*** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

Well this opened today here in the UK and most of Europe.

Saw it earlier. Not as good as TF1 as the story aspects were even more minimal and they replaced exposition with a lot more action.

But the action & CGI were a lot more than TF1 and the actors were all ok. Some of the humour was pretty funny especially with Sam's parents. This is a wall to wall sci-fi action popcorn flick. Do not take it seriously but just engage brain in neutral and enjoy for 2.5 hours. Michael Bay sure can make these type of movies look very slick & here he goes into overdrive with some stunning setpieces. 3 VFX shots in particular are eye popping when you see them you will know which ones I am talking about. The robots dominate a lot of screentime and ILM did a seamless job not 1 VFX shot looked ropey at all.

When this baby hits BD it can potentially destroy equipment!!!! as the LFE is so deep & low the speakers in the cinema were struggling to cope and you could really feel the deep bass & hear the speakers reaching their limits with it!!!

TF1 is a better overall movie as parts of 2 feel a little tired like they are running out of juice but in the 2nd part of the movie some of the real world locations look stunning and some you will remember from other popular movies but TF2 shows some new aspects to them.

If your not a Bay fan then this movie will do nothing to change your mind but if you like or love Bay's work then this will give you another massive fix until TF3 in 2012!!!

re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

Saw this today too, overall thought it was OK, great special effects but no real story or characters to invest in. Megatron and The Fallen aren't given much in the script - can't Hollywood do good villians anymore? Even Star Trek which I enjoyed a lot didn't get this right.

I expected them to ramp up the action, but was saddened to see them ramp up the 'humour' which I thought was forced enough first time round. Sam's mother in particular seems to have become mentally retarded between films and the Autobot Twins and Sam's college roommate were annoying for almost all of their screen time.

On the plus side the action was impressive and Bay clearly had a good time getting as much military hardware as possible in front of his cameras. Egypt and the Pyramid's look fantastic. The Transformer effects are great and I thought the fights were a bit easier to follow this time out. Excellent sound mix too.

In summary it's very much a switch your brain off film. If you can get past the fact that the screenwriters seem to feel 'annoying' characters = 'funny' characters then you'll probably enjoy. Just hope more work goes into the script next time.

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

This thread is now the Official Review Thread for "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen". Please post all HTF member reviews in this thread.

Any other comments, links to other reviews, or discussion items will be deleted from this thread without warning!

If you need to discuss those type of issues then I have designated an Official Discussion Thread.



Crawdaddy

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

i caught a midnite screening tonite at my local favorite theater. it was packed. i know they made some money tonight. on the way out i spoke to a manager that i am familiar with and she said that they had all 18 screens going and sold over 3000 tickets just for midnite screenings. it was a zoo.

and the movie was a zoo too.

big.
loud.
bigger plot holes.
better than terminator: salvation but suffered from the same poor editing.

to make a long story short this movie is literally a live action cartoon. literally. the script stretches that pg13 rating as far as the language goes. and there were a couple of annoying jarjarbinksbots that were atrocious. i do not understand hollywood's fascination with these types of characters. they are borderline offensive from a couple of perspectives.

i wasn't bored. but i left feeling average. boom. bang. blow it up good. now go home. meh.

i hope that someone in contemporary hollywood will learn to write a story where the vfx will complement the story instead of become the story very soon. i am becoming increasingly disappointed with these big vfx movies. as hinted to in my first paragraph this movie will do very well. it may even see some broken records as far as openings go. so the inevitable sequel will be made with more action porn. i am sure that tf3 will be even more of the same because why would hollywood change a profitable formula.

only two hopes left for the summer. district 9 which i think will be a late summer sleeper and gamer which had a surprisingly good trailer.

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

The difference between The Transformers franchise and the Terminator franchise is one is meant to entertain first while the other started out as a social commentary with a scifi flair until McF**k ruined it.

Transformers is a pure summer action movie. Can't complain as this is why these types of movies come out during the summer. They're not meant to be a social commentary. They're meant to entertain. Pure and simple.

