More than meets the ears

I "met" someone on Facebook who said he had six tickets left for the midnight showing of Transformers 2: Assault on Your Ears... and in IMAX at Navy Pier's six-story tall screen!
In a moment of weakness, I decided to go.

Now, the IMAX at Navy Pier is definitely Chicago's hottest showplace. The tickets all come with your seat number already assigned (hmm, not sure if I like that or not) and you sit in fron tof what has to be the tallest screen (so much bigger than the local theater's IMAX - sure, it's a big screen, but it really isn't IMAX, you know?).

Navy Pier was, surprise! closed.
All of it.
Dark, closed. All the restaurants, all the stores, the stages. Closed.
Weird. I mean, I was there at 10:30, and kind of expected some restaurants or something to be open. It is summer, after all.

So I waited around for about an hour, (from the popcorn girl I learned the last Batman movie played for 72 hours straight, every three hours -who needs popcorn at three in the morning?!)
and then...

The movie began.

Now, I've read some reviews that suggest it was kind of like watching a bag of rocks in a dryer. I will admit, it was LOUD. NOISY loud!
Robots slugging each other, robots blasting each other, things exploding all over!
And that's just in the first five minutes.

They seemed to crank up the noise factor on this film every time a robot appeared - LOUD!

And, well, the robots did appear a lot.

Nominally, the story features Shai laBeef heading off to college (after robots destroy his home, natch). whose name I did not catch because of all the NOISE! Whatever school it was, it was very nice looking, and filled with pouty supermodels (at least, those are no school girls I ever saw in real life) who dress provocatively and snigger at Shia's mom, who ingested some marijuana and is now acting goofy. As opposed to po'd, which she was just minutes ago.

One such pouty aggressive supermodel type is actually a robot in disguise (that's some robot!) who attacks Le Beef and starts the whole two hour chase scene of kids versus robots going.

Actually, Megan Fox, who's introduced in the most blatantly sexy (?) way of having her short-shorted butt up in the air (yeah, it takes work to do that, I know), spends all her time in this picture running from the robots, too.

So LeBeef and LesBoobs run around the country trying to stop the evil robots from extinguishing the sun. Uh, by saving Optimus Prime, the only robot who can possibly stand a skinny rat's ass chance of stopping the Fallen (boo!) (seems to me the US Military and a few dozen Transformers could blow him up just fine, but hey...) by taking a semi-mystic doohickey that's since turned to sand (hey, magic fairy dust!) and sticking in Optimus' chest cavity.

Oh, what's wrong with Optimus? He got the crap kicked out of him by the Fallen (I think, in battle all these robots look alike, you know?) while saving LeBoef (ibid!) from being attacked by a whole bunch of robots because they wanted (snicker) his brains!

Oh, there's a whole bunch more crap in this movie. There's LeBeefcake's college roommate, who runs an Internet site claiming there are aliens among us (ree-diculous!). There's a leering astronomy professor (can't tell this movie's made for teen boys, can you?). There's a US Military Strike Team named the NEST (E-i-Oooo!) that's coopted the good guy Transformers, put upon by an Obama-admininstration pain-in-the-ass guy who's out to get the robots to leave! Yeah, that'll show 'em!

There's that NEST team that instinctively trusts the kid LeBiftecetdesfrites and flies the dead Megatron around (you have any idea how much fuel it would take to carry a giant robot halfway around the world!!?) to the Middle East, because they TRUST him!

There's the sun-eating device that's hidden in one of the pyramids (like no one would notice THAT huge thing there before!). There's flashbacks to the first time the Transformers came to earth, looking for Energon (makes Exxon-Mobil look green and sane!)

And you know what?

Maybe it was because I was seeing in in IMAX, at midnight, in a theater packed with geeks (come on - who else is going to be watching Transformers at midnight?) --

I rather enjoyed it.

Yes, it was too LOUD. Yes, I could hardly tell who was fighting whom. Yes, parts of the movie were totally stupid(the public doesn't believe the alien threat is real - haven't they seen all those robots walking all over in the last movie?). Some of the characters, such as they are, are mind-blowingly stupid and/or insulting (an old robot that acts like a grumpy old man, complete with cane; little Suzuki-cars that transform into two gangsta-talking robots).

But it was also highly entertaining in parts. Mainly in those parts where robots were either chasing someone or blowing stuff up. In other words, about two hours of the two-and-a-half-hour movie.

Heaven help me, I actually enjoyed this picture. Despite the goofy plot, despite LesBoobs and LeBeef, despite marijauna Mom and a too-trusting US Military - I actually enjoyed seeing big ol' robots smack other big ol' robots around.

I am still trying to figure out why, though.