Acclaimed Chicago Sun Times critic Roger Ebert has written a well thought out response to the many Transformers fans who trashed him for his very negative review of the sequel. Ebert called the film “a horrible experience of unbearable length,” and most critics agreed with him. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has a 19% aggregate rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with most critics saying they can’t believe how terrible and how long it was. Bad reviews didn’t hurt ticket sales at all – Transformers is still top of the box office and has taken in $593 million worldwide in less than two weeks.

Ebert has some well argued points for those who call him an elitist or somehow overqualified to judge the merits of a summer blockbuster. He also claims that the film did so well due to marketing efforts, not because it’s a particularly entertaining saga of robots blowing up stuff. This is just a small segment and the whole piece is worth reading, with some very humorous photos added:

But am I out of touch? It’s not a critic’s job to reflect box office taste. The job is to describe my reaction to a film, to account for it, and evoke it for others. The job of the reader is not to find his opinion applauded or seconded, but to evaluate another opinion against his own. But you know that. We’ve been over that ground many times. What disturbs me is when I’m specifically told that I know too much about movies, have “studied” them, go into them “too deep,” am always looking for things the average person doesn’t care about, am always mentioning things like editing or cinematography, and am forever comparing films to other films.

I’ve “forgotten what it’s like to be a kid,” another poster told me. One of the most-admired contributors to this blog, who signs herself “A Kid.,” is 12 years old. She hasn’t forgotten. Neither have many other readers of middle school age. Their posts give me hope for the future. For them, to be a kid is not to be uncritical or thoughtlessly accepting. They seek magic, and don’t find it in the brutal hammering of “Transformers.”

A reader named Jared Diamond, a senior at Syracuse, sports editor of The Daily Orange, put my disturbance eloquently in a post asking: “Why in this society are the intelligent vilified? Why is education so undervalued and those who preach it considered arrogant or pretentious?” Why, indeed? If sports fans were like certain movie fans, they would hate sports writers, commentators and sports talk hosts for always discussing fine points, quoting statistics and bringing up games and players of the past. If all you want to do is drink beer in the sunshine and watch a ball game, why should some elitist play-by-play announcer bore you with his knowledge? Yet sports fans are proud of their baseball knowledge, and respect commentators who know their stuff…

The opening grosses are a tribute to a marketing campaign, not to a movie no one had seen. If two studios spend a ton of money on a film, scare away the competition, and open in 4,234 theaters before the Fourth of July, of course they do blockbuster business. The test is: Does the film have legs?

Major league Hollywood seems completely dominated by the belief that money can buy anything and justify anything. When a reader wrote to inform me that Michel Bay paid $8 million to the writers of the screenplay, I very much doubted it. Turns out that figure is correct. With numbers like that representative of big time Hollywood, I observe with Yeats that the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. No wonder. It pays better.

[From Roger Ebert’s blog]

Given the huge box office success of this film, we can be sure that we’ll be treated to more mindless crap like this in the future – as Ebert mentions. Over the weekend I heard a kind of sobering report on The Business, KCRW’s NPR-syndicated show on Hollywood. The panel talked about how the studios are undergoing major cutbacks like many industries and are scared to finance anything that isn’t a guaranteed hit. The audiences have spoken and smash-em-up films are in high demand. More thoughtful fare just isn’t as likely to succeed, or even to get made in this current economic climate. At least we still have smart writers like Ebert who are willing to take them to task and call it for what it is.

Ebert also added this video to his post of Robot Chicken’s “Condensed works of Michael Bay”