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Published: 13 January 2012

Hits: 1349

• Director: Michael Bay
  • Other movies he’s directed: Other movies with week plot, horrible lines and bad character development, but awesome action.
• Notable cast: Everyone from the first one, except for the only black transformer that was torn in two,
  • Also, Megatron is played by Hugo Weaving. You might not know his name, but you know him. He’s Agent Smith from the Matrix and Elrond in Lord of the Rings. He also played a drag queen, Tick/Mitzi in the movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert that you probably didn’t see. But I recommend seeing that and then watching the Matrix right after it just to mess with your head.
  • -We have one notable addition, a new, thin, high cheek boned with full lips hot chick who (not to be confused with the woman with the same physical description in the first or third movies), at some point, oddly, she ends up not wearing much furthering our understanding of how men should view women...with their clothes off. And she turns out to be a Decepticon...but really, what woman isn’t? Am I right guys?
    • [Note: I’m being sarcastic about how we should view women, FYI, you’ll find that out when I write a bit more about that in a different section someday on my website]
  • So... Megatron was killed by putting the Allspark in his chest, even though Optimus Prime suggested he sacrifice himself to prevent Megatron from getting it. Then, they dropped Megatron in the deepest trench at the bottom of the ocean, the Mariana Trench. If you care, take a look at the stats in Wikipedia. The deepest part is 6.78 miles deep. Wikipeida explains that if Mount Everest was placed in the trench, there would be 6,811 feet of water ABOVE the top of the peak. It’s deep. With that depth, comes pressure, a lot of pressure, 15,750 psi to be exact. That’s over a thousand times the pressure at sea level. Now, I know that Transformers are awesome, and they built (by whom exactly?) to survive almost everything... but yeah, in SPACE where there is ZERO pressure. All this to say... he’s dead Jim.

But, no, ‘cus they have to bring him back ‘cus we like Hugo’s voice too much, plus he’s really the only cool bad guy. But let’s talk about him for a bit. Megatron in the movie is pretty bad ass, but remember him in the cartoon? He was a gun. He went from really cool robot... and transformed into a gun that someone else had to shoot. If no one else was around, he’d just sit there shooting at anything and everything that was in front of him, but if they stepped to the left, oh, crap, they discovered his weakness. This is one of those few examples where deviating from the source material is preferable.

I’m not gonna talk a whole lot about the plot, ‘cus remember, it doesn’t matter all that much. Just keep in mind, I guess, that there is a ALOT of U.S. military in this movie. It’s like a freekin’ World War II propaganda movie. Also, Megan Fox bends over a street bike she’s working on wearing cut off jeans and top not covering much... we’re supposed to think she’s a gear head or a grease monkey, or a gear monkey with some head grease...? But all I could think of was “wow... that’s a nice bike.” There was a kinda funny scene where she captures the stupid little Decepticon that thinks she’s hot (why does a robot think a human woman is hot again? Oh yeah, ‘cus Bay needs to remind us that he’s working from a thirteen year old mind).

They end up at the ancient city of Petra, in Jordan. If you don’t know Petra, then you might know one of it’s most famious “buildings”, the Khezneh, or the Treasury. You saw that at the end of the Indian Jones movie, the Last Crusade (I think we all wished that was the last Jones movie too). The building, (if you can call it that, it’s really an amazing carving into the soft, beautiful sandstone of the area) is a copy of the Treasury that’s outside of the Rose City (aka, Petra).  I loved the fact that they ended up here, and reminded me that I wanna go there some day.

The Decepticons bring a really big, multi-vehicle transformer that sucks in everything in front of it... and oh yeah, it has little metal balls because we’re thirteen and we need ball jokes. The huge, new Transformer lasts for about four minutes (ok, maybe longer, but still) until Simmons (John Torturo’s character) calls a battle ship and sweet talks them into firing on the the Great Pyramids with a rail gun that isn’t supposed to exist, with no clearance and no rank. Simmon’s is like the human’s secret weapon against the Decepticons. If the good guys, you know, the Autobots, didn’t have Simmon’s around, they’d be sunk.

