Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Since its one of the hot movies of the summer and one of the shaping forces of my childhood, here is my review of the new Transformers movie. It’s relatively spoiler free and of course is an opinion, though if you want the briefest of brief of opinions then I shall sum it up like so. I’d see it again.
First thing to say is that this is obviously a Michael Bay movie, no two ways about it. There are explosions and lots of them, and then there are some more explosions plus a few more after that. The special effects are crazy good, some of the best ever seen and none where it blatantly screams computer generated, even if you know it is. There are plenty ot mechs as well, both Autobot and Decepticon. All beautiful animated and smoothly moving, and indeed there are some truly great fight scenes between the mechs that really are the highlight of the movie. In fact the fight scenes between the mechs are the strongest scenes of the movie, and more gripping than a lot of the drama scenes.
As for the plot of the movie, well there isn’t much to it. It has as many plot holes as the first movie did, but a lot more plot devices than the first. Yet for all of this there is much individual plot advancement amongst the returning characters, and the overall story of the movie is rather fragmented and not pieced together well. Another thing that seemed troubled was the pacing, it took the movie quite awhile to actually get going and the time in between just seemed a bit too much like filler. I think what the movie ultimately suffers from is too much cast and not enough time. There are dangers with having a large ensemble cast and the main pitfall is the fact that after a certain point you simply cannot develop the characters in any meaningful way. Which shows in the Autobots especially, for all the new mechs they added, I felt like I actually saw the transformers less in this movie than I did in the previous one.
The dialogue in the movie hasn’t changed that much since the first, it’s still full of one liners that are hit or miss. The same can be said of the humor, even though it has a more juvenile tone to it. Some of the best dialogue belongs to the mechs themselves, and the voice acting is absolutely peerless. There is a certain thrill that went through me the first time I heard Soundwave speak in the movie. It only the visible actors had been as believable in some of their dialogue the movie would have been even better.
All in all it a good movie, but not great and it definitely could have been better. Still, it’s good enough that I’d willing pay to go see it again. The real question will be if I will see it as often as I saw the first one.