In other words, I loved it!!!!!!

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

Wow, the quote that came to mind was "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" when watching this film. I get the feeling Michael Bay gets a script, and then just picks the pages he wants to film because he thinks it'll look and sound cool on the big screen. But, Michael Bay is a known directorial quantity, you know he doesn't care about plot development, character development, and always goes for cheap laughs and bombastic action sequences, never provides enough cinematic connective tissue to make his films dramatically engaging, all the while providing top-shelf action porn.

So, Transformers 2 is truly bigger and louder than the initial installment, but not better, and simply goes to well of "robot-on-robot" violence too many times, and its sparse dramatic beats lack subtlety or weight. It's like a live-action cartoon, but it's even more over-the-top than the average Saturday morning cartoon, trading quick, swishy camera moves for what could have been awe-inspiring transformations. The tension from "danger" is both cartoonish and unconvincing, leaving us with 1-dimensional characters and caricatures who don't provide any emotional engagement for us to hook into their situation.

There is, what seemed to be, a 30 minute stretch where it was the cinematic equivalent of watching the characters running in place in quicksand, a lot of action was going on, but nothing was happening until they introduced a deux ex machina to get the gang from point A to a far away point B. There was just a ridiculous amount of story-telling deficiencies going on in this film.

I think I seriously overdosed on all the robot carnage and explosions on the screen, after a while you just get numb to it all.

I give it 1.75 stars, or a grade of C-.

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

I saw the midnight movie of this and practically fell asleep during parts that didn't have robots hitting each other (which was surprisingingly more than you would think) and sat almost as bored through the endless explosions and chase scenes Horrible pacing, story exposition, character development paired with bouts of robot on robot action that while cool for a minute becomes numbing after two. Save your money and go see HURT LOCKER or something else this weekend. Or just hit yourself on the head a few times and save the money.

Bleh.

For clarity's sake, I did enjoy the first movie for all its flaws but this ejected what little charm and characterization the first one had and replaced it with crass, insulting (gender, racial, etc.) and low brow humor and confused storytelling.

Skip it.

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

I think I liked this one just as much or a smidge more than the first one although I prefer the finale to the first one more, the desert setting in this one just made everything look bland and dusty.

Love what they did with Optimus Prime this time out, he was truly badass, manning up and taking on three Decepticons at once, it reminded me of the big fight between King Kong and the T-Rex's in Jackson's King Kong which I loved.

Also loved what they did with Jetfire, it was a great move making him a combination of Jetfire and Kup, the elderly and wise Autobot from the 1986 movie. The little remote control 4X4 Decepticon traitor was great for some laughs (saw a lot of Joe Pesci in there lol) as was the Autobot twins.

The humans were more than capable amongst the metal-on-metal mayhem, especially Shia Lebeof who seems to be maturing as an actor nicely. And Megan Fox...dayum, she's so hot it's insane in this.

My only minor quibble is with some of the humor, while much of it worked some didn't and felt awkward, like Sam's mom, did she lose her freakin' mind between films? They need to get that woman to some Prozac ASAP!

Nice to see the Matrix of Leadership show up and used in a way that's almost emotionally on par with how Rodimus Prime used it in the 1986 animated film,
Warning Spoiler! Click to show

Lastly, the action...good lord! Bay truely does this stuff better than anyone else, he get's off on madness and mayhem and his enthusiasm is infectious, you just knew that he had a good time making this.

Bring on the BD!

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

Grueling. So why did I go...the critical consensus is absolutely brutal, and it's not like Bay isn't a known quantity. But my son wanted to see it, and I wanted to see if it really was as bad as critics are saying.

Easily the least coherent plot of any film with this budget and runtime, probably ever. There basically wasn't a plot. I made a comment elsewhere that good characters exist beyond the film's runtime. These character's don't make sense outside of specific scenes, much less within their own film. The filmmaking is so lazy, it just plops characters where they need to be at any given time. It positively makes the first one (which also dropped characters and points willy nilly) look economical and robust.

