TRANSFORMER: REVENGE

[Ecalsneerg]

Second:

Megan Fox is overrated.

And hilariously full of herself. Apparently she's her own biggest fan.

quote's tub of Vaseline disagrees.

[Dr Archeville]

Gripe 1: In the final scenes during the battle between all of the giant robots...Why god why did sam's parents show up out of nowhere riding in a the middle of a construction vehicle?!

Remember when the 'Cons were raining down on Earth, and slamming into cities all over the place, including Paris? The end of that scene showed a 'Con snatching them up. They didn't just "show up out of nowhere," they were brought in as hostages.

[quotemyname]

OH! I must have missed that part amidst the horribly chaotic action scenes where you can't tell whats going on half of the time.

[Dr Archeville]

That was actually one of the calmer action scenes.

My thoughts: I'm torn.

Pros

* The special effects were top-notch, which is to be expected from a Michael Bay/Steven Spielberg film. I hope they win the Oscar for SFX this year; the first TF movie lost the SFX Oscar to The Golden Compass's talking polar bears! (ILM said they'd not done work that groundbreaking since Jurassic Park.)

* Soundwave (even though they didn't do the electronic altering of Frank Welker's voice so he ended up sounding more like Dr. Claw), Ravage, and "Reedman" (the combined form of Ravage's "hairballs").

* Jetfire (or is that LARGE HAMfire! "You know who my father was? A wheel! The FIRST wheel! And you know what he transformed into? NOTHING! And he was damn proud of it!")

* Scalpel/The Doctor. (Oh, like that's a surprise....) For a 'Con the size of a microscope, he has an impressive power of command over the Constructicons. ("I need parts... kill the little one!")

Cons

* SFX overload.

* All the stupid, stupid crude humor. Who's it aimed at? The folks who grew up watching the original TF 'toon? They're in their mid-30s by now. Their kids? I lost count of the number of times a kid in the audience turned to their parent and asked "what are balls?" or "what's a scrotum?". The Adult Swim male 18-25 demographic? They're already there for Megan Fox & to see giant robots duking it out.

* The Twins. Some see them as horrible black stereotypes. Others say they're Wiggers, white 'bots trying to act like horrible black stereotypes. I say they're annoying Jar-Jar-esque "comic relief" and the movie could've done without them. (But the kids in the audience seemed to love 'em.... and I will concede that shooting yourself out of Devastator's throat and half his face was awesome.)

* Actually, the whiplash "we're a zany slapstick comedy! No, now we're a deadly serious alien invasion! No, now we're back to slapstick!" mood of both TF movies annoyed me. (Is it so odd that Transformers Animated balances the comedy/seriousness so much more effectively?)

* My one real complaint about the Star Trek film also shows up here: all the Cue the Sun moments.

[N/A]

I don't remember Cue The Sun moments from Star Trek, so much as enough Lens Flare to blind the gods themselves. But I actually liked it.

My one complaint about Star Trek was different.

[Dr Archeville]

Cue the Sun, Lens Flare, either way my retinas hated it.

[N/A]

OK, I finally saw this yesterday. I'm glad I only paid a matinee price for it.

I have to agree with the assessment that it's just like the first movie, only more. More robots, more robot fight scenes, way more explosions, more stupid human subplots, and more "hilarious" blatant racism.

Like, jaw-dropping "I can't believe Michael Bay thought that crap would fly in 2009" racism. In general, the human parts were trying so hard to be funny you could see the film itself bursting a blood vessel from the strain. But they wound up just being annoying, embarrassing, and offensive.

Which is not to say that race relations was the only area where the movie failed. In the first film, Mikaela only entered the plot in the first place because the Designated Hero found her sexually attractive. That's it. But once she was inside the plot, she helped move it forward as much as anyone. She pulled her own weight in the action scenes. She contributed. The Mikaela of the sequel was much more the standard Love Interest. She was an object, not a subject. Just another damsel in distress. In the first film, she fought the villains. In the second, she just runs away from them. Again and again and again.

What was up with all the creepy sexualized violence? Did Soundwave really have to hack the communications satellite by tentacle-raping it? Was the six-foot-long flex-blade tongue on you-know-who really necessary?

Speaking of Soundwave - overall, he was awesome. And I can live with Frank Welker's Dr. Claw voice. But they really should have reconsidered digitizing it like the animated series version.

Animated Soundwave Voice :: Superior.

Animated Soundwave Alt-Form :: Inferior.

The movie was too long. Now, I'm the kind of person who wishes the last few Harry Potter films had been 3+ hours long like the first two, and who watches 3-hour black-&-white subtitled samurai films for fun. So it's pretty rare for me to say a movie is "too long." This one is. The humans and their subplots were so obnoxious that by the time we actually made it to the "epic climax," I didn't care anymore. I didn't care what happened to any of the humans. In fact, I actively wanted all the human characters to die painfully, so I wasn't even sure which side to root for anymore. I was just fatigued.

They focused on the wrong characters. Wheelie, Skids, and Mudflap shouldn't have even been in the film, let alone been given so much of the spotlight. Sidewinder, Arcee, and Ratchet were practically walk-ons. If I hadn't read the Wikipedia entry afterward, I wouldn't have even realized Jolt was in the movie at all. Hi, Scorponok. Bye, Scorponok. Devastator was cool, but needed more screen-time and less robot bollocks.

Wheelie deserves special mention, because every time his name is even mentioned, millions of Transformers fans cry out in anguish and fury.

The Decepticons need some graphic design input. During the fight scenes, I could tell the difference between Megatron, Starscream, and the nameless alt-formless Decepticon grunts, but I could see how a more "casual" viewer could get confused.

"Which one is he?"

"The grey one."

"...Which grey one?"

At least this time Arcee came in colors other than pink-with-hot-pink-accents.

On the bright side, the giant robot fight scenes are better, longer, more brutal, and more frequent. Optimus Prime and Bumblebee each took another level in Badass, and it showed. But there's still so much human padding I was squirming in my seat.

There are no surprises. They pretty much just remade the first one. Only, in many ways, it was a step backward. And it ripped off other movies so shamelessly it made me cringe. Someone should have told Mr. Bay that it's going to take longer than 10-15 years for The Matrix and Species to enter the public domain. Just saying.

And if Michael Bay ****s the American Military's **** any harder, it'll fall off. Seriously.