Film: 30 Movies in 30 Days: Day 12

This post is part of a month-long project, answering thirty topics about movies over thirty days. The subject for the twelfth day is:

A movie that you hate

Hate’s a little strong but a movie I strongly disliked was:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

(No source, this picture of robot testicles is all mine)

The first of Michael Bay’s Transformers films wasn’t great, with a weak story and some bad characters, but to an extent it was watchable, its biggest problem being the confusing fight scenes, shot close and with cuts so rapid you couldn’t see what was happening (a common problem these days). In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen they fixed the fight scenes, using distant shots that show all combatants and using longer, slower-moving scenes that let you understand the flow of the fight, to the point that some of the fight scenes are pretty good. Somehow they managed to ruin everything else though, including the things that weren’t that good to begin with.

The plot is a mess, the characters are worse, the dialogue is bad, the humour is awful, the casual racism of the ‘black’ Transformers is even more racist than before (thanks to the twins Mudflap and Skids), and even a lot of the action scenes go on for so long that they’re just dull. The film as a whole is just mind-numbingly tedious, which is ridiculous for something built so heavily around giant robots fighting.

That’s even without the whole ‘teal and orange’ thing (where a film is digitally altered to boost the orange flesh tones and contrast them with enhanced teal backgrounds and clothing), of which Revenge of the Fallen is one of the worst offenders around, with characters having bright orange skin and large chunks of the environment being teal (you can see a lot of examples, including this film, in the collection here). It was incredibly distracting and makes the film a visual failure in addition to all the other levels on which it’s a horrible film.