LEAVE the winning of Oscars and the making of sensitive tear-jerkers about plucky children with terminal diseases to other filmmakers. For the guys behind Wednesday’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” the appeal of the potential world-conquering sequel boils down to three simple words: “Bigger. F – – – ing. Robots.”
That message came through loud and clear last summer when Paramount handed out T-shirts at the San Diego Comic Con with that slogan.
It really is that simple, isn’t it?
Take all the elements that made the first film a $708 million hit — relentless action, Megan Fox in tight clothing, and yes, giant machines that can’t sneeze without destroying a city block — and ratchet it up a few notches.
One thing is for sure: This sequel is definitely bigger. And not just the run time, which clocks in at 2 ½ hours — an audacious length for a summer popcorn movie. Everything seems to have been supersized, making “Revenge of the Fallen” one of the biggest effects-driven movies ever, if not the biggest effects-driven movie ever.
“It’s definitely bigger, and that’s saying a lot, because the first was pretty big,” says Alex Kurtzman, who along with Roberto Orci and Ehren Kruger wrote the screenplay.
The film’s budget reportedly swelled to $225 million, and that kind of cash buys a lot of eye candy. (Luckily, the producers ran out of money before they could purchase long pants for Megan Fox.)
“The movie is huge,” says Scott Farrar, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, which handled most of the computer wizardry. “I tell people it’s a combination of ‘Ben Hur’ and ‘Apocalypse Now.’ “
While the first movie introduced 12 robots, the sequel deploys 60 new machines, Farrar says, including fighter plane Jetfire (voiced by John Turturro, who also returns as FBI Agent Simmons) and Jolt, an electric car, and Ravage, a cat-like machine.
The workload required ILM to assemble the largest team of animators it’s ever had on a film, more than 40. “This movie sets records on many, many levels,” Farrar says.
Further complicating the delivery of ILM’s 555 effects shots was the decision by director Michael Bay to present some sequences in IMAX. Because each IMAX frame contains about eight times as much information as a regular movie frame, creating higher-res effects became extremely time-consuming. A single frame featuring the giant robot Devastator, for example, took 72 hours to render — and that was on ILM’s supercomputers. It would take your home PC about 16,000 years to render the entire movie. In all, ILM’s work ate up more than 150 terabytes of memory. The original “Transformers” took 20.
The robots also get much more screen time this go-round, as the now-college-age Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his Autobot allies try to defeat the resurgent Decepticons. Their appearances in the first were limited, in part, because of budgetary reasons and because no one involved knew how well the Transformers would work on-screen.
“The first one, we were just trying to crack it. No one had any faith in that movie,” Bay told Collider.com. “The first one, you had to establish everything. The Transformers come to Earth. This one, you really get taken for a ride.”
“The first movie was produceable because it was a mystery for the first hour,” screenwriter Orci says, alluding to the mostly robot-free initial 60 minutes. “The second one, you can’t do that again. You’ve accepted who the Transformers are and that they exist, so you need to be with them from the beginning.”
The screenwriters also got to revisit a few ideas discarded from the 2007 film, including a gag that’s now used to introduce Optimus Prime in “Revenge of the Fallen” and a sequence of an aircraft carrier that was deemed too expensive last time. Bay also rolls out the first female Transformer, raising a ton of puzzling anatomy questions and creating unsavory images of metal-on-metal romance.
The director didn’t skimp on the live-action production, either. He and a crew of 150 spent three days in Egypt filming a massive battle sequence on the pyramids. And we mean on, as in actually touching the stones. Bay claims he’s the first director in 30 years to be given that privilege. He was able to gain access to the monuments by going through Zahi Hawass, the infamous archaeologist in charge of Egypt’s ancient treasures.
The director is evidently popular in the Middle East. With the help of Jordanian Prince Ali — a big fan of “Transformers” — Bay and a crew of 160 were the first to ever shoot in the ancient city of Petra. The Jordanian air force lent five helicopters to ferry 36 loads of equipment to the mountaintop town.
The US military did its part as well, in part because “Transformers” and action movies like it are a boon for recruiting. (Never mind that hundreds of faceless GIs get vaporized by the Decepticons. We’d rather be in the Coast Guard.)
“As far as I know, this is the biggest joint military operation movie ever made, in terms of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines,” Lt. Col. Gregory Bishop, the film’s military liaison told USA Today. “I can’t think of a bigger one.”
One battle scene filmed on a New Mexico missile range used two A-10 Thunderbolt jets, six F-16s, 10 armored Humvees, two Abrams tanks, two Bradley tanks, two missile-launcher vehicles and two armored personnel carriers. Not to mention the actual military men and women who served as extras, including the Army’s Golden Knights parachute team. The troops blasted off so much dummy ammunition from so many guns that crews had to go around and scoop all the empty shells in buckets between scenes.
The question now is whether all this supersizing will add up to box-office dollars? Er, yeah, probably. A week before it opened, “Revenge of the Fallen” already accounted for 45 percent of ticket sales on Fandango, and prognosticators are predicting it’ll rake in about $170 million over its five-day opening run.
If it is so successful, two things will happen:
On the downside, Bay — who claims to have made $80 million off the first movie — will get so rich, he’ll be able to buy his own country where he can do nothing but sit in a lounge chair all day and blow stuff up. Boomgladesh.
On the plus side, the filmmakers will feel pressure to make “Transformers 3” bigger than this one, and that can only mean one thing: Even. Bigger. F – – king. Robots.