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| "I'll get you, Megatron! With my mighty and trusty GUN." *Bang* *Megatron dies* *Roll end credits* ♫ Whaaaaaaaat I've doooooooone, I'll faaace myseeelf... to cross out what IIIIII've beeeeeeecome ♫ |
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| "Hello, agent? Yes. If you receive a script for Transformers 3... please shred it immediately." |
...but that was the fun of 2007. Now it's 2009. I was no longer in going into my Freshman year in high school, but now Junior. I was a little older, and a little wiser. While I was showing tremendous growth and yes, at the time, even a little potential, I regret to inform you that the Transformers franchise was not. At the time, we all knew Transformers was going to get at least one sequel and I was hanging on to every new image and every new trailer the internet would throw at me and let me watch. Well... the day finally came that summer and... Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a gigantic mess. It felt like Michael Bay got carried away, overhyped himself and created something otherworldly stupid, lame, and plain ridiculous. For a sequel to Transformers, it's okay on it's best day, but otherwise it's just an overhyped, overbudgeted, colossal misstep in carrying the story forward. What the hell happened, I hear you cry out from your computer or smartphone? Well... do what Michael Bay did not and put on your thinking cap; let's dig in.
The movie opens in 17,000 B.C. with another Optimus Prime narration. The Primes (the highest ruling Cybertronians) gather their energy, Energon, from sun harvesters, machines that consume stars to harness their energy. The Primes have a sacred rule to never deplete a star that sustains life. One Prime violates this rule by building a sun harvester on Earth, for which he was defeated by the other six Primes, and becomes "the Fallen" (Tony Todd), the original Decepticon. Flash forward to 2009, two years after the battle of Mission City, the Autobots and the humans have formed N.E.S.T. (Non-biological Extraterrestrial Species Treaty), a classified international joint task force to eliminate the remaining Decepticons. Two of them, Sideways (non-speaking) and Demolishor (Calvin Wimmer), are defeated in Shanghai, but the latter declares "the Fallen shall rise again." before being killed. Meanwhile, the Decepticon Soundwave (Frank Welker) hacks a military satellite. The Decepticons steal the last known piece of the AllSpark shard from a U.S Navy base in Diego Garcia and use it to resurrect Megatron (Hugo Weaving) while killing one of their own to provide parts for his damaged body. The Fallen sends Megatron and his second-in-command, Starscream (Charlie Adler), to capture Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) alive and kill Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), the leader of the Autobots.
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| I could make a joke about these two but... nah I feel like they, in and of themselves, are jokes enough. |
Sam, now a college student, has been seeing Cybertronian symbols since holding a smaller AllSpark shard... why he didn't get blasted with the ability to see these symbols after handling the AllSpark in the first film, of course, goes unexplained; Megatron believes the symbols will lead the Decepticons to a new Energon source. The shard brings many of the kitchen appliances to life, which attempt to kill Sam and his parents but Bumblebee rescues them. Sam gives the shard to his girlfriend Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), who later captures the Decepticon Wheelie (Tom Kenny) as he attempts to steal it. After being attacked by Alice (Isabel Lucas), a Terminator... I mean... "Decepticon Pretender" posing as a college student, Sam, his roommate Leo (Ramon Rodriguez) and Mikaela are captured by the Decepticon Grindor (Frank Welker) before the Autobots save them. Megatron then kills Optimus... yep, kills Optimus... after Optimus takes on three or four other bleedin' Decepticons.. so he's OP but he still had to die I guess? Lol anyway, this was all while he defends Sam. Afterwards, the Decepticons launch devastating attacks around the world, while Megatron and Soundwave hijack Earth's telecommunications systems, which allows the Fallen to send a message to the humans, demanding that Sam be handed over to him.
Sam, Mikaela, and Leo then find alien expert and former Sector Seven agent, Seymour Simmons (John Turturro), who reveals the Transformers visited Earth eons ago and the most ancient, known as Seekers, remained hidden on Earth. With help from Wheelie, they track down an elderly Decepticon turned Autobot Seeker named Jetfire at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. They use their shard to revive Jetfire (Mark Ryan), who teleports the group to Egypt. Along with Jetfire, Wheelie sides with the Autobots, and Jetfire sends them to locate the Matrix of Leadership, the sun harvester's key, which could also be used to revive Optimus. Transformers fans know the Matrix of Leadership as an artifact of great power, traditionally carried by the leader of the Autobots... here it's a "sun harvester key", which begs the question "If it's the sun harvester key, what does Leadership have to do with it?" I think they were just hoping for some name recognition to score points with disappointed fans. Many of whom at this point no doubt have already walked out of the theater.
