Screenhead

I wanted to hate this movie.  Believe me, I did.  Going into this thing burned like acid on my soul.  After the colossal cash-grab wreck that Michael Bay and company made out of the first one (Character  development?  Who cares?  More explosions!  Plot coherence?  Who cares? Bigger explosions!  Actually respecting the canon?  Who cares?  More AND bigger  explosions!) I longed to tear this nightmare into quivering bloody stumps.

So why, oh why, did I enjoy the sequel?

Somehow, Michael Bay and company have defied the longest possible odds and made a sequel better than the original.  Okay, it’s not like Bay had a tough act to follow–when you’re throwing more crap than a stadium men’s room on Chili Dog Friday, it’s not exactly hard to do better on your second go-round.  But here it is, and it’s clear–this one is significantly better.

This time, things are looking up for the Witwickys–Sam’s off to college, his dad’s poised to turn his room into a home theatre, his mom is…well…she’s freaking out, badly, but that’s every mom’s right when the baby leaves the nest.    Meanwhile, another scrap of the original Allspark cube has reared its ugly head, and this catapults the college-bound Sam back into the thick of an alien civil war.  The U.S. military’s been working with the Autobots to root out and blast the Decepticons into their component bits and pieces.  But the Decepticons aren’t alone this time around–they’ve got some support in the form of the Fallen, an enigmatic figure that will represent a whole lot of trouble for the Autobot forces.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are a LOT more Autobots hanging around than there used to be.  And a lot more Decepticons, too–Earth is becoming something of a tourist trap for giant shapeshifting robots.  But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing–it just gives us more room to blow stuff up and knock stuff down.

This is where Bay’s production really shines; they’ll blow stuff up and knock stuff down in really entertaining fashions, and they’ll do it with a kind of insane blind fury that’ll just make your jaw drop.  This is like that episode of Mythbusters where Jamie got a hold of a Vulcan cannon and used it to shoot fish in a barrel.  Only a lot more so.  It’ll be all sorts of fun to watch this, and it’s very engaging even if it’s all really kind of simplistic.  Further, there will be plenty of laughs here– Sam’s mother, played by Julie White, is a particular scene-stealer, and was easily responsible for some of the biggest laughs in the theatre.  She got more than a few guffaws out of me too, and for a Michael Bay movie, that’s no small feat.

That’s not to say that this gets off scot-free.  There’s still plenty of standard Michael Bay problems.  Devastator is not some kind of giant turtle.  He is a giant bipedal humanoid robot.  I don’t even want to know what he was thinking bringing in Mudflap and Skids.  These two are USELESS.

And in the biggest kick in the teeth EVER, he brought in the original voice of Soundwave, Frank Welker, to voice Soundwave.   Frank Welker, for the kids at home, was the original voice of Megatron also, who for reasons that STILL escape me is being voiced by Hugo Weaving.  There’s no reason Weaving should be involved.  You have the ORIGINAL MEGATRON!  USE HIM!

Who am I kidding?  Michael Bay can’t understand human thoughts unless they’re written in letters thirty feet high and set on a fire that was started by a car exploding.

But the fact remains.  This movie will do exactly what it sets out to do.  It will knock stuff down and blow stuff up and Megan Fox will still be hot and there’s lots of things to laugh at and plenty of things to make your jaw drop.  For two and a half hours, you will be entertained.  And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we come to the movies for?

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