That is depressing.

The first Transformers was damn near the worst movie I ever saw. It was surpassed only by The Thin Red Line, because if your war movie doesn’t have a shot fired for 45 minutes and looks like a NatGeo nature documentary in the meantime, your war movie sucks. But I digress…
The thing that just killed me about Transformers was how utterly and unapologetically stupid it was. I mean, we go to great lengths to make sure the robots all match up with the right size and shape so that all the parts are visible and the resulting robot is the same mass and parts and whatnot as the car or truck or whatever…and then we also have a gigantic cube the size of a house, but it can magically reduce to the size of a basketball. Oh, okay. The fights were loud and noisy and everything, not to mention damn near impossible to follow, and then everything just stops, because oh shit, the magic beam shot out of said tiny cube but nobody thought to do that beforehand? Note that I’m sticking purely with the robots here, leaving aside stuff like the ghetto computer whiz and the underwear-model-as-super-scientist – we have robots talking in jive, we have robots that pee on government agents (especially ones just crammed in at random because somebody mistook plot elements for actual plot), we have robots that apparently are capable of crouching behind a house in the middle of a residential neighborhood COMPLETELY SILENTLY.
This isn’t a movie, it’s fanfic. Written by a 10 year old boy. Who lives on a steady diet of Ritalin, Sunny D and paint chips.
And the new one, to all accounts, is even worse, and is exactly what you expect as that boy hits 12. Now the underwear model turns into a killer robot, and there are jive-talking robots with gold teeth, and one robot has balls! heheheheheheheheheh! Balls rule! Shut up Beavis. No way!
I realize that there are enough screamy kids, paste-eating fanboys, mental defectives, and people who just don’t give a shit to make this kind of thing a going concern. I didn’t realize there were $200 million worth of them. And now I’m seriously waiting to hear that NBC just greenlit 13 episodes of Ow! My Balls! for the fall season. You have to look awfully hard for it, but there is a line between dumb fun and just plain dumb…and Michael Bay’s basically wondering what that dot behind him is.