Let’s do the numbers, with a budget of $210,000,000, little bit more than the first, they made $836,303,693 world wide in the theaters.  That’d be a net of $626,303,693. So... they made another one.

Details

Published: 13 January 2012

Hits: 1160

• Directed by: Michael Bay
  • Other movies he directed: Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II, and all the Transformer movies.
• Notable cast:
  • Shia LeBeouf: (Sam Whitwicky, you might remember him briefly in I Robot, or Surf’s Up as the main penguin, and of course Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but my favorite roll he played was in the Rear Window remake, Disturbia).
  • Megan Fox (Mikaela Bones, none of us really knew her before Transformers, but now she has been in Jonah Hex and Jennifer’s Body, but looks like she was also in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.  But looking at IMDB.com, it looks like Bay may have discovered her in Bad Boys II when she played a stripper under a waterfall...)
  • Josh Duhamel (Captain William Lennox, you might remember him as Tad Halmilton in Win a date with Tad Hamilton, and maybe from that show Las Vegas, and since the first Transformers movie, he’s been in When in Rome, and Life as We Know It)
  • Anthony Anderson (Glen Whitmann, you may know him from a whole bunch of stuff, but I know him from Law and Order)
  • Jon Voight (Defense Secretary John Keller, if you don’t know who Jon Voight is...then you’re not paying attention. Apart from being Angelia Jolie’s father, he’s been in National Treasure, Mission Impossible, Heat, Deliverance, Lara Croft, Catch 22, and back in the day, in the show Gunsmoke)
  • John Turturro (Agent Simmons, you might remember him from Secret Window, or maybe as Monk’s brother in Monk, or maybe Barton Fink)

Michael Bay likes the military. In fact, if you sign up for the military now, they actually call it “trying out for a Bay movie”.  He likes the U.S. military so much, I think he’s just coming up with new movies he wants to do in order to put more helicopters flying into the setting sun, or shoot with a wide angle from below with the actors looking up...seriously, pretty sure that shot is in every movie of his. One of my favorite movies, Hot Fuzz, makes fun of his fact.

Bay is kinda like George Lucas when it comes to action movies. They both know how to make REALLY good action flicks, but neither of them really know how to direct actors to be believable, or know what character development really is, and neither of them know how relationships with women work, although George Lucas is married, I don’t know that he’s ever talked to her. Ok, maybe that’s harsh, but c’mon, neither of these guys know how to direct on screen romantic relationships.

But...we don’t care. I mean, I care, but I’ve also seen every one of the Transformer movies in the theater... because they’re just so dang awesome. Are you kidding me!? Big robots are smashing each other, how can that not be awesome!? And they even got Peter Cullen to play Optimus Prime, who played his voice in the original cartoon! This guy IS Optimus Prime, no one else can play him.

Of course I have a few issues with this movie. Namely, why is Megan Fox in it? Yeah... she’s hot, I guess, and does run around nicely, but I mean, c’mon, this is a movie about Transformers... you know, Hasbro, for kids. Parents are bringing their kids to these movies, is it really time to start showing them what the girls are supposed to look like, or what kinds of women men are supposed to be attracted to? Are there any normal looking women in this movie besides Sam’s mom? Even the scientist who figures out the secret signal is ridiculously attractive. Now, I will give Bay this, Megan Fox actually proved herself useful when she hooked up Bumblebee to a tow truck and pulled him around so he can shoot stuff. This is what you do with the love interest in your movie, you have her look good and be all “oh, honey be careful and save for the world for me so you can kiss me when you’re done” but then do something awesome that actually helps. Yes, this was good. I appreciated that. But... eh.

And... what’s up with the Allspark? Apparently it can animate machines magically just by being around, and it automatically makes them into bad robots. Why? And if it’s this amazing, life creating thing, why does it kill you when you put it into your chest? We’re supposed to take for granted that these things make sense when they’re made up things, but when you  make something up, then give them rules, it has to be consistent in those rules, otherwise we just know you, the writer, are cheating.

Like they say on Marketplace (ya know, on NPR) “Let’s do the numbers”. With a budget of $151,000,000, they brought in $708,272,592 worldwide in the theater. That’s a net gain of $557,272,592, that’s not too shabby. So, I guess they figured they should make another one.