jdslater1

It was only a very small thing that wouldn't have changed the whole film if you had noticed it!

When you first see the Armardilo in that hanger they had a load of pointy things on the floor (even Bay didn't know what they were in his commentary). They had the same pointy things in the Autobot base.
Kinda like they shared stuff.
That's the thing, they take the time to put these little things in there, and screw up everything else.


In regards to them leaving the musuem and going straight to the aircraft graveyard, the only way that would have made sense is that Jetfire used the spacebridge. But he didn't mention it.

Supermallet

I am a Transformers fan. Watched the show. Watched the original movie. Loved the 2007 film. Hated this one.

You're seriously putting the Devastator balls as a PRO?! I can see that being one of your "not annoying" things, but an actual pro?? I guess you really are the target audience for this movie.

Also, the Fembot bothered me as it opens the film up to Terminator territory. If they can make robots look and act like humans, why not just replace everyone around Sam with robots? Also, earlier in the film Ironhide says he can "smell" a nearby Decepticon. If these robots really can detect each other, why doesn't Bumblebee react when the fembot gets into him? Why doesn't she react when she realizes she's sitting in an Autobot? I could see her not reacting in order to maintain her disguise, but it's clear Bumblebee only reacts to her as a hot chick, because the whole scene is about him trying to convince Sam not to cheat.

Did I miss these Gremlin decepticons?

So robot balls are a "pro" but Megan Fox is a "con"? I think I'm seeing a pattern...

They're not meant to be hispanic, they're meant to be black. And they're really offensive.

The first movie had good humor, this one only had the parents to make it funny. The rest of the humor made me groan all the way through.

Ronnie Dobbs

NOTE TO SELF: Don't read Supermallets reviews ever.

Supermallet

Yes, because heaven forbid I should have my own opinions on movies. What happens when I love a movie you also love? Does that mean you'll have to start hating that movie because I also like a movie that you hate?

jdslater1

I thought Soundwave sounded like Dr Claw (Inspector Gadget) more than cartoon Soundwave. But that is Frank Welker for you.

And yes I know he done the orginal voice!

RD1973

Damn, look at the poll results. They're all over the place.

I haven't seen the movie yet. I'll be watching it on Sunday. But at this point, I have no hope of it being good. Its pure morbid curiosity.

I just saw the first one again since getting it on dvd. Its ok, but it feels like you could easily remove half an hour and it would be much better.

Apparently, the new one could lose a whole hour. Maybe someone will give us a pair of phantom edits.

By the way, how much more footage is there in the IMAX version. I have to travel about an hour to see it on IMAX. Should I bother?

starman9000

Hated the first one, but the nephews wanted to go to this so I went last night. It seemed like the same movie to me, I may have even liked it a little more, which isn't saying much. I guess I don't get why it's getting worse reviews than the first, except for the been there, done that factor of seeing the robots for the first time. The goofy twins were terrible, but the crowd was rolling with them. I figured this would not make a ton of money off of early reviews, but judging by the group last night, it'll still rake it in.

stingermck

I'm very interested to read the inevitable "what would you change in Transformers 2?" thread.

Sanjuro37

I don't know which movie I hated more this year: Terminator Salvation or this. The only thing remotely redeemable about this film was Peter Cullen's voice acting. Everyone else's voice acting was all over the place and it was racist, sexist and piggishly American (only the US President made a pact with the aliens? Only the Americans can call on them? Oh, and like five British people because at least they speak English. That's God's language!). The action is crap with terrible direction, worse editing and unidentifiable goings-on among the robots. And the dialogue is either super expositional or endlessly unfunny one-liners that are all totally inappropriate for a film that's meant for children (and I grew up with fucking Ren & Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life), and it's even worse coming out of the actors.

Oh, and Megan Fox looks like the alien chick from Species had a lesbian relationship with Ariel from The Little Mermaid, and somehow they had a child which was then fed only a diet of spray-on tan products. That's the hottest woman in the world? Do people masturbate to fish now? Fuck I hated this movie so much.

