Transformers’ The Revenge of the Fallen’s Got the Sequel Bug!
By Hervé St-Louis
Jun 25, 2009 - 20:43:47 PM
Studios: Dreamworks SKG
Writer(s): Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman
Starring: Megan Fox, Shia LeBeouf, John Turturro, Ramon Rodriguez
Directed by: Michael Bay
Produced by: Stephen Spielberg, Michael Bay
Running Time: 2 hr. 24 min
Release Date: June 24, 2009 (wide)
Rating: PG13
Distributors: Paramount Pictures
Genre: Action/Adventure, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Sam Witwicki, the young human who saved the world and ended the war of the alien transforming robots known as the Transformers is going to college and wants to leave the adventurous life he had behind him and be a normal kid again. But forces greater than Sam conspire to implicate him in the war of the Transformers, pitting the heroic Autobots lead by the valiant Optimus Prime and the evil Decepticons, led by a revived and tyrannical Megatron. Will the Decepticons obtain the key to the energon machine that will destroy the solar system’s sun but them provide valuable energy?
This sequel of the first Transformers’ movie suffers from the same bug other successful franchises with multiple sequels have had before. The first sequel is better than the first outing and gives a rich cadence to the entire concept that was already well begun by a successful initial film. The plot in this film is not important. What is important is that everything that made the first Transformers’ film a success is reintroduced in the Revenge of the Fallen but with a finer touch and much more skill. Key aspects of the first Transformers’ film were epic fights, complicated transformation sequences, a lot of human interaction allowing them to take center stage over the robots and of course a large dose of humour. Well, The Revenge of the Fallen maximizes all of that but gives viewers more Transformers, more deaths, more characters to marvel at, more car and weird technology transforming and involving themselves in the human world and higher stakes than the first film.
This film will keep audiences entertained continually and even the more idiotic robots introduced in this sequel are bearable. There are far more ridiculous robots than in the first film, but unlike the first film, this reviewer stopped caring about who would make it at the end. It’s a large-scale war and both sides take many casualties. In fact, for many of them, their final whereabouts and statuses are unknown. This is a total war. I liked how the military culture of the US armed forces was well captured, especially as it regards their traditional defiance of Democratic administrations. The other thing I liked was how a lot of the plot was lifted from classic Transformers’ stories. For example, the impression of the matrix in Sam’s brain is something that has happened way back in the first Transformers’ comic book released by Marvel Comics in 1984.
Visually, the choice of the filmmakers to continue with the curvy and strip like modelling of the Transformers makes for many little pieces and elements to follow visually in a scene. Just like in the first film, audiences will miss a lot of the details flying by as the Transformers’ designs are so intricate that by the time one understands what is happening tom the mass moving in front of one’s eyes, it has shifted into something else. And this is not just relegated to the Transformers. For example, I’m a big fan of Bombardier’s three wheel Can-Am Spyder, but the one showed in the film went by so fast that I didn’t even see when my friends pointed to it.
Yet, the characters’ design was better than in the past, perhaps because my eyes are better used to their forms. These Transformers while being very similar in many aspects to the ones from the 1980s cartoon series, are also much more evolved and gave off vibes of other science fiction properties like Aliens. This film is undeniably this year’s blockbuster. Now, let’s hope that the rule about first sequels being better than original films doesn’t mean that the third Transformers’ film will not be a disaster, as the rule has dictated so far. The third Matrix was excruciatingly bad. The Third Spider-man was a disaster, and the third X-Men film was a total meltdown.
Great review! I'm so glad you put the movie in the context of the original Transformers stories, something I know nothing about. And I did enjoy the jokes about Rumsfeld, but Obama was mischaracterized. He would have been front and center -- and would never give a presidential order giving a Rummy NSA chief control over Optimus Prime! Obama and Optimus Prime probably hang out together.
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