Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen (Page 2 of 3)

Well, I'm sorry to say that I think this isn't the best test case of that. During the second hour, I think it was, the guys totally flipped off the movie and talked about skydiving for like ten minutes. Which was great, by the way.

I gotta say, it seems like this movie is one that very nearly broke the whole four-friends-in-your-head concept. I'm not complaining, but you guys just seemed so deeply, deeply unhappy. Even Teague's heroic attempts to get a workshop-thing going didn't really take off, 'cause what can you say other than "This movie sucks."

I've always had a problem with Transformers for some reason, way before the movies. I guess it's cause I was just slightly too old when the cartoon was a thing, or maybe too young, or anyway not in exactly the right demographic group. I was seven years old (or whatever) on a Saturday morning asking those same questions Twig brought up. Why cars? Why a gun? (I think Megatron turned into a gun, one that mysteriously got small.) Why do they turn into ANYTHING, and more specifically, why these things? It just never clicked for me.

So I think I'd suck at workshopping these movies, 'cause I'd be all stuck-up insistent that we start all the way over. Okay, robots that turn into mundane things. That's our given. Well … why? Obviously they're disguising themselves; they're hiding. Hiding from what? Okay, there was a robot civil war on their home planet, and the heroes LOST, like big-time. I don't mean to be offensive, but I'm thinking like Jews-in-1944-type lost. Victims of genocide, handful of survivors fleeing and trying to hide just to stay alive. Why was there a war? Oh, who cares. Ethnic cleansing. Religion. Water rights. There are plenty of stupid but entirely plausible reasons in history for wars of extermination.

So these refugees scatter themselves around the galaxy, and eventually come to Earth. They can disguise themselves to hide, but only within the strict rules of mechanics and stuff. So a robot couldn't turn into a hot sorority chick, JUST TO NAME A TOTALLY RANDOM EXAMPLE. And they're big, thirty feet tall or whatever. So what do they become? Machines. Big machines, like locomotives. Like turbine generators in coal plants. Like tanks. Oooh, yeah, maybe that's what drew them to Earth in the first place. They sniffed at us and discovered that we were just starting to build big machines (think 1900-ish here), so they thought this was a plausible place to hide out.

So they do, they manage somehow (handwave) to sneak into power plants after dark and turn themselves into generators, whatever. And little by little, our technology evolves, and they're with us all the way, hiding in plain sight. The Large Hadron Collider? That's like a dozen Transformers, man.

But there's a reversal! The bad Transformers, on their genocidal crusade, detect Earth by our radio emissions or something (even though that's way implausible), and come to check us out. They find the surface of the planet positively TEEMING with Transformers! Or so they think, because it never occurs to them that organic life might build big machines that AREN'T transforming robots. So they go full-on war on us, shooting planes out of the sky and shit, blasting power plants, destroying trains, taking out every large machine they see, cause they think they're Transformers.

(There's your justification for the war, by the way. The Decepticons are pseudo-religious zealots who think that Transformer-kind was created in the image of their divine creator, and that to change their form is blasphemy. In the most literal sense. Only God has the power to choose a sentient being's form, blah blah blah. Fill in the blanks yourself.)

So here's Earth, early 21st century, us mindin' our own. And out of the sky comes this handful — like six or eight, whatever — Decepticons. Just a few, 'cause they're basically the Decepticon equivalent of a recon patrol poking around in the bush. They come screaming out of the sky and start senselessly destroying every large machine they encounter. Maybe they're not even aware that we exist at first; maybe they see us as organic parasites and pay no attention. But it's this big thing, tens of thousands die in mere hours, all over the news, big crisis.

And then the President gets on TV and is all, "Uh, yeah. What do you think, that we're stupid? That we can't tell the difference between a turbine generator and a giant freakin' robot?"

And then we cut to an aerial shot of a 747 cargo plane transforming into a giant fucking robot and opening up a can of whoopass on the Decepticons.

See, it turns out the Transformers have been an almost-open secret for a hundred years. We let them hide here, and in return they're basically our willing slaves. They run our nuclear reactors and all that stuff, and we keep their existence a secret. They're really good with mechanics and electronics and whatnot — it's innate with them — so they help us out, technologically. That's why the advancement of the practical sciences exploded in the 20th century, 'cause we had these basically idiot savants helping us out. It's not that they've got all this magic technology and they're giving it to us; why would they ever need to design a nuclear reactor? It's just that they GET engineering and stuff on a level humans can't, so they solve problems for us. It took decades to learn how to express the problems in terms they understand, but once we did, we got shit like transistors and MRI machines and iPhones. Oh, and those big canister things on utility poles that step down the high-voltage power lines to feed our houses. Yeah, some wise guy thought it'd be a HILARIOUS joke to name those things "transformers." Almost had an XK-class breach of security over that one. You probably heard of him. Guy by the name of Julius Rosenberg.

Anyway, so the President's like "Yeah, we knew this day might come, but we were foolish enough to think it wouldn't be in our lifetimes, so we blew it. We didn't tell you the truth. But that doesn't mean we were idle." And all over the planet, locomotive engines and ballistic missile subs and cargo planes all start transforming, while the President's all "Don't worry, it'll all be over soon, just stay indoors," and fucking war erupts in the upper atmosphere.

And the sequel hook writes itself. "We're safe now, wight, Mr. Giant Wobot?" "For the moment, Little Timmy. But that was just the first battle of a new war. A war in which you, someday, must fight." "But not awone, wight, Mr. Wobot?" "No, Little Timmy. Not alone. For just as we have been for a hundred years, we will be with you."