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| "Sam, my little buddy." "Optimus, quit calling me that--" "You look like an ant from up here!" |
The group finds the Matrix, whom the Primes sacrificed themselves to hide, in Aqaba, but it disintegrates into dust. Meanwhile, N.E.S.T. forces and the Autobots land near the Giza pyramid complex and are attacked by the Decepticons. The Constructicons combine to form Devastator... which I'm not going to lie is a pretty fucking epic shot... who reveals the sun harvester hidden inside a pyramid before he is destroyed. How about that Egypt? The Great Pyramids don't house the tombs of your fallen leaders from ancient history... they house a made-up sentient toy's superweapon! JOKES ON YOU! Anywho, a majority of the Decepticons are annihilated, mostly with multiple airstrikes from the Navy and the U.S Air Force, but Megatron manages to kill Sam. Many people who were over Shia LaBeouf's schtick already probably cheered at this point. The Primes speak to Sam in... I don't know, limbo I guess... saying that the Matrix must be earned, not found, and that he has the right to bear it by sacrificing himself for Optimus. They resurrect Sam and grant him the Matrix, which he uses to resurrect Optimus. The Fallen steals the Matrix from a weakened Optimus and uses it to activate the sun harvester. After a wounded Jetfire sacrifices himself to allow his parts to be used for additional power and flight, Optimus destroys the harvester and kills the Fallen. Heavily damaged and distraught by his master's death, Megatron retreats with Starscream, proclaiming ye olde 80s villaine catchphrase "This isn't over". The Autobots and their allies then return to the United States, and Sam and Leo return to college... and we never see Mikaela again because she's dated Sam for basically a year and nearly died about five times.
That is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Yeeeesh, what a mess. It tries to capture the tone and essence of the first film, but this is an example of a director, or scriptwriter, or both believing their hype too much after the first film did pretty well. That's the thing; it wasn't like the first movie was a groundbreaking piece of cinema, but it was pretty darn good still. That alone made them think they were Messiahs of transforming robots and decided to get really really cringe with this one. I mean, what went wrong?
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| "Oy let me tell you micro human blokes about this thing called MySpace..." "Oh man, Jetfire isn't aware of Facebook yet." |
First off, the aesthetic for this movie looks like it took a giant back-step. Everything about this movie feels "orange", you know what I mean? The same way Batman Forever is green? This movie is orange. Every shot feels like it was filmed in an orange/brown filter, and everybody has a very, very bad spray tan. Plus they all look greasy, like what happened? Did the art department try to make the live actors into cartoons too? Not to mention, everybody's acting is so ridiculously over the top. I guess Sam's okay, and Mikaela just Megan Foxes her way through it, but everybody else is basically a cartoon. So... yes to my earlier question. Leo is a nut, Simmons literally shows his jockstrapped buttcheeks on screen, Sam's mother has a ridiculous pot incident on Sam's college campus; it's all nuts... like a circus... and don't even get me started on Mudflap and Skids. I even glossed over them in the synopsis. Voiced by Reno Wilson and Tom Kenny, respectively, these are two of the most overacted and highly racial characters I've ever seen, and they don't really belong in a Transformers movie. Yeah a couple of their exchanges make me laugh, and they are funny; but they're so out of place and so are not okay to portray in such a manner. I'll admit.
Plus the Bay-formers plot holes are back in full force for this one. I.E... why didn't Sam use the shard of the AllSpark he still had to bring Optimus back to life. It fixed Bumblee's legs between movies, or HELL, something did! So why couldn't they use it to resurrect Optimus, they wouldn't even need the Sun Harvester of Leadership, or whatever. Also, in the middle of the movie (roughly) Megatron tells Starscream that it is "time for the Decepticons to let the world know of their presence." To that point, Transformers have destroyed a rather large chunk of a major metropolitan city in America, a large section of Shanghai, have had battles in four other continents, rampaged across a major college campus, destroyed a forest, and stomped around the Witwickys' backyard multiple times. There is no conceivable, possible, metaphysical way that the human race does not know of the existence of the Transformers at this point. Like we're stupid, right? Just look at TikTok trends. We are stupid as a race... but even we are not that stupid.
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| "Hurry Mikaela, run!" "Hang on, Sam! I have to adjust my top!" |
How about Simmons being severed from all government work, but yet being able to single-handedly steal seventy-five years worth of classified files and information from Sector 7 when it was shut down?? Well actually maybe not a goof, we've seen Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton get away with similar feats ... but perhaps the single biggest goof is in basic math. When the Decepticons go underwater to revive Megatron, the Navy states that five "objects" went under water. If one of the Decepticons was killed to bring Megatron back to life, six "objects" could not have come out of the water: Let me break it down. Ravage spits out the Doctor Robot (we're up to six), one gets stripped into parts (we're back to five), Megatron gets reactivated (Back to six) and Ravage swallows the Doctor to head back to the surface... bringing us back to five. Yet Navy dude states that five became six. Somebody got held back in simple-math, didn't they?
No, I do not care for, nor do I really recommend Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I was so hoping for a stellar sequel to the first film that would explore more of the established Transformers lore from the 80's. The Matrix, Energon; instead we get this Jersey Shore meets Transformers mish-mash of annoyingly cluttered writing that even kids don't really find engaging... smothered with so many plot and logic holes, it makes Swiss cheese jealous. It's dumb, it's obnoxious, it makes no sense, it's inept, it's loud, it's cartoonish, it's dumb, it's contradicting, it's silly, it's overacted, it's dumb... am I repeating myself? Get used to it. It's what these movies do. Tally ho and onward to the next no-doubt brain-tickling entry in the Transformers motion picture franchise, I suppose. Yippee for us.
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