And that would be tolerable if there was reasonable humor, characters, or exciting whiz bang action. The film fails all three, and the third one was a surprise to me. The action was terrible, with the exception of a few nice action beats involving Sideswipe early and OP in the middle. Even those are pretty incoherent, but there is at least some verve.

The score was basically noise, and the sound design was "as much bass, always". It wasn't nearly as well shot as previous Bay films. It did have typical Bay trademarks of racial and gender stereotyping in the extreme. It's even more obvious when he applies it to ROBOTS.

My son liked it OK, which for a 5 year old is bald condemnation.

A genuine piece of shit. The worst thing I can say about it is that it was boring, a claim I also apply to the final action sequence.

The actors are pretty bad, but I can't blame them. The director didn't care, and the scriptwriter couldn't be assed, so why should they?

I wasn't a fan of the first, but it was better than this. Anyways, it's not qite Batman and Robin, but it is an excruciating experience.

3/10 (for the early Sideswipe kill and some OP),
Chuck

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

Transformers 2 almost reminds me of 2006's absurdly overrated Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest. Both are way too long, go absolutely nowhere, and make me feel like 2+ hours of my life are gone and I'll never get them back. The difference being that Pirates at least had some aspirations to be a good movie (of which it collapsed under its own bloat). Transformers still doesn't seem to give a crap.

This film is overblown for the sake of being overblown. Nothing makes sense, new Autobots and Decepticons keep showing up without much explanation, there's no real sense of exposition, and the whole "plan" of The Fallen (a character introduced without much fanfare at all really) seems to have been tossed out at random.

If Bay had managed to allocate some of his nearly 3-hour running time to trying to make a decent story I might have cared. But no. That's not his thing. Its all hot chicks and right wing pro-millitary complex fetishism. You still suck Michael Bay.

1/2*

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

I screened this a couple of days ago with a few other people. Now, I am not normally one who talks during a movie, but this was an exception since there were only four of us in the theater.
Twenty minutes in, we started making cracks at the film every so often. Nothing made sense, nothing was explained, WAY too many plot devices just to move the story forward, and the trip into outer space was just...bizarre.
Lucky for us our copy snapped in half and we were unable to finish the last twenty minute. (From what I was told it's pretty priceless in the "they actually thought that was a good idea?" category.)
A good time was had by all, as this is PRIME Mystery Science Theater 3000 material to be sure.
I think when the robot started humping Megan Fox is when we all checked out and decided this was better enjoyed with running commentary.
When Agent Simmons yells at an ancient Transformer who is telling a story, he says something about making things coherent, moving his story along in a way that doesn't confuse people, I actually thought(and then blurted out) "Finally! I hoped someone would do it!"
Unfortunately, the wise old Decepticon was no help, instead he started babbling more nonsense.
This was a waste of time.
If you like car commercials, this is your kind of movie. For the rest of us...
My grade: F

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

Either I'm easier to entertain or I saw a different movie than most of the reviewers here. The action, CGI and effects (both visual and uadio) were spot on, and it was much more humrous. Like the one reviewer said, it will tax the heartiest of systems with it's low bass shooting straight to the highs in a flash. I don't understand the dilema with the plot, first it's a sc-fi/fantasy movie, how much of a plot do you want? There is no more or less of a plot than the first one.

Bottom line is I highly recommend seeing it on the big screen, and should be a must buy when it comes to Blu-Ray!

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

This movie is getting beat up enough that it doesn't need me to add to it. I'll just say that I think that if you liked the first one, you'll probably like this one too. It's not really my type of movie so it's not much of a surprise that I didn't like it.

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

Okay, my wife, sister-in-law and I (all of us are 50) went to see T2:ROTF at an afternoon matinee. All we were looking for was an action packed popcorn movie, and that is exactly what we got. My wife declared it as "awesome". Outside of the unnecessary sexual humor, we really liked this movie a lot, and we had just rewatched the first film last Saturday.

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

I went with a couple of friends. We liked it alot. This is a check your brain at the door type movie. But I can't wait for the Blu-ray release. The sound was incredible.

