Transformers 2 gave me a headache

I was actually entertained by the first Transformers movie a couple of years ago. But the new sequel was not only the most boring movie Michael Bay has ever done, it had an incoherent storyline that felt as if the writers had pulled it from a hat, and there was a lot of unnecessarily crude humor, mainly from the robots. I watched the movie this afternoon in a packed theater, and my head started hurting before I even made it back to my car. I took a Tylenol when I got back to the apartment because I’d gotten a headache.

Ever since King Kong — and to a lesser extent, the last 2 cinematic installments in the Lord of the Rings trilogy — I’ve had a less than enthusiastic reaction to movies where the CGI tends to overwhelm whatever story is present. I had a hard time being emotionally involved in the title character in King Kong, especially during his fight with the 2 dinosaurs, because I was at all moments keenly aware that I was watching a computer-generated giant gorilla fighting against a computer-generated dinosaur. I was skeptical going into the first Transformers movie that I would care about one computer-generated giant robot fighting against another, but I was entertained overall by it. In the sequel, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t care, it’s just that the fights were shown from such extreme close-up angles that I could scarcely tell which robot was which. And most of the human characters were so annoying I wished a decepticon would land on them.

It followed a pattern similar to that of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels: keep the same characters that people liked before, but remove all the interesting elements, write the action sequences before you’ve written the story, and make the plot up as you go along without concern for it being the least bit comprehensible. After Dead Man’s Chest, however, I was still ready to go back for the third Pirates movie to see how it would all end up. If a third Transformers movie ever hits the screen, my money and my person will be staying far away from it.

For a funnier look at the film and its legion of problems, read Roger Ebert’s print review.