This film shall not be judged by Shakespeare

Rating: 7/10 (7 July 2009)

Let's talk for a moment on the notion to quote Shakespeare in the review of a Michael Bay film: As children we are raised to appreciate Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliette, or Henry IV ... and yet the appreciation of Elizabethan dialect, iambic pentameter, and Danish teen angst do not come so easily to us. You must be taught to appreciate Shakespeare.
To a film viewer entering an imax theater for a sold out show to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, much like going to see Hamlet in the Park, you are stepping into a period piece. If you did not grow up listening to Run DMC and the Beastie Boys, and watching Transformers and Voltron on Saturday mornings, the experience will feel like two-and-a-half hours of nonsequiturs over-wrought by a cacophony of metallic crashes, and dialects that would make Buckwheat frown with embarrassment.
But this is a period piece, and to the children of baby boomers and hippies -- and more specifically the children raised by Bugs Bunny slapstick and a sense of ethics born out of the age old battles of Heman and Skeletor -- there is real grace here. If you don't know the difference between Space Ghost and Moltar, or Gloop and Gleep, then it is a grace you might never see.
Film in a large way is meant to be ... at least eccentric, and not a far leap from esoteric. It should be a goal of a film maker to bring light to things that people might miss. Why else would we praise film makers like Fassbinder and Herzog? This noted, Transformers IS dumb. I'll be the first to admit that. But the script by Kurtzman and Orci, and the banter as it's executed by Lebouf, Fox, and Duhamel carry the story as though it had always been a part of the series -- much in the same way the Star Trek revival carried the character of the original series.