Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Review

Published by Jeff Leins on: June 24th, 2009

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a deafening cacophony of explosions and crunching metal in an almost uninterrupted barrage of noise and special effects.  The sequel is easily bigger, louder, and longer than the first and it certainly feels that way.  It’s 150-minute runtime feels like it plays out in the ever-present slow-motion which somehow doesn’t leave space for a story.

Before I’m bombarded with angry, devoted fans defending their high-budget, low-entertainment toy show, I don’t mean stories like the ones used to tuck them in at night.  I mean any resemblance of a coherent plot, instead of this cinematic garbage heap.  Director Michael Bay assaults his audiences with his expenses, cramming every dim-witted plea cried about since 2007 into a bloated, brainless waste of time and money.  Less humans, more berserking robot favorites, and more beautiful women give die-hards exactly what they wanted and one thing they didn’t ask for: disappointment.

After all Bay’s public assertions that his giant, transforming robots would be more of a spectacle than McG’s Terminator Salvation this summer, Bay has no problem borrowing the female cyborg right out of Terminator 3 while failing to deliver on his egotistical promise.  Pixels smash other pixels and all you’ll get is a headache.  There should be T-shirts.

While packing to leave for college, Sam (Shia LaBeouf) comes in contact with a shard from the AllSpark, the alien object that springs electronics to life.  The chance encounter causes him to start spouting streams of crazy and drawing strange characters on the walls.  (By the way, this is the same cube he carried around years ago without flying into a frenzy.)  The Decepticons return to Earth in order to retrieve the implanted material in Sam’s brain and, of course, the Autobots must fight to stop them.  Unfortunately, the charm of Sam has been erased by the shard and replaced by endless scenes of him running with his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) and an unfunny, unnecessary roommate (Ramon Rodriguez).

With the jokes gone, the intricate digital work of effects house Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is the only redeemable element of the sequel.  A forest battle sequence is perhaps the best eye candy for action seekers, but it’s only slightly less frantic than the jumbled mess of metal in the original.

Improvement in CGI allowed the robots to be a bit more expressive, but just because it’s possible does not mean emotion is actually used.  Instead the robot personalities (aside from Bumblebee) are less defined this time around, possibly because there isn’t time with all the epic grandstanding from both good and evil.  The veiled ethnic traits are now blunt racist caricatures, substituting the shucking and jiving of the Autobot Jazz for the new, ghetto dialogue of Mudflap and Skids.  Neither can read and one has a gold tooth.  Ahhh, stereotypes.  Just what this awful movie needed.

What may have been a kiddie affair before (i.e. robots urinating on people) is now almost inappropriate for it’s PG-13 rating.  The sexual “humor” has been ramped up (lots of humping), there’s accidental drug use, and some of the language doesn’t fit with the Hasbro I remember from Candyland.  I’m not saying parents shouldn’t bring their kids, but it’s probably best for the children to wait until they’re older and know better than to watch this junk.

At one point Sam pleads with a Transformer.  “Let’s not get episodic, OK?  Beginning.  Middle.  End.  Facts.  Details.  Condense.  Plot.  Tell it.”  How the screenwriters were able to put those words in his mouth without any awareness of their own epic storytelling faults is a perfect example of the hollow core in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Well, that or the swinging wrecking ball testicles.

2 out of 5.