Yojimbo's Movie Review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

"Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 01/27/12

The Decepticons return to Earth under the command of one of the original "primes" to restart an ancient machine designed to cannibalise the sun into an energy source. I actually didn't have a problem with the original Transformers film; okay it was big and dumb and was embarrassing to say the least whenever the characters opened their mouths, but it had loads of well engineered action and entertained on a very base level. As such I wasn't exactly expecting high art from the sequel, but this is dumb with a capital D. Not just dumb, but dumb by MICHAEL BAY STANDARDS. It makes Independence Day look like Shakespeare. Bay obviously just made a list of all the ingredients of the summer blockbuster (explosion, car chase, love scene, exploding monument, fart joke, college dorm full of Playboy bunnies, car chase, love scene, explosion, military porn, car chase, etc etc), threw them into a blender and just randomly vomitted the contents onto the screen. It has no narrative flow, no momentum, no emotional connections; something happens, then something else, then something else with no logic or sense attached to the events whatsoever. As a result, although the bare bones of the plot actually make more sense than that of the original, it's impossible to care what happens. I've never before seen a film in which I literally couldn't care less whether any of the characters lived or died. Not one. On the plus side, the special effects cannot be faulted and visually it is absolutely eye boggling, but this bloated mess doesn't even deliver on the action front; huge swathes of it are nothing but nonsensical plot development and weakest of the weak comedy; the "twins" in particular are like having not one, but TWO Jar Jars on the screen. The first film was hardly an intellectual exercise, but this is like being awake while a frontal lobotomy is performed on you.