A regular Guy reviews Tranformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

So I’m sure that by now everyone has seen or at least read about the new Transformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen, by Michael Bay. I was not a big fan of the first one, with its incomprehensible designs, turbo-shaking camera, a lot more focus on the humans than on the actual robots…eh, I could go on, but really I just didnt like it. Maybe it’s my fault, for being a hardcore G1 cartoon and comics fan? Who knows. So I didnt plan to see this one, but I was invited and I didnt want to be rude and turn it down. So big spoilers coming up, after the break

The opening scenes starts with a new military agency created to hunt down the remaining decepticons that stayed after the first one ended. Right off the bat the action starts, with a fight against a…robot-thing with a giant wheel in place of legs. I had no idea what it was really, or who it was. Optimus takes down this “thing”. I noticed that Optimus was given a sort of “quiet badass” personality here. He throws short phrases here and there like “you fall, I rise”. bah. The movie had its moments, though short and didnt really stand up.

The first 25 or so minutes of the movie were actually decent. There was a good amount of the film distributed between Sam and the actual plot, with the Transformers and the military. The introduction of Soundwave as a satellite was possibly one of the only smart things the movie did. I’ve seen so many different versions of this character; a boom box, a helicopter, a communications tower, etc. There’s been so many modes, and this one specifically really did work. Just a shame he didn’t come down to earth and joined the action.
It was also great to see the interaction between Megatron and Starscream. This really made up for the 3 minutes of face-time Starscream had in the first movie. Just wish we would’ve seen more of the other transformers interacting with each other. I’m sure there had been some kind of deal going on there when they ripped one of the Constructicon’s legs off to replace Megatron’s missing leg. I mean, why would he willingly give away his leg??

The fights were also longer and made more sense what was happening. But, the designs still sucked, I had no idea who was who in the forest battle, except for Optimus and his “stealthy” color scheme.

I wont lie, putting aside that it was basically the same movie you saw back in 2007. And it just went downhill for me past the supposed death of the Big-bot. The god awful shaky camera came back to haunt us, and spent so much time on useless scenes, little things that can be seen in any of Bay’s movies, like the slow motion-angle from below shots of people getting out of a car. It’s getting old. Really. Just stop it. Another thing that really bothered me too was how we were never really introduced to any of the new transfomers, aside from The Fallen (who, for all the hype, really only had like 5 minutes of action) And Soundwave. The ArCee units, bringing back Jazz(though I thought he was dead, and if that wasnt Jazz, who the hell was it?) and then we got stuck with “The Twins”, the most obnoxious characters of all. They basically were a mix between rednecks and hood people, if you can imagine that. My point being, that really we dont know who any of these characters are, aside from Optimus and Bumblebee. Ratchet is seen, but never really mentioned by name. Same thing with the shit ton of decepticons that rained down later in the movie. Who the hell were they?

My other big complain was the taking down of Devastator, if you can really call that huge metal junkyard Devastator. Earlier in the movie, Optimus mentioned that they were not going to hand over any of their tech to the humans to create weapons, because he knew what they were capable of. All of the sudden, the humans have this huge laser cannon that was shot once, and it tore through Devastator.
WHAT?!

Where did this weapon come from? why do they have such a thing, how? it was never really explained, anything even vague would’ve worked. And then we cut to more running, more random explosions from random robots we dont know, and random tanks and soldiers blowing up and taking down deceptions—wait what?! Yea, the humans took down a good share of the 15 or so random decepticons that came down towards the end. With bullets. Just as ridiculous as the fanboyism of Michael Bay for the military. I’m not saying “dont be a patriot, dont support the troops” etc, etc. But it’s too much, the whole plot, the whole point of the original was the interaction they had with some humans, and how they had to hide among the humans. It wasnt about how the US military would handle the situation. I dont know, I guess in my opinion, it was just overdone. Sure, show some soldier action, but dont focus the whole movie on them.

Overall, yea, I dont recommend it. I hear that people over at TFW2005 just eat up anything TF related, so I guess this movie would really be for the hardcore TF movie fan, and the hardcore Bay fan (Because they exist) I guess to sum it alllll up (cause I did write a lot) I’ll leave you with a quote from Matt Moylan, guy who makes LilFormers and also worked on some of the comics, and who currently works for Udon entertainment (this guy is everywhere!)

“Though I will say that the movie’s supporters generally say things like “It’s not supposed to be brilliant, just turn your brain off and have fun!” Sorry but, “turn your brain off” and “have fun” are directly contradictory. I’m not going to give any movie a break and pretend I’m stupid because it has expensive special FX”