Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Grading & Discussion

The Silver Corvette was Sideswipe. Interestingly, the brother relationship between Sideswipe and Sunstreaker (Who wasn't in the film) from the cartoon was instead given to Mudflap and Skids, who in the original had no relation.



BTW did anybody else notice Deep Roy (Keenser in Star Trek) as the Pyramid guard?

 

I love that part, where Simmons said he was a tourist from New York with his kids.

 

It really wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be. *sighs* First T4 now this. Only hope is G.I.Joe.

 

I thought it was...okay. The special effects and the action were top notch, and the story was kind of interesting, but it was all buried beneath way too much expository dialogue and way too many comic relief characters, most of which were complete failures.

Skids and Mudflap added nothing; the movie would have been better served if they'd been excised completely and Bumblebee made Sam's sole Autobot companion, like in the first movie. Sam's college roommate was completely pointless, and shouldn't have been in the movie once Sam and Mikaela left the college. Sam's mom was way over-the-top, and not in a good way. Simmons was funny, but did we really need to see him in a thong? And was Devastator's swinging ballsack supposed to be funny?

Optimus being absent for a long stretch of the movie really hurt it, I think. I get what they were trying to go for in paralleling what happened to Megatron, but Optimus, IMO, is the heart and soul of Transformers. He is the star of the show, in every incarnation. I want to see more of him, not more of Shia LaBeouf running around dodging 'splosions (though I don't really have a problem with LaBeouf, like a lot of folks seem to).

I'm really glad they decided to ignore that Bumblebee got his voice back at the end of TF1, though. He's a lot more fun when he can only communicate through audio clips.

 

I just got back from seeing Transformers 2 and I must say Michael Bay has got to be the worst director in the history of the film industry. He makes Ed Wood look like Orson Wells.

The cinematography and editing in this movie is awful! It was two and a half hours of random random, incomprehensible images flashing on the screen a million miles a second. Half the time I could not tell what the hell was going on!

I understand this is supposed to be a movie about giant robots fighting each other, and I was perfectly prepared to enjoy it on that level. The problem is when ever the robots would transform or fight, the camera would zoom in so close you couldn't make out the action. Not only that, but the camera was continuously moving in every single shot! I mean come on, is a tripod going to kill you!

Why Michael Bay thinks this is the proper way to film a movie I don't know. He's lucky this movie is called Transformers. That Transformer brand name might enable this movie to make its money back. If this movie was called anything else, we'd be looking at a huge bomb!

 

No, he does, he just wants to wait till 2012 to get it out.

 

Yeah, he wants to take a little break this time, and I don't blame him. He's probably had Transformers on the brain for the last four or five years.

Maybe this means ST2 will come out in 2011, with TF3 in 2012.

 

Cool. So basically the same way he sounded on Robot Chicken?

 

I pretty much agree with this. Skids and Mudflap weren't important, at all. They were kinda funny, but took up too much screen time, IMO. I would have preferred more screen time for the other autobots, like Bumblebee, Rachet and Ironhide. Sam's roommate became irritating after about two minutes. Aside from a few genuinely funny moments (like with the taser), he was disposable. I really love Sam's mom but they should have cut the scene with the brownies. Basically, they needed to drop all of the forced, unnecessary humor because it wasn't actually funny.

 

Revenge Of The Fallen alternate ending: what would have happened if the Decepticons hadn't been completely incompetent and relied entirely on one small and useless bot to track down the Allspark shard?

 

The movie's domestic take so far is $201 million and its total worldwide take is $281 million.

 

I saw this in IMAX on Friday with my friends and it looked amazing.

That's about the only positive I can give this movie though. It was otherwise a bloated mess. Everything that made me laugh in the first few minutes was making me groan by the 30th time we had to witness it by the middle part of the movie. The twins having some of the most screentime out of all the Transformers just speaks to the level of mentality Michael Bay was trying to achieve in this film.

I agree with some of the previous posters in saying that there really was no dramatic tension in the movie. I knew Optimus would be resurrected as soon as he died. The Decepticons were completely incompetent and wow did Megatron turn into a total wuss. In the first movie the Autobots were running from him in fright...in this one he gets the shit kicked out of him by literally everybody. And sad to say that even the titular "Fallen" was a total waste of a character.

Leg humping, ball jokes, Simmons' jock strap, Mikaela whining about love in the middle of Egypt...it got old really quickly. And Devastator, who when he transformed made me think a really great scene was coming up, just ends up choking on the twin and getting destroyed by a railgun? Wow. And I loved Jetfire to death (one of the only good parts of the movie), but just pulling out his spark to form Super Optimus..I'd much rather have seen a team-up of the Autobots. That and when the only good battle of the movie was the forest fight didn't really help me get through the 2 1/2 hour movie.

I really enjoyed the first movie, still did when I watched it earlier in the week. Left the theater shaking my head this time. One of my friends said I was being too critical of it since it was a TF movie, but all I know is that I enjoyed the first one and did not with this one.

Better pray to the Prime Spirits (in another WTF scene) that a sequel will be Bay-less.

^^^ Great link too, the Decepticons' incompetence is horrendous especially when they are dealing with the likes of the Twins who can overcome Devastator. Almost made me wish they'd blow up the Earth...

 

Now that I think back on it, did we see any interaction between Prime and the other bots at ALL in this movie?

There might have been a brief moment here or there, but for the most part it felt like the only real robot interaction of any kind was between the twins (and a very brief exchange between Ratchet and Ironhide).

I'm not some TF purist who wanted this to be an robot-centered story or anything, but I at least wanted a LITTLE more interaction between the bots this time!

 

The more I think about it, the more I wonder how much of this is Bay's fault, and how much of this was scripted? I'm curious to see a Transformers 3 without Michael Bay. Keep Orci & Kurtzman on board and let's see what they deliver without being pressured by Bay to insert all of this crap that he wants.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siGtn_SxKbs&NR=1

 

Place your bets. I say a drop of at least 60-70% box office between weeks ...

--Ted

 

Yeah, I really don't think this thing will have legs. At all.

 

Considering it's already made nearly $400 million worldwide, I don't think it really even needs legs at this point.

 

That's the sad part about it.