spectacular effects, a villain capable of destroying entire planets, and a team of inexperienced young heroes tasked with stopping him. And now it has a Star Wars-sized audience to match, and that audience is experiencing a renewed interest in the classic series.

If — and this is a big “If” — the movie’s popularity endures, if its new continuity is accepted by longtime fans, and if the inevitable sequels are worth a damn, we could see a permanent shift in the way Star Trek fandom works. Fans will be freer to talk about their fondness for the franchise, and will encounter far more people who share their interest. In short, we could be headed towards a pop-culture landscape in which Star Trek is not arbitrarily considered less acceptable than Star Wars.

That this could happen, and that the peaceful, progressive values of the Federation could be treated with the same relative respect shown to the (frankly medieval) Jedi code, is nothing short of a miracle for my fellow geeks. We’ve spent the last few decades — and the last eight years in particular — banging our heads against the wall in frustration, shocked and frightened by humankind’s apparent inability to overcome our urge to destroy ourselves.

Star Trek made an impact during the Cold War by depicting a future where humans had not only survived, but had become model citizens of a galactic civilization, and leading voices in a Federation devoted to peace, exploration, and diversity. For years, its fans have held it up as an example for our present-day society to follow, and have been largely ignored. We were told they were too idealistic, or simply too hard to take seriously when they wore fake Vulcan ears. Plus, “Voyager” kind of bogged down after a couple seasons, and nobody liked “Enterprise” that much.

Now, though, an explosion-filled summer blockbuster has provided them with their long-awaited opening, and a decent sequel or two will be more than enough to make the public wonder why they weren’t on board with Gene Roddenberry’s ideas in the first place. It won’t result in a radical overhaul of society, and it won’t compel us to model our world after the Federation, but it could very well get people thinking some of Star Trek’s lofty ideals.

As a nerd, that’s really all I’ve ever asked for.

“I’m a woman, hear me scream!”

-Amelia, Girls Rock!

“I hate myself already, so high school doesn’t, like, degrade me that much.”

-Laura, Girls Rock!

Speaking of documentaries (which I was), here’s another one for you: Girls Rock!, which I finally got to see a few days ago. The movie takes viewers into Portland’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, which is just as awesome as it sounds; girls ages 8-18 have a week to form bands with their fellow campers, take classes with actual lady-rockers, write a song, and perform it for an audience. Girls Rock! had the usual limited documentary release about a year ago, and I missed it. During the last year, though, I made everyone I know watch the trailer on YouTube, often more than once. Now it’s your turn:

You see why I was so anxious for the DVD?

Now that I’ve seen it, I can say that the film is far from perfect (although still quite good). The directors chose to focus on four campers, but we never quite get enough background on them. On top of that, the scenes of rehearsals and intra-band conflicts become repetitive, while the classroom scenes and the final concert are truncated. These issues could have easily crippled the film; luckily, the subject matter is interesting enough to make me forgive just about any directorial missteps.

Honestly, how could anyone hate a movie that features and eight-year-old who spends her time writing atonal dirges about her dog, and inventing new guitar chords with name like “Negative 10″? That’s Amelia, a.k.a. Am, an experimental visionary who happens to be a shy, thoughtful girl with a flower-shaped guitar. The directors also introduce us to Palace, a punk rock demon cleverly disguised as the world’s most angelic seven-year-old (she’s the one growling “Rock ‘n’ Roll!” at the beginning of the trailer). Seriously, she is so fucking punk rock it will make your eyes bleed. If you need proof, you can download her song “San Francisco Sucks Sometimes” and hear the magic for yourself.

In addition to these two, we also meet two teenage campers: Misty, a recovering drug addict, and Laura, who is — there’s no polite way to say this — a Korean-American death metal fan trapped in Oklahoma. Aside from offering a more mature perspective on the camp’s proceedings, they also provide a striking contrast with the younger girls. For all her shyness, Amelia can become quite chatty on camera, spinning theories about music and school and her dog Pippi; when she steps in front of a microphone, her inhibitions seem to vanish entirely. Laura, on the other hand, is talkative and social and genuinely funny at times, but will cheerfully admit to self-hatred when asked.

Much of the movie is dedicated to figuring out where and why this disconnect occurs. Scattered throughout the film are brief animated segments, which are really just a way to deliver statistics without resorting to captions or narration. Although I was ambivalent about the segments themselves (I found they broke up the flow of the movie, and took up running time that could have been better spent on the bands in concert), they provide answers to those questions, and raise several new, more difficult ones. What can girls do — indeed, what can anyone do — to get back in touch with the brilliantly uninhibited visionaries they were at age 8? There’s no obvious answer, but I suspect that the people in charge of Rock Camp are on the right track.

I could go on nitpicking, but I’d prefer to end on a positive note. Because for all its little flaws, this is still a movie about a fascinating subject. Without it, I probably wouldn’t even know that Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls existed, and I definitely wouldn’t have “San Francisco Sucks Sometimes” on my playlist. If they have to get a little preachy, or overstate a few points, fine. Those points — about society’s expectations of women, the numbing conformity of adolescence, the thrill of finding people like yourself — still need to be made, frequently and at a very high volume.

It also doesn’t hurt that the soundtrack kind of kicks ass.