Bay takes another shot at destroying Paris and New York, but the real spectacle in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the director’s particular vision of college life. (With all the classic movies this hotshot talks about remaking, why not Animal House?) It’s only a matter of minutes before Sam Witwicky’s roommates have turned his freshman suite into a dot-com company; at the ensuing kegger, our hero (LaBeouf) is waylaid by a hottie (Lucas) who looooooves his bumblebee-colored Camaro. Can Sam stay faithful to Mikaela (Fox), his well-oiled mechanic girl? In Transformers, Bay treated women like robots. Why not go one better by adding women who are robots?

What is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen about? That is the wrong question. Tossing aside the queasy detours into reactionary politics (mystifyingly, the idiotic government stooge is labeled as an Obama employee) and bizarre ethnic humor (e.g., Turturro’s lox-chopping special agent, “funny” Arab border guards and, most egregiously, a pair of slang-speaking “black” robots), the film is mainly a pretext for Bay to show off the latest in what one character calls “quantum crypto gear.” Leveling Egypt as Sam seeks “the matrix of leadership,” Bay shows he still has the awesomest sunsets and highest tolerance for incoherence in the biz. He also generates more trash than poor WALL-E will ever be able to pick up. On a pure level of color and design, the new Transformers is sensational; there are so many robots, even Bay loses track of them. Blurb this: If you haven’t suffered a cortical meltdown by the last 30 minutes, you haven’t been paying attention.

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