Really, Spielberg?

Rating: 1/10 (24 September 2011)

Most of the time, if I see a bad movie, I don't need to spend time afterwards scrubbing it from my consciousness. But I did with "Revenge of the Fallen", which is the whole reason for the "1" rating; not one that I've ever given out before. But I don't ever want to sit through this again.
It's the same hideous bot designs as last time, same dizzying camera movements and ugly palette, just more of all of those for the sake of a bigger sequel. But I've never seen a movie this bad. LaBeouf is more spastic than ever and the story is needlessly convoluted for a giant robots movie. I didn't have any fun with this; it's loud, incoherent and Michael Bay's rocking the shaky cam. Seriously? Up until now, his brand has been tolerable - not all that enjoyable, but tolerable. But here, it's just awful. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not pretending the Transformers is something bigger than it is. It isn't. But everything that was wrong with the first movie is exacerbated here: characters and a story that are really badly drawn, horrible CGI (be honest: those robots are hideous) and action that's no fun to look at. Except this time, there's a broad attempt at "humor", be it racist or scrotal. And were the vulgar comedy actually funny, there wouldn't be a problem! No problem at all. If that's not bad enough, it's 150 minutes long. It's merciless! At a certain point, the stupid becomes suffocating. So yeah, it's a rating befitting a movie I want to forget. A shameless exercise in making Summer fare painful, and escapism shouldn't be an endurance test.
Eff this movie.
1/10