Roger Ebert Hated This Billion-Dollar Sci-Fi Franchise With A Passion – SlashFilm

When I was a young movie buff, I noticed that my favorite film critics had a soft spot for trash. These critics’ pulp appetites weren’t always predictable, but when I saw Roger Ebert dive into the muck to defend Wes Craven’s “Swamp Thing,” I knew he was legit. His rave for a comic book movie would be emblazoned across print ads all over the country. He had to own this. When I later learned that Ebert had won a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism and penned the screenplay for Russ Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” this all made sense.

Ebert loved trash. Sometimes. I was with him on “Swamp Thing,” but he could misfire. His one-star review of Lewis Teague’s “Alligator,” a fiendishly clever knock-off of “Jaws,” caught me flat-footed. In his write-up, Ebert took issue with the film’s internal logic — which is rarely a great way to engage with pulpy horror flicks, but let’s humor a Pulitzer Prize-winner.

“The alligator… is smart enough to travel all over the city without being seen,” wrote Ebert. “In one shot, he’s in a suburban swimming pool, and seconds later, he’s midtown.” Rog, the beast had been living in the New York City sewer system since it got flushed down the toilet as a baby-gator. If you told me that reptile could hightail it from the Financial District to Arthur Ashe in five seconds, I’d ask for a less conservative estimate.

When studio-financed pulp got dumber and pricier, Ebert’s tolerance for trash plummeted. Mostly. In 2007, I was shocked when he wrote a three-star review of Michael Bay’s “Transformers.” A film based on a toy line (which spawned cartoons and comic books), did not strike me as Rog’s thing. My instincts proved to be spot-on when he savaged the sequels.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, but Ebert’s positive assessment of “Transformers” suggested that he was initially fine with the cinema of Michael Bay so long as he was blowing up robots that turned into cars (and everything in their metallic warpath). “I think Michael Bay sometimes sucks,” wrote Ebert. “But I find it possible to love him for a movie like ‘Transformers.’ It’s goofy fun with a lot of stuff that blows up real good, and it has the grace not only to realize how preposterous it is, but to make that into an asset.”

Unpopular opinion: I think Michael Bay is usually great (/Film’s Rob Hunter agrees)! But when it comes to the Bay “Transformers” sequels reviewed by Ebert, I concur that they’re the wrong kind of trash. Ebert blasted both barrels at 2009’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” in his inimitable fashion:

“The day will come when ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million).”

I thought 2011’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” much of which is set in Chicago, might appeal to Ebert’s Windy City sensibility, but… it didn’t. Ebert’s one-star review begins with this observation: “The series exists to show gigantic and hideous robots hammering one another. So it does.” I think the film’s third act is, on a technical level, expertly executed tentpole mayhem until Bay pits Optimus Prime against Sentinel Prime (a psychopathic Autobot chieftan voiced by Leonard Nimoy), at which point it turns vicious. Bay and his writers had a thing about Optimus Prime being more bluster than brutal. He wins fights in the first three movies, but they’re score-card triumphs. In “Dark of the Moon,” he licks his wounds and lets Megatron and Sentinel pound the cogs out of each other before cowardly cleaning up the mess. I remain in awe of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” for all the wrong reasons.

“The series” kept clanking forward after Ebert’s death in 2013, but I’d like to think he would’ve enjoyed Travis Knight’s heartfelt “Transformers” one-off “Bumblebee.” The series has grossed $5.42 billion to date. The return of the franchise is imminent, and, now that the it’s under the aegis of Trump toady/Paramount-Skydance exec David Ellison, we can expect the viciousness to get kicked up a notch. We’re going to get inundated with hard-hearted, $200 million budgeted Hollywood spectacles absent the essential recriminations of “The Deer Hunter” or “Casualties of War.” Because, for our billionaire class, the survival of the species hinges on your expendability. Bay served them well. We all served them well. Where’s a mutated, corporate-hostile New York City sewer alligator when you need it?