Posted

Jun 30th 2009

Mood

I liked it. I didn't LOVE it, but I liked it. Although, I do think that the first half of the film, on the whole, was done much better than the second half. It starts on kind of a sour note, with a two-minute narrative by Peter Cullen telling the audience what the Autobots have been up to in the two years since the first movie. Granted, the first movie started with a quick blurb about the Cube from Optimus, but that felt necessary, because it was back story. Here, it just feels like Michael Bay tore the page out of his directing textbook that mentioned the "show, don't tell" philosophy. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, we would have been able to adequately infer that the Autobots were cooperating with the military without having to be told about it by Prime. This is a PG-13 movie, you can count on your audience having a certain amount of intelligence. Anyway, while the very first moments of the movie struck a negative chord with me, it was remedied shortly with a very cool action setpiece showing Major Lennox along with Ironhide and some new Autobots tracking down some Decepticons. Things get out of hand when the Decipticon is revealed to be a crane, and Optimus Prime is parachuted in to save the day. Even in all the awesomeness, though, a flaw emerges.

One of the most common complaints about the 2007 Transformers film was that there wasn't enough of the freakin' ROBOTS. That's certainly remedied here, but take too much of any medicine and you'll still need to get your stomach pumped. True, we wanted more OF the robots. What that gave us was just more robots. Period. There's way too many to keep track of unless you're a superfan who already knows all of them. There's a definite emphasis on Prime and Bumblebee, and Ironhide is a fairly major player, but Ratchet, who returns from the first movie, is reduced to a mere background character and has no lines at all. Filling in the rest of the Autobots lineup are Arcee, three motorcycles sharing a single consciousness, Jolt, a Chevy Volt, Sideswipe, a Chevy Corvette, and the infamours and obnoxious twins, Mudflap and Skids. Also of note is the elderly SR-71 Blackbird, Jetfire, a defected Decepticon. The trouble is, I had to use Wikipedia to get half of those names. See where I'm coming from here? Things get even murkier on the Decipticon side.

Starscream and Megatron return, both given much more screentime than before, and a bit more character development, and newcomer "The Fallen" is revealed to be Megatron's superior. I get it that we're not supposed to empathize with the Decepticons as much, but they must have about twice as many soldiers as the autobots, and only a few are only ever named on screen. Soundwave has been reimagined as a satellite-raping hacker 'bot, slightly reminiscient of a Sentinel from The Matrix. And from there, it's back to Wikipedia. Much like the helicoptor, Blackout with Scorponok in the first movie, Soundwave unleashes a minicon called Ravage, a jungle-cat like robot. Scorponok himself returns briefly, and there's also an Audi called Sideways, a microscope dubbed "The Doctor", six different robots forming Devastator, the Decipticon Megazord, as Justin put it, the ball-bearing like Insecticons, and more still that not even the filmmaker's bothered to name.

You see the flaw? They could have introduced maybe five or six new robots to refill and expand the roster from the original movie a bit, and then continue developing the preexisting characters. THAT WAY, there would have at least been few enough of them that maybe I wouldn't have to look it up just to discuss all the Autobots by name. As one would expect, the overabundance of Transformers means that the human characters are significantly scaled back. Returning, of course, are Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, along with LaBeouf's on-screen parents Kevin Dunn and Julie White. Josh Dunhamel and Tyrese Gibson reprise the roles of William Lennox and Robert "Bring the Rain" Ebbs. And of course, John Turturro comes back as the Sector Seven agent, Simmons. Notably absent of the 2007 alumni are Jon Voight as the Secretary of Defense (although the film does take the change in presidency into account, so it at least is off-handedly explained in the story), and the hackers Maggie and Glen played by Rachel Taylor and Anthony Anderson (which really, they were probably the most forgettable characters in the first one, but their stories never had any closure, either. A small mention in one of the early scenes would have gone a long way in tying up the loose end). The only memorable newcomer is Ramon Rodriguez as LaBeouf's college roommate, Leo, who is clearly supposed to be comic relief, but is only memorable as being an annoying coward.

Moving right along, the plot revolves around ancient coordinates embedded in the last remaining shard of the Allspark, which are beamed into Sam's mind. This results in a few tense scenes where he goes into a trance-like state, drawing these Cybertronian glyphs in whatever medium is available to him. With as much weight as these scenes carry, the payoff comes across as rather anti-climactic when you finally get to it near the end of act two. As it turns out, the coordinates lead to a machine that, if activated, will harvest the Earth's sun, creating Energon, but killing the planet (and indeed, the rest of our solar system). Sounds heavy, right? Well, not so much. So much more emphasis is placed on a certain other character's peril, that the imminent destruction of the entire human race is outshone by it. Which leads me to...

The death of Optimus Prime.

Remember what I said in the beginning about the beginning of the film being better than the second half? At one point, Sam, Mikaela, and Leo are captured by Megatron, and Sam is effectively being tortured by the Decepticons for the information that now rests in his mind. Let me go a little off-topic for a moment- I think this was probably my favorite scene in the whole movie. As cool as the fight scenes and special effects and the robots are, it's this very horror movie moment of this little robotic spider prodding at Sam's facial orifices, and Sam trying to fast-talk his way out of it, pleading as Megatron holds him down, that I keep coming back to. Anyway, the Autobots bust in at the last second, saving the kids, and this big action scene follows, culminating Prime alone protecting Sam against a seemingly endless supply of Decepticons. Eventually, Megatron himself, along with Starscream and a third Decepticon (which one escapes me) gang up on and overwhelm Prime. The scene is tragic, and it's a mark of how loved these characters are that we actually care about the fate of a friggin' semi truck.

After that point though, everything starts to go downhill. The kids wind up in Egypt, because apparently one of the robots can teleport (oookay, then why do they turn into VEHICLES?) and they wind up finding the Matrix of Leadership. This is the magic bullet that can bring Prime back to life. So one very long and tense war scene later (which, I have to admit, was done very well in that your really feel a sense of peril for the two main human characters, although I was disappointed that the twins didn't manage to get themselves killed off), Sam jams the Matrix into Prime (I dare you to not let "You Got the Touch" by Stan Bush start playing in your head at that point). Prime turns into the Ninja Falcon Megazord using parts from Jetfire, and beats the final boss in like thirty seconds. Seriously, you blink and are like "WTF, it's over?" It's like they suddenly realized "Oh, crap, we've made a three-hour movie. Better just end it so people will be able to go to the bathroom. Oh, wait, one more shot of Megan Fox's boobs. Okay, done".

So that's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Starts strong, suffers from pacing issues, overabundance of characters without personalities, and half-assed plot strings. But damn if it isn't a fun ride.