Movie Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
- Theatrical release date
- June 24, 2009
- DVD release date
- October 20, 2009
- Grade
- C+
Autobots rule!
I don’t really demand much from my summer entertainment: explosions, a half-way interesting premise, some nifty CGI, and just enough story to keep my mind from wandering (it’s too small to be let out on its own…). Michael Bay’s latest, the $200 million sequel to 2007’s Transformers succeeds on all fronts but the last. While the premise of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is moderately interesting, the story itself is silly and convoluted and mostly delivered in one marathon exposition session (ouch!) by an ex-Decepticon who talks like a pirate.
Hmmm, not promising.
Still, the return of the most of the characters from the last movie is welcome and a lot of fun. Though sometimes the comedic relief misfires (news flash to Hollywood: dogs humping each other does not equal humor), most of it is just funny enough to make one laugh, but also forgettable, pretty much the way a summer blockbuster should be.
Minor misfires aside, the major problem with the movie is Bay’s indulgent running time of 2 hours 30 minutes. That is only six minutes longer than the 2007 movie, but it feels like six hours. Once the major battle sequence is joined at around the two hour mark, it just keeps going and going like the Energizer bunny. Honestly, I missed the moment when the good guys overcame the bad because I’d stopped paying attention. Excising a good 15-20 minutes from that last half-hour would have been wise.
During this last half-hour, there are multiple shots of explosions in the foreground, explosions in the background, people running around and shooting guns, and robots ripping each other apart. You know, what should be enjoyable popcorn fun. But the plot does not progress nor does the action get somehow spectacularly more interesting as the butt-numbing half-hour wears on toward its conclusion. And then, poof! Movie’s over.
In the first movie, I thought it was rather funny that one of the opening captions told us we were in “Qatar, the Middle East,” as if there were another Qatar somewhere on the planet that could easily be mistaken for the Middle Eastern one. But this movie trumps that a hundred times over. Our heroes, without any papers at all, drive from Cairo . . . to Petra, Jordan . . . and back in a matter of minutes or hours at the most (it all appears to happen in a single afternoon). I can tell you, it’s a six-hour bus ride from Cairo to Rafah at the Egypt-Israel border. Using that distance as a guide, one can see that Cairo-Petra-Cairo, is not the drive of a single afternoon, nor is it something you can accomplish without documentation. On top of this, our characters also appear to run through the hypostyle hall at Karnak, even though we are repeatedly shown that they are in Giza hundreds of miles from that location. And speaking of the pyramids, the bad guys start trashing the pyramid of Khephren, but later, it’s seen standing perfectly pristinely in the sun, so it would seem the Decepticons repaired it and moved on to the pyramid of Khufu during a scene break. Or something. I’m assuming the filmmakers didn’t bother to notice that the pyramids don’t actually look that much alike.
Oh well. It’s not a great movie. I won’t even say it’s a particularly good movie, but if you want explosions and robots fighting to the swelling strains of an orchestra, well, take some popcorn and don’t worry if you buy soda. Once the big fight at Giza starts, you have time to go to the bathroom and then get a refill, and you can return knowing you won’t have missed a thing.
Copyright Martha Kneib. Published 1 July 2009 in What’s New.
Reader comments
Commenting is closed for this article.