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

Thought this was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It was kind of a cross between baywatch (slow motion boob bounces and a college dorm full of bimbos), WWE fights, and moronic attempts at humor that consisted of dogs and/or robots humping and stupid parents - throw in "scrotum" robot humor for good measure. Throw on a teen "love" story about who will say "I love you" first is the big deal. Also add in a couple of falls the hero's just walk away from that would have killed them for good measure. If you blow up enough things, it must be a good movie....so lets blow up everything....
It went on way too long and was so loud I came way with a headache. It could have an hour cut from it and not effected what little story there was.

Zero stars....don't waist your time with this stinker....

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

I saw this with my daughter at a packed midnight show Tuesday. We watched part 1 before we went the to theater.

In short, I liked it more than part 1 with the exception of the racist twin Autobots and Shia's roommate. Had someone like Jonah Hill actually gotten that part, I think he could have brought some real laughs to the film. The character in its current form serves no purpose and all of his lines could have been Shia's. The sound and VFX were excellent. Shia's parents were great for me -- much funnier than in part 1. The film is bloated and overblown but that doesn't bother me.

Besides the aforementioned shortcomings, I had problems with the plot. I can say the same for part 1, though. This is not good storytelling. The writing is by committee. Had they stuck to Spielberg's vision ("a story about a boy and his car") and told it in 3 parts, I think we'd have a much better final product.

I enjoyed it for what it was.

***/*****

Re: *** Official TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN Review Thread

I checked my brain at the door and still hated it. I love most summer blockbusters but this was just awful

Everyone can deal with some plot inconsistencies in summer films but this was just beyond belief.
At least I expected some decent action sequences but apart from one or two moments (the fight in the forest) most of them were incoherent. I dont mind the whole up close and shakey cam style in battle sequences but you still need to give your battles a sense of geography and scale so you know where everything is. And you need to be able to tell who the hell is fighting who.

My main problem with the film is the sexual reference and innuendo which was completely inappropriate for younger kids who are going to be crying out to see this film. I certainly wouldnt be taking them.

This film has nothing at all to recommend it except for a few mildy well done visual sequences which last seconds before dropping into incoherency again. Approximately one minute of a near 2 and a half hour movie does not warrant any stars at all.

Awful!!

Loved it! Popcorn action at it's best. Movies like this are about great special effects and lots of action and this film delivers.

When I go into a film like this I don't care about how it follows the original story, the quality of acting or trying to find some fantastic plot. Just take me away for 2 hours for a great ride.

A+

Both IMAX shows were sold out this past weekend, hoping to get a ticket for Saturday. 

Totally agree. A fun film for all the family. I don't know where all the hate comes from, really I don't, and these sour-pussed supernerds are crazy nuts about the even more kiddie-friendly Speed Racer, go figure.

The little transformer robots running around with silly voices didn't appeal to me much, but the action setpieces were topnotch and as expected in a Michael Bay film the visual effects were astonishing. Not being up on the Transformers mythos I wasn't sure what was happening sometimes. But I had an entertaining time at the cinema.




I laughed, I cringed. I ogled Megan Fox (the best visual effect in the film and lovingly filmed running in slow-motion not once but three times!). I looked at my watch, the film was 20mins too long, some of the comedy with Sams nitwit parents could have been excised and left for the dvd.

The film has already grossed closed to half a billion in just a few days, looking forward to the next instalment.

Along with Star Trek one of the most entertaining films of the year.

4 out of 5. Highly Recommended.

P.S. I loved the look of the Transformers home planet, why is it in our solar system?


Edited by Steve Christou - 7/1/2009 at 08:34 pm GMT

Well, the first film certainly was no masterpiece, but it at least had moments (fleeting though they were) of genuine wit, imagination, and even a slight bit of awe. Revenge of the Fallen, on the other hand, is a colossal mess: a chaotic and almost completely incomprehensible two-and-a-half-hour onslaught of Bayhem.  Of course, I wasn't expecting Citizen Kane here.  So the movie’s plot is ridiculous, its characterizations are paper-thin, and its jaw-droppingly embarrassing attempts at humor aren’t the least bit funny (although I have to point out that many a summer blockbuster has cracked these problems quite successfully). Fair enough; we’re here to see giant robots fight each other, and then transform into vehicles and crash into each other.