BullGooseLoony

Lol me too! It was very distracting.

iggystar

and "suck the sack", really?

I was going to take my daughter, but after it was all said and done I decided against it.

atlantamoi

First flick was my least favorite of '07, so you couldn't drag me to #2.

Here's some of the best bad review quotes"

http://www.movieline.com/2009/06/the...the-fallen.php

"“Terry Schiavo would have been bored by this bloated, ponderous piece of shit.” — Devin Faraci, CHUD"

outcastja

I was disappointed by the amount of IMAX scenes, it seems to take forever for the first IMAX scene which was the forest battle which was one of the only things I liked about the film. Then you again wait forever for about like 5 minutes of IMAX footage at the end sequence. It's also kind of annoying because there's like 2 second shots entered randomly of IMAX footage and would switch back.

Stu 17

Wait, Transformers 2 raped your adulthood memories of Transformers 1, yet your biggest complaint is the wrecking balls? Do you not remember Bubblebee taking a leak on the S7 agents?

Michael Corvin

Yeah, that raped his childhood, try and keep up.

Brent L

I'm one of the most anti-PC people around, and I fully think that morons take that crap too far. Now with that said, even I had to say "come on now" when I saw the Twins, and it only got worse as it went on. I'm not so much sure if it was just because of how over the top they were, or just the fact that the comedy was way too juvenile, I'm not sure. I think it was a mixture of both. I will say that when one of the Twins says "we don't do much readin'" that I did raise my eyebrows a little bit:

http://chud.com/articles/articles/19...OTS/Page1.html



Totally off topic, but when that one guy

pinata242

Tom Kenny? As in Spongebob Squarepants?

Honest to god, that makes this even worse.

Mopower

http://io9.com/5301898/michael-bay-f...e-an-art-movie

Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie
By Charlie Jane Anders, 9:00 AM on Wed Jun 24 2009, 45,001 views (Edit post, Set to draft, Slurp)

Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers' worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.

Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review — except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

And the true genius of Transformers: ROTF is that Bay has put all of this excess of imagery and random ideas at the service of the most pandering movie genre there is: the summer movie. ROTF is like twenty summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole. You try in vain to understand how the pieces fit, you stare into the cracks between the narrative strands, until the cracks become chasms and the chasms become an abyss into which you stare until it looks deep into your own soul, and then you go insane. You. Do. Not. Leave. The Cabinet.

Michael Bay understands that summer movies are about two things: male anxiety, and pure id. That's why he casts Shia LaBoeuf, that supreme avatar of pure male inadequacy, in the lead role. LaBoeuf projects a pathetic, wall-eyed dorkhood, when he's not babbling like a tumor removed from Woody Allen's prostate that somehow achieved sentience. I imagine the DVD of ROTF will include a whole disk of outtakes where they had to stop filming because LaBoeuf was drooling on camera. As it is, the film includes several extreme closeups of LaBoeuf's dazed stare.

Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.

And then there's the "id" part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on "over the top" as if from a great height. It's the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or "ghetto" robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their "schmear" and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let's go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

Transformers: ROTF is so long, you'll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie's pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You'll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd's screams of excitement.

And yet — and here's the part where I really think ROTF approaches "art movie" status — the movie's id overload reaches such crazy levels that the fabric of reality itself starts to break down. Michael Bay has boasted about how every single shot in the movie has so much stuff going on in it, it would take your PC since the dawn of time to render one frame. After a few hours of this assault, you feel the chair melt and the floor of the movie theater becomes an angry mirror into your soul. Nothing is solid, nothing is real, everything Transforms.

The closest thing I can think of to this movie is the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, which had a similar kind of CG image overload, although it was only five hours long as opposed to ROTF's nine.

And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components — male enhancement and pure id — start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.

So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality — but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?

So yes, ROTF approaches the sublime, and then just keeps rocketing. Next stop: total anarchy. In a sense, it's the first war movie ever to convey a real sense of the fog of war, the confusion that comes with battle. Somewhere around hour nine, you will understand why friendly fire happens in wartime.

