The second Transformers is a overblown, towering anti-masterpiece from the action “master” himself, Michael Bay.  The new entry is less a story about robots from outer space, and more an adolescent hard-on for the US military.

Bay has directed this film in the same style as his other films, but without any budget restraint to keep the explosions somewhat under control. Reader, I do love explosions, and I have to say the new Transformers is like someone video recording fireworks up close for 150 minutes. Nobody is really expecting a masterpiece here. As my friends often say, Michael Bay films are a huge guilty pleasure.

With Transformers shaping up to be one of the highest grossing movies of the summer, I hope (probably in vain) that this might be an end to such bloated films.  Or at least, films so shallow that even the subject in the title no longer has any bearing on what the movie is about.  No matter how many times people claim it to be an action film, or about robots from space, it is not.

Transfomers: Revenge of the Fallen is a two and a half hour commercial about joining the United States military.  It does not matter which branch, every single one has plenty of screen time.

Is this bad?  Is this good?  Is it necessary? Bay’s films always had some sort of military tie in, no matter what the subject. If I cut out any scenes involving the protagonists, or Transformers fighting only other Transformers, I would have probably an hour of pure military footage.  The same kind of footage found in Army ad campaigns.

Planes take off of aircraft carriers, submarines survey the Transformers, soldiers jump from planes, new, advanced infantry rifles are in the hands of every soldier on screen, hovercrafts land M1 tanks onto shore, personnel conduct their duties in very structured teams in front of nice LCD monitors…  I could go on.  After seeing the movie twice, I can hardly say what I have learned about the Transformers, but I can safely tell you what weapons of war the US military has.

In Bay’s films there is such a shallow minimization of the military that it can be truly frightening.  Advertising the military to the lowest-common denominator with showboating explosions, vehicles, and combat will only seriously appeal to the last people I want holding guns.

The actual human actors in the film are lost so quickly to the tumble of incomprehensible CGI that they have no weight at all. Even the Transformers themselves have such a light story arc that they too are outweighed by the sheer amount of military footage.  Such minimization of the military makes it not even an army-of-one, but an army of machines, planes, tanks, and bombs.

While Transfomers: Revenge of the Fallen may be one of worst, bloated CGI action-fests of the summer, there still may be one movie coming out later this summer that can top it.