The problem is that we don’t really get to see much of that.  The camera never stops moving long enough to let us, and the movie appears to have been edited with a cheese grater.  By the time we finally come close to figuring out what’s going on in one scene, we’re already half-way through another scene that’s in the middle of doing the same thing to us. There is no overall build, no sense of anticipation. For all the $200 million that went into this thing, Bay is still making commercials; each scene is shot and edited as if it were a stand-alone ad (whether for GM, the Army, or simply a better movie, I don‘t know). Even though this has pretty much been Bay’s standard operating procedure since he actually was making commercials, here it seems more glaring and obvious than usual.

It’s one thing for a movie to have a silly plot that you just go along with as part of the fun; it’s quite another to literally not be able to tell what’s physically happening on the screen. Let me put it this way: I know most of these characters’ names. I know that Devastator is a giant Decepticon made up of six (or in this movie’s case, seven) construction vehicles, and yet he was almost completely formed before I knew what was happening. There’s one shot where you faintly see, through a storm of digitally created sand, a cement mixer ramming into another vehicle and attaching itself to it. The rest is just a mass of metal falling on top of itself.  Similarly, when it came to the much ballyhooed forest battle, even with the expanded aspect ratio of the IMAX screen, I couldn’t tell you whether Optimus was fighting Megatron, Starscream, or Mechagodzilla.

When I got home from the theater, I popped in my DVD of the animated Transformers: The Movie from the 80s just to see if I really was unfairly trashing ROTF’s incoherence. Sure enough, the animated film is probably hard to follow for the uninitiated, but even if you don’t know the characters’ names, you can at least recognize the Autobot who sounds like Scatman Crothers every time he’s on screen and usually, you’re able to discern what he’s doing. And also…


Warning Spoiler! Click to show
I dunno. I’m sure that ROTF will make a ton of money (it already has brought in quite a haul). I’m sure studio execs are thinking, “Alright, now we need more movies about giant robots crashing into each other and little dog robots humping girls’ legs and real dogs going at it on top of a mailbox and mothers getting high off pot brownies and twin robots acting like Amos ‘n Andy (because that’s really funny) and former government agents working at delis and being all funny and, and, and….” And at that point, the execs’ brains will explode from trying to comprehend the idea of all those things existing in one movie and the potential money to be made from bringing in audience members who might like one or more of them.

Meanwhile, the audience won’t know what to think, but they’ll have already paid their money, and the new execs who take over will slip on the remains of the old execs’ brains that are still on the conference room floor, see what they were thinking about, and put two and two together. Then they’ll say, “Alright, now we need more movies about giant robots crashing into each other,” etc., and the cycle will repeat itself.

And more garbage like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will get made, and we’ll probably go to see it.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen  

This movie was bad. It made no sense whatsoever, I seriously have never seen a movie with this many plot holes before. It was about 35-40 minutes too long. Full of stupid unfunny "humour". I actually found it boring in places and I was looking forward to the end. Michael Bay the self proclaimed action director has created a movie that is surprisingly lacking in action, the action that is present is often shot in medium close-up making it extremely difficult to make out what the hell is going on. I give it one star for the CGI which was incredible, and one star for Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf who I like despite the paper thin characterisation. I'm being very generous with this score. 

I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.  Lots of action, some really good cgi fight scenes. Certainly a clear block buster for the summer.  We had a lot of fun in this movie.  I have to admit, I had to shy away from the children regarding some explanations the kids were asking about.  What's a P____y, and what's a scrotum.  To the boy it was easy but to the girl, well I haven't given her an answer yet.  

I liked it, story was lame tough. During the movie there were times where I questioned why the characters were at a certain place at a certain time. So aimless as someone called it. I just loved the funny parts like when his mom got high but it was kind of long.