Movie Reviews - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Let me begin by saying I enjoyed the first Transformers movie. Sure, it was far from perfect. The transformers themselves were non-existent from a character point of view, and the humour was poor even by Michael Bay standards. It did however look absolutely gorgeous, the action was well choreographed, and it really should have won the Oscar for special effects. Overall it was a fun brainless blockbuster, which is exactly what I expected, and so I was able to enjoy it for what it was.
Now we have Transformers 2, subtitled Revenge of the Fallen. With my general liking of the first installment I entered this with a fairly open mind. Unfortunately I was disappointed.
There was a lot I didn't like about this film, but I'm going to do my best to concentrate on the good for the moment.

Towards the end of the first act there is a superb fight scene between Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, and Megatron and Starscream, leader and second in command of the Decepticons. The fight is superbly shot, well choreographed and even has an emotional impact, something generally lacking completely from Michael Bay movies. The major plus in this scene compared to other fights in this and the first movie is that you can actually see whats going on.
Later on in the film fans of the old cartoon series are treated to some Decepticon in-fighting in the shape of Megatron and Starscream squabbling over leadership. It's funny and it's a nice throwback to the origin of the material.

Those are the good bits. I've brought the positives forward as much as I could. Now onto the bad.
Normally in a film about extra terrestrial robots the plot shouldn't really bother me. I'm not there to enjoy good writing, I'm there to see shit blowing up, but I would like it if the writers at least tried a little bit.
The action picks up 2 years after the events of the first movie. Optimus and co are now part of a secret government organisation who hunt down Decepticons hiding on earth. Meanwhile, Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is getting ready to go off to college, and is broody about leaving behind his girlfriend (Megan Fox). In the background the Decepticons are plotting to resurrect Megatron from his slumber at the bottom of the ocean. Now that's all fine. Decepticons try to do bad things, Autobots try to stop them, explosions ensue, and Shia LeBeouf gets involved for some reason and shouts 'No no no' quite a bit.

The plot follows this format for the first act and everything is hunky dory. But then they happen across a rickety old transformer who's purposes in the movie are comic relief and exposition. There are two problems with this. Firstly he's not even a little bit funny. Secondly, the plot doesn't need to be moved anywhere else. It was doing just fine before when it was virtually non-existent, but they had to go and ruin it by introducing a new villain and a new maguffin robbed from the old animated movie all at the expense of action. The new villain, named The Fallen, is another rickety old transformer living on the moon. He's plotting revenge for something that isn't quite clear and the only thing that can kill him is something called the matrix of leadership, which really doesn't appear to do anything either. Roughly 45 minutes is taken up by the old transformer (who's name escapes me) explaining these facts, and that the transformers have been on earth for thousands of years. To slow things down further he falls over a few times. By the time the explanations were done I found that the whole gang of transformers, human teenagers and the US army were in Egypt and I was none the wiser as to exactly why. And in all this time I hadn't seen a single explosion.

When the explosions finally come again in the final act, they come thick and fast. So thick and fast in fact that they completely obscure what's going on. At some point during the meleé Megatron has called in about 20 decepticons to help in the fight. None of them have names, none of them are in any way distinguishable from each other, or from the Autobots they are meant to be fighting. This whole extended battle scene is so badly filmed it gave me a headache. From time to time I saw a robot having it's head blown off and presumed it was a decepticon. Seeing as the autobots were all present and correct when the dust settled, I presume I was right.
This final battle, and the aforementioned long exposition take up about 2 hours of this overlong movie.

Besides these major complaints, there are also countless small details which served only to annoy me further throughout the movie.
Michael Bay's love for 'comic' characters to offset the mayhem of the action took up far too much screen time. There's Sam's nerdy new roommate, there's John Turturro reprising his character from the first one (at least he tries to make it funny), and there are the twin autobots who are in fact just incredibly racist black stereotypes who end up being more annoying the Snarf and Jar-Jar Binks combined.
Once again I must acknowledge that I was watching a movie about big ol' robots so really anything goes, but for gods sake writers, try to keep it within the confines of the universe you have created. There shouls never be a transformer who can imitate humans a lá the Liquid Metal Terminator, And there should never EVER be an instance of a human life being saved by the ghosts of transformers who have been dead for thousands of years.

The main complaints of fans when the first transformers movie came out were: #1 Not enough transformers, #2 No mention of Energon, #3 Fights were confusing, #4 Too many humans
Michael Bay attempted to fix the first two, but ended up making things 10 times worse. He added lots and lots of transformers, but failed to give them any sort of identity or character. He brought in the concept of Energon as a life force for the transformers. It was done almost as an afterthought though and really wasn't necessary. As for the fights, with the one notable exception mentioned earlier, they were far more confusing than ever before. and the humans are still there in force too, doing the same thing they did in the first: Running around and trying to be funny, and failing miserably.

In short, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is overlong, nonsensical, confusing, boring, and sometimes actually offensive. It's a painful experience, and it's nearly 3 hours of your life you won't ever get back. Don't see it.
All that said though, it's not the worst Michael Bay movie ever made. That honour still goes to Pearl Harbour.