The same... only more so

Rating: 5/10 (20 June 2009)

You pretty much know what you're going to get with a Michael Bay movie by now. It's HUGE! Everything EXPLODES! The camera SPINS! It's LOUD! Revenge Of The Fallen takes this to the logical limit with two and a half hours of EXTREME BAYHEM! But bigger isn't necessarily better.
The first Transformers movie has grown on me over time - there's a lot wrong with it, and some of its flaws (like having far too many obnoxious 'comic relief' characters and some borderline offensive racial caricatures) are admittedly dealt with the second time round. But it had a relatively straightforward plot, and underlying it all was a Spielbergian "a boy and his..." story, in this case his first car. The sequel, on the other hand, is about, er...
That's the biggest problem with Revenge - it's just a MacGuffin hunt, but in this case each MacGuffin leads only to another MacGuffin. The shard leads to the symbols which lead to the Sector 7 files which lead to Jetfire who leads to the Pyramids which lead to the Matrix which leads back to the Pyramids which contain the... There's no ingenuity in following the trail, either - Sam and co make arbitrary deductions that of course turn out to be right, are flat-out told what to do next (Jetfire is by far the most entertaining character in the film, but he's also lumbered with a colossal amount of exposition) or, laziest of all, make crucial discoveries by sheer accident.
The same applies to the various battles; baddies turn up, are dealt with using big guns, bigger baddies turn up, are dealt with using bigger guns, and so on. No tactics, no using an enemy's weaknesses against him, no tricking him into making a mistake - just more and louder bang-bang. I generally love Big Dumb Action Movies, but after a couple of hours of this I was just numb to the whole thing - and there was still half an hour to go before the climax!
The returning characters are actually *less* developed than in the first film because they pretty much have nothing to do except follow the clues, run and/or fight. Other than Jetfire, the new characters fare even less well. The Twins (who act and sound like Master Shake and Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force) accompany Sam for about a third of the entire film, but there's no real reason for them to be there other than bicker like idiots. And the title villain, the Fallen, is a generic growling bad guy who wants to destroy the world basically because he's a jerk. Most of the other new Decepticons don't even get names.
Like the first movie, this will probably be easier to follow on a smaller screen because the robots are again shot too close and cut too fast. On the big screen, scenes like the forest battle are blurs of pixels with the occasional moment where the action slows to show off a money shot, then goes back to being a whirling mess of metal. (Still, on the plus side at least it's not shaky-cam.)
The whole thing is impressive in that every penny spent is up there on the screen, and some of the visuals are pretty spectacular (though oddly, the gimmick of the title - that the robots can transform into vehicles and back - feels downplayed this time. Optimus and Bumblebee have a couple of hero transformations each, but there are no real jawdroppers like Blackout or Bonecrusher in the first film). Sam's parents are a lot funnier and less annoying than before, and Megatron and Starscream's master/servant relationship is also quite a laugh. But beneath all the gloss, there's no heart, no soul and no brain. Like a robot... in disguise.