overly long and tiresome

Rating: 4/10 (8 February 2018)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a movie, even as a young lad I found overly long and tiresome. All the flaws that the first movie had were magnified with more shouty characters, stereotypes, sexual innuendos, voyeurism and excessive action.
The first had a simple blockbuster plot, whereas this movie has so many plot threads and moves at such a fast pace it's confusing. There's also an overload of comic relief which is funny at times but loses its impact as the movie goes along.
However it isn't an irredeemable picture since the spectacular effects and sound design are all top notch as always. Even in the first movie I found the action scenes hard to follow since its often shot in medium/close-up instead of a nice wide shot showing off the giant robots. For once there's a fight shot in wide between Optimus Prime and Megatron before Optimus dies, only to be resurrected later for the plot's convenience.
Transformers was like the male variant of Twilight, they were both commercial franchise that appealed to certain gender desires. Twilight depicted the female fantasy of a man saving them in the most dire situations. Whereas Transformers showcased the male fantasies of beautiful scantily clad women loving a dorky lad for no apparent reason and of course action and explosions galore.
Now I don't believe Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is one of the worst movies ever, I've seen plenty of schlock to know what a truly terrible movie entails. However, this was definitely a downgrade from the first, which in retrospect wasn't all that great either. It was more of the same garbage in the first on a larger scale.