Ok, so I'll admit it. I actually liked the first Transformers so I had hopes for the second installment. But, alas, I have now seen 2 very bad movies in a row. Wow. Who knew reviewing movies would actually suck from time to time? I think I may pull out my old school DVD collection just to feel better about the world.
The main issue with this film is the fact that for the first solid hour there is no real plot! We start off with the main character Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) preparing to go to college while his unbelievably hot girlfriend Makaela (Megan Fox) stays behind to work in her daddy's motorcycle garage. There's my first problem. Really? Motorcycle garage? Um, you're hot. Leave town and pose for Playboy. It feels like this could actually go somewhere for a few minutes. Then, suddenly Sam ends up on campus and all hell breaks loose. This is where the confusion starts. Things just escalate without any real reason or direction. As an audience member you start trying to figure out how we got from college to things exploding and running to Egypt!?!?! What's worse is the dialogue of the characters seems to suggest that THEY don't even know what's going on.
The other thing that really hurts this movie is the fact that there seem to be tons of charcters muddling up the script but we are supposed to only focus on 5. Bumblebee is back along with Optimus (of course), Megatron, and our two human heroes. But suddenly we are faced with welcoming 2 twin autobots who are SUPPOSED to serve as some sort of comic relief. In all honesty they are just hip hop annoyances that you almost have to have an urban dictionary to understand. Then we meet the 1,000 year old Decepticon turned good who brought back memories of Treebeard from Lord of The Rings (an actual good movie, btw). One of the worst things about this film is not being able to understand, that is HEAR, what the autobot characters are saying. Their voices are so overprocessed it is very difficult to understand their dialogue.
In fact, the movie is entirely too loud overall. It seems that director Michael Bay knew he had a weak plot so he filled it with unbearably loud explosions.
Visually it was a confusing mess as well. I almost got dizzy watching the autobots transform into whatever it was they were becoming. Everything moves so fast that you can't keep up with where the pieces are going. Many times I couldn't even tell which machine was fighting with machine. It was just a jumbled mess of loud, dizzying annoyance. All you know is now we're a car...or now we're a military tank...or now we're annoyed and falling asleep in the theatre (oh..sorry...that was ME).
This movie was entirely too long. Michael Bay spent too much time trying to develop his robots into emotional beings that an audience can connect with. The flaw with this? They're robots! Instead of meaningful dialogue it just comes off as cheesy attempts at creating an emotional link between these "beings" and their human counterparts. Also, there seemed to be alot of slow motion running. Our human friends seem to run VERY slowly out of explosions, into each other's arms, through the desert...In short, we could have ended this about 30 minutes sooner and I wouldn't have been nearly as annoyed.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a trick. Somehow it's raked in millions at the box office. My best guess is from 14 year old boys who are old enough to understand Megan Fox is hot but young enough to still have Optimus Prime on a shelf in their bedroom next to the cheetos and Dr. Pepper. Don't waste your money and if you decide to my only request is that you rent it later. At least that way you can fast forward through the bad dialogue and slow motion. Oh, and when you're done let Michael Bay redeem himself by catching The Rock...even if it's on TBS.
Cast: Shai LeBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Rainn Wilson, Kevin Dunn, Julie White, Hugo Weaving
Rating: Pg-13
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