While looking at Optimus Prime, Tyrese asks “If God made us in his image, then who made that?” Let’s not get philosophical in a movie like this, please.
Because Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a terribly overlong, over-caffeinated debacle of explosion and demolition with shallowly underwritten characters scrapped under a metallic junkshop debris of a plot.
So it has no right to get to ask deep questions.
The plot, which you may easily forget after yet another combustion of any element that TNT can blow up like trucks, tanks, aircraft carriers, school dormitories and 3000 year old pyramids, centers on one-day college student Sam Witwicky touching the tip of that Allspark cube, which concentrates all of its information into his mumbling jumbling head transforming him into an epileptic fool. From there the Decepticons, who are the evil robots but you can’t tell once they’re rolling around annihilating each other in desert dunes with the bright colored good guys Autobots, must get out of their way in this misty English-speaking alien asteroid near Saturn they call home to get to Sam and consume this information inside him to light up the tip of the pyramids to avenge global catastrophe to mankind.
Director Michael Bay serves up a fanboy’s ultimate buffet of eruptions and perilous detonations that leave them overstuffed and you almost nauseous. Forget a story, and fun characters! You know what, forget lines. Give me a vacuum sand-sucking dino-robot. Forget most of the stuff that people loved about the first film! Now watch me destruct the shit out of Paris!
There were a few left from the first movie: there is still that teenage love affair between Sam, Shia LaBeouf and his uncontrollably hot now girlfriend Mikaela, Megan Fox, who stays perfectly made up despite running for her life in the middle of the desert. But their ten-minute love story (on who will say “I love you” first, although Sam says “I adore you”, which was not the same thing she says) gets shelved in the same pile as pointless subplots such as the forty-minute segment that features the military (headed by Mr. Fergie) preparing for a standoff that doesn’t do anything at all for the overall story, and a dull three-minute security patrol check in Egypt conducted by Johnny Depp’s Oompa-Loompa.
Of course Optimus Prime, Megatron (spoiler alert!?) and Sam’s best Camaro Bumblebee are back. Those are only megazoids from the list I can name because the rest of the robots are either hip-hop break-dancers, are unnamed, are insignificant, are tigers, are old (uh, elderly robots need canes) or are hot for Megan Fox and hump her on the leg.
There is also still the pairing of Sam’s ceaselessly cheap dad and delightfully dumb mom, who both took the superhero pill from the last movie since they can now both outrun explosions.
This movie tries to rely on brash humor to save it from rusting robotic mayhem. There’s the grease-loving hot blonde (in Sam’s college, they all have to look like that) who’s actually bionic woman, there’s Seymour played by that guy in all the Adam Sandler movies who used to work for the FBI but now settles in a deli restaurant of his moms (his mother lives with him, there’s a huge difference) who can interpret Sam’s visions and saved the world by keeping the sun alive, and there’s Leo, Sam’s tech-savvy friend who thinks he’ll die each time the movie car he’s in is about to fall from the movie sky filled with all the leads in a movie. He didn’t die. The centerpiece of this movie’s humor was not one but two shots of little dogs humping. What can I say, cinematic genius.
Why am I being such a douche? I should’ve loved Transformers 2! I couldn’t wait to see it! I loved the first one. I love explosions! I love robots! I loved the story. I guess they didn’t care anymore. They ditched a good story for good special effects. 150 minutes. What a colossal waste of my time. What a waste of hype. Oh well. The first movie’s still on my iPod, I’ll focus on that.
Finally.
