A Nutshell Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Rating: 2/10 (23 June 2009)

The story, if it's any excuse to call it one, involves Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) facing some teenage existential romance issues, quite petty amongst the world's concerns that the Decepticons are not yet a done deal, with the Autobots joining forces with US soldiers forming NEST, an operations unit with jurisdiction just about anywhere in the world, because the world does not have soldiers, or competent ones at that – Jordan only has 2 choppers being swatted down like flies.
Throw in more bureaucratic nonsense like a rehash of the first film, the return of Josh Dumahel and Tyrese Gibson giving a collective to soldiers on the ground, John Turturro for some weak linkage to the first film, and a highly irritating, immature Ramon Rodriguez in a nerdy roommate role who got caught up in situations he never bargained for. In fact, there are so many frat boy situations and lame jokes tossed around, that it made it seem that the scriptwriters and filmmakers all had some repressed teenage fantasies they needed to play out on screen. Needless characters, just like the Witwicky parents, just bloat the screen and the runtime, just to have more human presence in the story, but serving little purpose other than to elicit some cheap laughter.
Sure, Michael Bay had responded to fans clamouring for more robots in disguise, but that had translated to a load of nameless, faceless robots either created just for laughs thanks to a renegade allspark fragment, or introduced so that they can be blasted to smithereens. Even the final assault of Decepticons were made up of unknown, generic looking robots that were there for cannon fodder. As for Devastator, what a big let down and a cop out. That on screen is not the composite giant robot I had known through the years, and reeks like the Americanized Godzilla where its orientation became severely changed, here to serve nothing more than a huge vacuum cleaner.
Nameless, faceless robots extend to the Autobots too, with Optimus Prime and Bumblebee taking up most of the screen time being obvious fan favourites, with others being Ironhide, the newly created Twins, and supporting acts like Arcee and Sideswipe, together with loyalty flipfloppers like Wheelie (whom I thought all along was supposed to be an Autobat) and Jetfire (this stays true, in a way). The biggest let down of all would be the Fallen, supposedly one bad-assed transformer with a huge axe to grind, becoming nothing more than a lazy bastard whose threats he made get forgotten about totally, in between snarls.
If there's anything of merit here, then yes, hats off to the CGI folks who have upped the ante with their numerous detailed transformations of robots to vehicles, and vice versa. There were action sequences intricately crafted, but alas some dodgy camera angles sometimes get in the way of their creative genius. There were a handful of action sequences which fell prey to extreme close ups and resulted in a huge mesh and mess of clanging metal being welded together and thrown about on screen, where you can hardly tell who's who, made all the more difficult when the Decepticons aren't as brightly coloured. The finale is some 30 minutes, but largely reminiscent of the old cartoon series where you have two opposing combatants occupying one side of the screen each, and firing everything at one another, and missing a whole lot. Then wash-rinse-repeat, or cue heroic Autobot who rips apart the enemy without dripping engine oil.
Fans of the history of Transformers might feel a little mixed with the origins of the Transfomers explained here in a little bit more detail, a continuation of the allspark artifact seen in the previous film, with biblical elements like the fallen angel with the featuring of an important element such as the leadership matrix. Even a moment of the Transformers animated film found its way here, though I will not reveal what it is since it's a huge plot point and fuels pretty much the entire 2nd half of the film. And if there's one major gripe I have to make, it is this – Bumblebee is a four-seater Camaro (and we're reminded about this time and again), but to Sam, he'd rather pack his folks into the car, while opting to run some 4 miles in the desert dust to a common destination amidst a raging all out war. Right, yay to illogical heroic moment misconstrued to be sacrifice.
I will unabashedly say that I've enjoyed the first Transformers movie, but this sequel is obviously churned out to milk the fanboys of their money, together with so many blatant merchandising opportunities with variations of toys. But that's what the fans want, and that's probably what they got and lapped up, given the reaction of the audience who laughed at every single unfunny moment, cheered at every robot death, and roared with approval with every shot of a military vehicle put in just because Bay could. One should be offended by what went on screen in a total waste of time and budget, and this goes down in my books as an over-hyped and stale summer blockbuster.