Music swells, smash cut to credits, please deposit your trash in the receptacles by the exits.

I guess there'd probably need to be, like, a character or two in there. Maybe somebody who wants something, and spends the movie doing interesting things in a series of attempts to get whatever he wants. But that's really just fluff. You can squeeze that in there right after you spell-check and right before you put the pages numbers on, right?

Aw shucks. I mean, thanks and all, but I'm really not sure what I spewed out would be such a good movie at all. I just walked down to the corner store and back, and while I did I was thinking about where you could squeeze a human being and some conflict into that story. Cause what's in my head sort of depends on the alien robots being both alien and robotic. They're REALLY different from us, which has the potential to be interesting if you're into that sort of thing, but it doesn't make 'em relateable. Relatable? However you spell that.

So I'm thinking, okay. The President comes out and says … here, blah, whatever he says. The President can't take a shit without 30% of the country thinking it's the end of the world, so obviously there's a conflict there. There's the "We're harboring refugees" angle versus the whole "It's not our war" angle, and that's a story that's both relevant and (hey, bonus) easy to tell. But it's awfully cerebral, y'know? I don't mind that, 'cause those are the kinds of movies I happen to like, but that's not the only snack on the craft services table. What I think both the Transformers movies did well was to take a fairly relatable human character and put him in the center of the story. So much else was wrong, but props to them for that, 'cause that could have been on their list of failures, and they averted it. So yeah.

On the other hand, we could take a total War of the Worlds angle here, and introduce a POV character with absolutely no power in the story, and no large-scale goals. He just wants to get out of the burning city, he wants to find his kids, whatever. And the Big Story™ happens around him, or whatever. That's okay too, but that story has been told before, so I'm not wild about it.

I guess what attracts me about the Transformers concept — not the cartoons or the toys or the movies, but just the central concept — is this idea of mixing the utterly mundane with the ineffably incomprehensible. There's this giant robot from outer space who literally could not be more different from me, who I'd probably have a hard time even recognizing as sentient he's so different, and yet he hides out for fear of his life by disguising himself as a garbage truck.

That idea feels, like, sexy to me, or whatever. It's seductive. That premise is a great big sandbox, and there's a lot of playing you can do in it. I'm just pissed that what we've gotten instead is a decades-long series of kids' shows and stupid movies that exist for no purpose other than to sell toys and cars, respectively.

Anyway. That's how I see it. But I'm just some guy who listened to a podcast and got all typey.

Holy.

Shit.

Friends and well-wishers, that's a movie I'd watch the fuck out of.

No farting parachutes, though, right? Somebody tell me that there can be no farting of parachutes.

Sweet jeebus, the first justifiable backstory for the transformers I've ever heard. Nice.

One way to fix the problem of balancing relatable human characters and giant robots fighting, both so essential to a film like this, is to give the robots human allies. They don't have to be operators, because the robots can drive themselves. Maybe they're the people who rode in the vehicles to maintain the illusion all this time. Maybe they're some kind of technicians to change the robot's oil. Hell, maybe the robots just need people with tiny hands to pick things up from narrow spaces.

Now the alien robots can be as alien as they need to be, but their buddies have worked with them for so long, they've come to understand the way they communicate, like the way Luke talks to R2, or the way you can listen to your car's engine and know that it's trying to tell you something. Now the humans are providing the dialogue and mirroring the conflict which the robots can play out on a larger scale. Really, they need some way to tie the story back to experiences you and I might have, so the more like us the humans are, the better.

It could even add another point of conflict, where the decepticons would never debase themselves by taking these delicate little meatbags onboard, but then we lose the element of the bad guys also having someone to speak for them.

Doctor Who has done this countless times over the decades. Which is good, given the reason behind any given concept changes as often as Doctors do

Hey, no cross-pollination, Hamil. We've got to keep these boards separate or things'll get messy.

Jeffery's rewrite is great, but he's also right that you absolutely need Shia to be integral to the story. Gregory's take on who is what is slightly better. No kid would want robot toys that transform into a locomotive, a turbine generator, an ICBM, or the Large Hadron Collider, but we might need some other alternatives to the Pentagon and the Utah Jazz. We obviously need an iPhone and a PS3 and whatever else kids think is cool. Jet boots or something. Electric toothbrush, maybe. Kids still think that's cool, right?

But if the Autobots are hiding from the big bad Decepticons, why would the Autobots kick ass when the Decepticons arrive? Maybe... the Allspark has been carried to earth by Bumblebee and Shia has found it and befriended Bumblebee, bringing Shia into the story and giving the Autobots the advantage they lacked in the prolog.

And Megan Fox is still the superhot chick. Only this time she isn't orange, okay? Seriously. Can we address this?

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It's important to note that I was 19 when Transformers (and GI Joe and also Australian rules football) was on TV, and I only watched it one time when I was sick and hopped up on four cold medicines.

Yeah, I remember him saying something similar about the first one when ROTF was on the horizon. "Oh, yeah, we totally fucked that up. This NEW one will be SO much better." He also made sure to let us know that Spielberg thought it was awesome.

Let's also not forget that he told Megan Fox she could go ahead and shut her whore mouth when she dared to say the film was anything but pure genius.

Being a hack, Bay has no silly concerns like "art" or "integrity" as long as the check clears and he's got a big opening weekend. If that means shitting all over himself and his previous movie, he will do so with a smile.

No, that would be more entertaining than Transformers 2. Has anyone pitched this to Asylum yet? It could be called 69 Torque Street: Megahooker versus Cockasaurus.

This thread makes me miss Harrell.

Damn, Zarban's on fire this week.