Transformers 2: Revenge of the Nerds

The Nerd dollar strikes again, remember back if you will to much earlier in the year when Transformers 2 recieved almost universally bad reviews. But customers vote with their feet and it outearned its predecessor.

I only got around to watching it last night. And I have to say, I'm with the critics, there was one brief moment when I thought Micheal Bay had fooled me and that he actually was a brilliant director - when one of the many new annoying characters got eaten by devestator seemingly destroyed forever. But this was wrong and the annoying character burst forth from Devestators mouth and continued to be an offensive racial stereotype in transformer form.

The movie was long, the kooky human cast that had been amusing to tolerable in the first movie was now just plain annoying and aggravating. The women universally had far too much makeup on, the guys behaved as if they didn't know anything about women, there were a bunch of 'cool explosions' characters, being grafted onto the story with little to no backstory, explanation or whatever, of the new transformer characters 90% were annoying and the remainder didn't speak.

The jokes were pedestrian, the explosions massive, the plot poorly paced, the characters cliched, the emotions non-existent. It was a long film that varied between boring and annoying.

Take for example terminator 2, where James Cameron introduced the T1000, a liquid metal terminator whose powers blew our mind. And that concept was were Cameron stopped and just played it out to its fullest potential.

Now Bay was like 'What if a transformer could transform into a human? What if they could be ball-bearing transformers? What about nano-technology? Rail guns are cool! What if Optimus could fly?' It really reminded me of why the Japanese Anime revival of Transformers sucked so much collossal dick.

1. Annoying character archetypes (snivelling henchmen, the 'rad' comedy duo, the french chef, the old british bugger)
2. Super unlimited power-ups (most notably Optimus Prime's super half truck-half jet mode).
3. All style no substance. (explosions come first, emotions come second).

Kind of like Spiderman 3, or myself when I'm overconfident, I don't feel the restraints anymore and go too far. Spiderman 3 was too busy, with 3 villains, Transformers 2, is too busy but tries to absolve itself by spreading the business over 3 hours. (the premise takes an hour to get traction).

But nerds stampeded into watching what I will generously call 'The Best IMAX film ever' I have been convinced that people never go to see a sequal, they go to see the previous film for the first time the second time. Thus I think the real effects of how collossally shit the critics rightly found Transformers 2 to be won't be in its own box office performance but the extreme lack of interest there will be in Transformers 3.

As always though with the nerds that support this shite, if losers win do they stop being losers?