The late 2000s were a weird time to be a Megan Fox fan. She was a big name starring in several major movies, but it was hard to enjoy her rise to fame because so many people kept being weird about her. Take, for instance, this interview Harry Smith conducted with Fox for CBS in 2009. At the time, Fox was promoting the Michael Bay-directed “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” but Smith kept joking about how someone as attractive as her couldn’t possibly know anything about cars or motorcycles in real life. It was one thing for Smosh to make this joke in a silly video, but it was another thing for a professional journalist to be saying it to Fox’s face in an interview with a limited time for real questions.
The result was an awkward interview where Fox didn’t seem comfortable, which led to her making a joke that led to some “Transformers” fans trash-talking her in the years that followed. “I’m in the movie, and I read the script, and I watched the movie, and I still didn’t know what was happening,” she remarked. “So, I think if you haven’t read the script, and you go and you see it, and you understand it, you may be a genius. […] This movie is for geniuses.” Her reply was then interpreted by certain people as her making fun of “Revenge of the Fallen,” which wasn’t considered a cool thing to do on a press tour.
The moment’s easy to forgive in the full context of the interview, though, because the question Smith asked her was hard to answer tactfully. He said he couldn’t follow the movie and asked her, “Are you supposed to literally understand what every scene is or what it means?” In other words, he was telling her “Revenge of the Fallen” is a mess (which is true) and asking her if it was supposed to be one. Combine that with Smith’s general condescension towards Fox throughout the rest of the interview, and it’s understandable that she would respond the way she did.
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To be fair, it’s genuinely hard to understand Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Optimus Prime in the middle of a battle in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – Paramount Pictures
The comment that spurred Smith’s question was Fox talking about how she’d watched “Revenge of the Fallen” in the front row of the theater, an experience that gave her a headache from stimulation overload. This is a reasonable complaint: There’s so much going on in every single frame of that film that you can’t blame anyone for feeling exhausted after watching it. Even at the time of its release, /Film’s “Revenge of the Fallen” review made it clear that there’s simply too much going on in the movie.
In her 2017 video “Why is it So Hard to Remember What Happened in ‘Transformers’?”, pop culture critic Lindsay Ellis noted that she, too, has struggled to keep track of all the plot beats in Bay’s “Transformers” films, despite being a major fan who’d seen these movies multiple times. Ellis argued this was the result of Bay’s intense directing style, which tries to make every single moment as epic as possible. Even scenes that should be low-key, like two characters having a conversation outside, are often filmed with a spinning camera effect or some other flashy nonsense. Bay is simply incapable of taking it easy, which makes his movies fun but exhausting if they go on for too long. (That’s why his blessedly short 2025 documentary, “We Are Storror,” is such a breath of fresh air.)
The result is that “Revenge of the Fallen” is low-key one of the most densely packed movies of all time and requires a surprising amount of concentration from its viewers. It shows you a lot with each frame and introduces a massive amount of characters to keep track of. Does this mean the “Transformers” film is to Bay what “Finnegans Wake” is to James Joyce? Probably not, but it does mean it’s time for some “Transformers” fans to forgive Fox for that interview. You may not need to be a genius to keep track of the plot of “Revenge of the Fallen,” but your brain does need to be built different than most to truly enjoy the movie.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
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