'Transformers' Is Comprehensively Awful

(For a review of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, please click here.)

I remember reading a message board discussion of this movie about a year ago and being blown away by people arguing that it might be the best movie of the year. I hadn't even seen it yet, but I was fairly certain that no one could possibly generate a thought like that unless they also still considered getting a Happy Meal and then a Chuck E. Cheese pizza the only lunch and dinner options on their birthdays.

Still, I thought it'd be fun in a turn-brain-off, watch-thing-blow-up way. It's not. Transformers is a blockbuster of dong-huffing. It was written, directed, acted and scored as if the one question above all that everyone on the crew asked themselves was, "In this scene, am I doing enough to make sure this movie huffs the greatest number of dongs?" If Transformers were a car company, its slogan would be, "Dong-Huffing Is Job #1." If every disaffected Korean youth with a surname starting with D were given free paint cans and unlimited alone time in the garage, there would still be significantly less huffing of Dongs than in this movie. This movie is awful.

Why 'Rambo' Is Probably a Better Movie Than 'Saving Private Ryan'

The opening scene of Rambo shows Burmese soldiers throwing mines into rice paddies, hustling prisoners out of a transport, then forcing them to run through the rice paddies until they trip the mines. The soldiers bet on which prisoners will be the ones to die. Eventually, a prisoner's body erupts in a fountain of crimson and muddy water. From there, the movie only gets more meaninglessly violent. The thing is, that's probably what makes it good.

Ten years ago, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan ushered in an era of ultra-realistic violence in film with a frenzy of dismemberment, fragmentation, ventilation and explosion that was accepted almost uncritically. This acceptance derived in part from the fact that Spielberg brings a great deal of gravitas to any production, in part because he's an excellent filmmaker — and in part because he's Jewish, which lends a cultural weight to his rightfully demonizing Nazis — but also because Spielberg is very good at controlling the narrative tone of what he's showing.