It’s difficult to find anyone with anything nice to say about the Transformers sequel. What about the Bureau-crats?
Some comments follow:
“They’ve managed to make a movie that is so incredibly bad that it manages to mark career lows for pretty much everybody involved. “
–David Poland, Movie City News
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments…. The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed The Rock in 1996. Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Faust made a better deal.”
—Roger Ebert
“You might make it out of the movie with your soul barely intact, but the actors in the film don’t fare so well.”
—Cole Smithey
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen takes everything that was bad about the first Transformers movie two years ago, and amplifies it to deafening proportions…. Revenge of the Fallen has a mentality that is clearly aimed at the 8-year-old set, although most parents of children that age will probably not appreciate Bay’s fetishistic treatment of various female bodies and coarse stabs at crude humor”
–James Kendrick, Q Network
“I think the franchise is ruined now.”
—Some Guy at the imdb discussion boards.
“Hey! This isn’t a link to a review! Jesus! It’s a bunch of really wrong action figures!”
—Grilled Jesus
I’ve heard some terrible things from coworkers as well. Going to wait for the DVD on this one. The first one was pretty terrible, I had a feeling it could only get worse.
Like what bad things? I’ve heard a lot of flak about this movie, but I don’t quite get it. What exactly are people expecting when they see this movie to begin with?
I can’t speak for anyone else but I hold up these movies against the animated Transformer’s movie which pretty much did everything right.
It’s funny that a ’80s cartoon manages to convey a more mature and cohesive story line than anything that Bay has done.
This is all second hand information but this is what I’ve garnered about the sequel so far:
– There are two, completely unecessary, robots that cross the Jar Jar line in racial stereotypes of urban black youth.
– Deus Ex resolution to an already convoluted plot
– Gratuitous T&A
– Infantile humor. One of the decepticons has testicles that are shot at.
– Completely ripping apart what little canon was established. Transformers that change into humans!
Maybe I will go see this just to see how bad it can get.
Actually, I thought this too, but the Transformer->Human is canon, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretenders_(Transformers) as shown here.
I agree with the Jar-Jaresque type robots not being needed, the reason for there existence is allowed for through the means they learn Earth’s language and culture, the internet, as mentioned in the 1st movie. They’re not needed though.
Gratuitous T&A? There’s more T&A on the Disney Channel.
The testicle part is taken out of context, you really need to see the scene to understand what is actually being shown (if you haven’t been told). It sort of answers a question thats on the back of everyone’s mind when any of them transform. Plus there’s no violence against said balls.
The Deus Ex resolution is nothing that hasn’t happened before in canon either. I felt the movie showed more faithfulness in respect to the ’84 movie and cartoons than the first one.
I just got done seeing the movie because I had a few friends tell me it was great, although I haven’t seen the first movie. It was borderline acceptable, but definitely not good nor worth the $9 I paid for it. A few of the problems:
– Whiny, clingy, useless female main character. I can’t even remember her name.
– Fight scenes that drag on and on long after they should have been over.
– Numerous logical errors and inconsistencies in the plot.
– Most of the autobots got almost no screen time, except for the ones who were jumping around and blowing things up in the background; the ones who got speaking parts were all annoying and unfunny, despite how hard they tried.
– As other people have mentioned, juvenile humor. Apparently Michael Bay thinks that testicle jokes and humping are the height of humor.
Well, my one of my local free rags (the other is the Portland Mercury) gave it what looks like a favorable review. To be specific, they liked it more than they liked the original (though they don’t say how much they liked the original).
[…] See strange here: Bureau 42 | Transformers: Revenge of a Fallen […]
I must be one of the only people on the planet that liked it. There was good action, and it was just a fun movie.
There were some glaring continuity flaws and some terrible “humor” from the aforementioned 2 bots, but otherwise, I didn’t really expect anything less from Michael Bay than what I got.
The one real complaint I had about the movie was that the humor it did have wasn’t very funny. I remember laughing at several of the jokes in the first movie and don’t think I laughed at anything in this one.
I went into this movie with low expectations. It is afterall Michael Bay. However, the movie itself was not that bad. It was full of robots kicking robot ass, which is what I paid to see. Yes there were many many scenes of Megan Fox running, running is slow mo, running is super slow mo but we knew to expect that from the first movie already.
Low points, the Autobot twins. Way too over-stereotyped. People point out that they learned how to interact from the internet but from everything I have seen the faces of the robots don’t change much. So now you have two jive talking robots who would have fit perfectly in the Airplane skit running around with a gold tooth, grossly exaggerated facial features and the maturity of a 10 year old.
The metal testicle part is way over blown by the media. It is on screen twice for about 10 seconds each and is a seg-way for the comic relief to make a comment about them.
There were many scenes that could have been completely cut. The human looking Decipticon could have been removed completely and the movie would have been shorter with more robot ass-kicking. We already know men are weak for petite blondes and we know Megan Fox can kick ass with the best of them.
So you go to see the movie for the robot on robot slug fest. It delivers. The effects are lacking in a couple of areas, they don’t feel as smooth and well integrated as the first movie. If they followed the animated movie and pretty much removed all human context from this one I am sure it would have had better ratings.
That’s exactly my complaint about the first movie, and why I’m hesitating about this one. The cartoon, the movies, and the comic were all about the Transformers. The first movie was all about the humans, and how they were reacting to, afraid of, or helping the giant alien robots. There wasn’t even really an attempt to characterize most of the robots, either.
The humans should be completely secondary in these movies — a backdrop, someone for the Autobots to be careful not to harm, and occasionally get help from, and the Decepticons to threaten and take hostage.
I liked Toplessrobot’s one line review the best: “Marginally better than shitting in your pants, but takes longer”
That was bad. I never thought I would pay to see a movie worse than Episode 1, but I finally have.
I also never thought I would see a movie that would make me long for the good old days of the original Transformers animated movie, but I did. Don’t get me wrong, I like the original, it’s just that when I saw it in its original run, I was one of the kids that started crying in the theater over Optimus Prime’s death. Bay has succeeded in making a movie that actually makes me want to watch the hated Hot Rod become the slightly-less-hated Rodimus Prime.