... Starring Megan Fox's Ass
Okay, so yesterday, I compared Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen unfavorably to a (literal) car accident and dropped a Plan 9 From Outer Space reference. I feel like I ought to explain a bit.

The Plan 9 jibe was not random, nor was it an attempt to imply Transformers: ROTF was somehow a candidate for Worst Movie EVAR. (If I was going there, I would have called it "Transformers: Hands of Fate.") I very, very literally got a Plan 9 vibe off this movie; I commented to the friends I saw this with (Jamie and Paul) that this is the movie Ed Wood would have made if he'd had a budget and more technical skill, and I stand by that assessment.

For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Ed Wood Jr., this is not a Good Thing. It is a Bad Thing. Wood loved cinema, but he didn't understand it at all. His movies imply that he didn't know concepts like "Visual Storytelling" or "Narrative Structure" even exist. Both his love for the medium and his complete ineptitude at using it shine through in his work. Plan 9 is the movie a little kid would make: "I'm making a movie! That's awesome! And what makes movies awesome? Stuff happening! Like flying saucers! And zombies! And sometimes, people have to talk, so I'll throw in some bits where people talk, because movies have people talking, and movies are awesome! So here's my movie! With flying saucers -- over HOLLYWOOD! And zombies! And people talking! Isn't it AWESOME?!?!"

If you've never seen Plan 9 From Outer Space, I'll save you some pain:

No.

No, it is not awesome.

And neither is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

I prefer movies that treat the audience like we've got brains and stuff, but the truth is, I can enjoy dumb movies. If I walk into a theater expecting something pretty and shiny and brain-dead bloody stupid, I'll walk out with a smile if the movie had fun with its dumbness. This is Michael Bay's strength -- he blows shit up real good. Plot? Plot is just there to stay out of the way and take you from one blowing-shit-up bit to the next. Characters? Okay, those are sorta handy, so you should give them some good lines -- particularly when shit is blowing up around them.

I'm a remarkably simple creature sometimes.

Transformers: ROTF isn't merely dumb -- it's incoherent. It has no fucking idea what it wants to say, so it just keeps saying stuff in the hope that it will somehow start to make sense. It chucks one half-baked subplot after another onto the screen in the hopes that you'll find one of them appealing. It litters its own landscape with superfluous characters that surely somebody in the audience will relate to and love, right?

It does this with enthusiasm and glee and a complete disregard for why any of this crap actually needs to be in the movie, resulting in the most tiresome, ass-numbing two and a half hours I've ever spent in a theater. It desperately needed somebody somewhere in the creative process to say "No." "No, we should not include that subplot, because it's dumb and adds nothing." "No, we should not include this character; he's irritating as hell and serves no purpose." "No, if we include these characters, we'll owe an apology to every black person in the fucking United States."

Ah, yes. The Twins. Mudflap and Skids, I think their names are -- I seriously don't want to waste time looking them up on IMDB. (The Spill.com crew refers to them as "Step" and "Fetchit.") Take Jar-Jar Binks, turn him into a robot car, and give him a lobotomy and a lobotomized clone, and you have The Twins. You probably think I'm exaggerating for effect. Should you ever subject yourself to this movie, you'll realize I'm not -- probably when you notice one of them has a gold tooth.

But I digress.

Nothing in this movie makes sense -- not intellectually, not emotionally, not even viscerally. The action scenes -- what the audience is fucking well there for -- are a mess. Robots are slamming each other around. Which robots? How bad are they getting slammed? Well ... the red blur is Optimus, and the yellow blur is Bumblebee, the freakishly huge blur is Devastator, and the two faux-jive-talking retard blurs I want very much to see dead are The Twins; everything else ... dude, your guess is as good as mine. The bits that carry you from one bewildering setpiece to the next are ineptly paced and stuffed with ludicrous illogic that might actually be tolerable if either the jokes worked (they don't) or the characters elicited some emotional reaction other than annoyance (they can't).

And the plot? Well, apparently, the Decepticons are so desperate for "Energon" that they're going to turn the sun's rays into gasoline, causing them to incinerate every piece of the universe they touch ... no, wait, sorry, that's Plan 9. The Decepticons are actually trying to blow up the sun.

You probably think I'm kidding. Heh.

The movie can't stay out of it's own way long enough to let you enjoy the shiny bits -- which are themselves generally crap. It feels like the work of somebody who has absolutely no idea how to make an entertaining movie and is intent on chucking movie-like components in there in there until it congeals into an actual film -- and when it doesn't, the only solution is to keep chucking more stuff into the stew until he finally runs out of money.

And that's the kicker -- director Michael Bay knows how to make a damn movie. He's the master of Big Dumb Fun. He knows how to entertain the hell out of an audience.

And people were entertained, apparently; damn thing raked in piles of cash over the weekend, and scored a bewildering 21% on the Tomatometer. (One out of every five movie critics actually liked this thing? Jesus.)

It would seem that Ed Wood was simply born too soon.

Worst Movie Evar? No way. Thank you Mystery Science Theater 3000 for showing us how bad bad can really get.

But worst movie I've ever paid to see in a theater?

...

I'll get back to you.