So I've gotten almost all the way through this review, and I still haven't summarized the movie's plot. Here goes. It's a couple years after the first movie, and Sam is going off to college, leaving his transforming car and his hot girlfriend, whom he still hasn't told he loves her. And meanwhile, the soldiers from the first movie are running around with a bunch of late-model GM cars and trucks, which turn into robots and fight other robots sometimes. Sam sees weird symbols which make no sense (and they still make no sense at the end of the movie) and they turn out to be the key to the location of a thing that can control another thing, that will enable the bad guys to destroy the sun. Sam has to embrace the heroic destiny he's rejected, so he can save us all from solarcide.

But that bare plot summary doesn't include the twenty or thirty other storylines that could also claim to be the movie's plot. There's the whole thing where someone from Washington D.C. wonders why the U.S. military is running around the globe with a bunch of late-model GM cars from outer space, and tries to put the kibosh on the military-Autobot complex. There's the teenager who's got a conspiracy website, that competes with another conpsiracy website which turns out to be the work of a secret agent who's decided that the best way to keep things secret is to put them on a website. (It works. I post secret stuff on io9 all the time.) Various robots die and then come back to life, and there's a whole strand about whether Decepticons (the bad ones) can become Autobots (the good ones). And there's the Fallen, who's sort of the movie's villain even though he barely shows up. And people from 17,000 BC who had weird teeth and fought robots. And the ancient Egyptians did stuff. And Sam's parents go to France except that they meet a robot and then they're in Egypt.

Really, I could go on and on. This movie starts out with a coherent storyline, for the first half hour or so, and then it just starts to spin faster and faster until the centrifuge of random events slams you into the walls. It doesn't help that there are 500 robots in the movie and they all look kind of the same.

Oh, but that's the other thing about ROTF. It's actually quite funny, a lot of the time. Some of the jokes fall flat, like the "twin" robots with the ghetto speak, and a lot of the stuff with John Turturro. But the movie's relentless silliness is mostly pretty hilarious, in a Saturday morning cartoon kind of way, and almost nothing in the movie seems intended to be taken seriously.

So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF.

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.

starman9000

Yeah, I cringed at a lot of those.

Brent L

Yeah really.

My favorite part of that entire article is this:

stingermck

Im kinda glad I was never much of a Transformers fan, so I can sit back and laugh at all this.

Now come August though I will be like this when GI Joe comes out.

pinata242

The difference here is the sheer number of instances of crap like this in this movie. Yes, TF1 did have it's share of juvenile humor, but what's in this movie is just too much and too over-the-top.

You can defend Devastator's scrotum-less testicles all you want. There is absolutely no reason to include them, let alone a line about them. In fact, it's probably John Tutorro's fault since he said that line long before the effects were done. I'm sure the VFX guys just ran with it. How it got past any sort of review committee is well beyond me.

Superboy

When you make several movies that rake in several bazillion dollars, you can start telling people what goes in your movie.

That goes for the director as well as the writers.

pinata242

I'm with you there. My choices are "take it" or "leave it".

I've made my choice.

toddly6666

Kids are the target audience. Why would you expect it to be a mature film for us adults? You and I are out of the target range. The more childrens movies you watch and have expectations of them being good films, the more disappointed you will be.

This is called nitpicking. This is a movie based on a comic book/cartoon about alien talking robots that transform. You can nitpick The Wrestler or The Reader, but nitpicking about a kid's movie is like nitpicking the Garfield movie or Dragonball Z.

The little transformers in Sam's house that Bumblebee eventually destroys.

Yes, I like balls more than a skanky actress...I said Devastator w/balls was a plus, not just the balls alone. The balls were shown for just a couple seconds, which were not distracting. Where else could the wrecking balls hang in robot mode? haha.... Megan Fox trying to act hot was distracting. In the first one, she was just acting natural and was hot. In the sequel, she was trying to hard and came off as annoying. The fembot was the hotter one this time around.

All the reviews say that they are stereotypical hispanic. I guess you think the Star Wars movies are pretty offensive as well then.