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372 out of 583 people found the following review useful: Great effects - story lacking, 26 June 2009 Author: brendan5 from United States
As expected, the effects were spectacular. The fight scenes were extravagant and fast-paced.The story though, couldn't keep pace. They kept stopping for a romance that was never developed (and no one really cared). The real thing that brought this movie down though was the constant stooping to this immature level. The had to have said @ss and balls 10 times (and that's a low estimate). Not only this, but those two twin autobots were introduced who were supposed to be "hip" maybe? They just turned out to be extremely annoying and to bring down the level of the movie as a whole.As a fan of the original cartoon series, I have to say I was really disappointed they stooped the level of immature @ss-balls humor and creating new characters with low IQ's. They could have done better. The action though, was amazing and I am still glad I paid to see it on the big screen.
524 out of 909 people found the following review useful: Seriously...what happened?, 29 June 2009 Author: Lucian from Canada
i loved the first transformers, the acting/humour was superb and the action was AMAZING. I was super anxious for transformers 2 and after about an hr I was anxious to leave. I couldn't take it anymore, everything was stepped up to a bad degree. Too loud, too much action, too much horrendous jokes and way too many robots! Half the time i was trying to figure out whos who and there were so many plot holes that bugged me, this all being in the first hr alone. There were three characters that I truly DETESTED, the twin robots and that greasy haired buffoon of roommate, it doesn't get any more annoying than those three. GAHHH and when all three of them were in the same scene I wanted to kill myself.
633 out of 1131 people found the following review useful: Crude and boring, 27 June 2009 Author: from United States
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
When Shakespeare's Hamlet spoke of life being "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing." he was actually referring to a Michael Bay film. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the movie equivalent of a 13 year old boy who has stopped taking his ADHD meds and overindulged on caffeine, sugar, video games and porn. It makes me wonder if Michael Bay actually is a 13 year old boy--the victim of a tragic case of arrested development. 13 year old boys also appear to be the target demographic that this movie was made for.In Revenge of the Fallen the dialog mostly consists of people yelling inanities at each other and robots making expository speeches that attempt to provide some vague skeleton of a plot. The female characters are either soft-porn eye candy or blithering idiots. Or both. The violence is almost non-stop, interrupted occasionally by jokes which revolve around scrotums and testicles and oral sex and humping. The ethnic stereotypes are shocking. The homophobia is palpable. This film displays all of the tact, intellect and decency of a locker room full of pubescent boys.Once the action kicks in, it is relentless. The battling robots are mostly incomprehensible blurs of motion and color and clanging noises. The music pounds. Guns and cannons fire. Jets roar. Things explode. The characters run and yell. It quickly becomes tedious, but it goes on and on and on like this. When it was over, I walked out of the theater dizzy.The best part of seeing Revenge of the Fallen was when I left the theater, got into my car, closed my eyes and basked in sweet silence.
310 out of 516 people found the following review useful: Great action and visual effects - everything else is dribble, 20 June 2009 Author: provenelk from United Kingdom
This film is arguably the most highly anticipated release of the summer, and you can see the pressure must have got to Michael Bay with the amount of crap he put into this movie to lengthen it.Firstly, i will say the action scenes and visual effects are great, and the addition of new "hip" auto-bots is good for young viewers (not anyone else though), but unfortunately you only really see any action until the last half, and then its still separated by unnecessary and tiresome romantic scenes, and even then, the action scenes become tiresome with large amounts of 300 style slow-mo and an obvious intention of Michael Bay to show everyone how great his visual effects are, as well as Megan Fox's boobs for the 14 year olds in the audience. Great Mr.Bay, we can see that, just give us a good film.The first half is largely made of useless footage of Sam at college and annoyingly frequent comedy scenes with his mum. The whole "college" section could have been compressed to about 20 to 25 minutes rather than an hour long.The plot is very good, and the stuff about the fallen is pretty gnarly. Its just a shame you don't find out about it till about the last third of the film, and there are a lot of plot holes - like why the hell didn't Sam give the splinter to Optimus Prime instead of his lame girlfriend?! But i think if they had started with the plot earlier and cut a lot of the "inbetween" they could have made the film a lot more fun.Overall, it is fun, but the faults become tiresome and therefore make the film tiresome, especially with its long length (2 and a half hours i believe). Worth Seeing yes, but definitely not the blockbuster monstrosity we were all looking forward to.6/10Edit: On reading other peoples comments, i want to say to any self respecting film lover, ignore the 1 or 2 star comments, but equally ignore the 9 and 10 star comment. Especially the 9 and 10s which go on about the special effects, i think they need to learn having good special effects doesn't give you a good movie. They'd get along with George Lucas pretty well though...
269 out of 440 people found the following review useful: It's our fault, really..., 11 July 2009 Author: aecioborba-2 from Brazil
In Psychology, we would take this movie as a perfect example of what we call "reinforcement". If people like it, make more of it. If no one said anything about it, no need to make it again.So, what did everyone (myself included) talked in the first film? Those fights were great. Loved the robots, I wanted more of them. Oh, Megan is hot. Let's get more of her too (if by "more of her" you hear "less of her clothes", even better). Oh, Megatron was great, sorry he had a short time in the screen. And do on.No one talked about the story of the movie, or how the characters were different from each other. Of course no one paid any attention to the dialogues. No one said how great was the continuity of the movie. No one cared who the characters were. Thus... why bother with any of this?There was a long time I did not see a movie so bad as this one. I am still in shock, after 4 days. Director, writer, editor... no one had any idea of what do to with any of those characters or how to get from a scene to the other. No one cared for the story, why people should be in one place or other. The plots are so scattered no one bothered to think why a character would do something.So, if you like the characters created in the first movie; if you like stories; if you would like at least that you ears and/or you intelligence don't be hurt by the most stupid lines ever told by a human (or robot) in a movie, be careful with this movie.But, if you want to see a lot of spare parts fighting each other, would like to see great battles, don't care for story, dialogues or continuity, you'll sure like this one, because it has great battle scenes, bigger and faster than the first one. Then, maybe you'll give and 8 instead of a 2 to Revenge of the Fallen. Myself, i like that action scenes be part of the movie, not the movie itself. And, with how much money this movie is making, I am too afraid of Transformers 3. Because THERE WILL BE a third one. Bigger than this one. Maybe they'll add the Transformer Planet Unicron, who maybe could try to destroy earth itself. I'm sure Michael Bay's eyes would spark thinking about a giant hand smashing Manhattan, while it's leg sink in the pacific and destroys Japan with a Tsunami.So, be careful with the movie. Don't get any higher expectations except some time to eat popcorn.
204 out of 326 people found the following review useful: Shameful, 13 July 2009 Author: BSHBen from United States
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is far from the worst film I've ever seen, but it may be the most depressing, degrading experience I've ever had at the movies. When I left the theatre, I was outraged.Let me start with director Michael Bay, who, over his career, has kept two things remarkably consistent: (1) his conviction that he's the world's greatest action director and (2) his complete inability to direct an action scene. Don't pin me as someone against "having fun" or as a snob who considers himself above a good chase or shootout. I'm all for action, it just has to be GOOD. Hell, I'm the one guy who liked "Speed Racer", so don't pull a "it's just an adaptation of a cartoon show" on me. In "Revenge of the Fallen", pretty much every scene of the 2.5 hour+ running time assaults the audience with bad action.The problem isn't with the quality of the visual effects, strictly-speaking. The gigantic robots and elaborate explosions are all convincing, but the camera never pauses long enough to give us a good chance to take a look. The entirety of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" consists of boring humans we don't care about running from explosions caused by boring robots we don't care about. I would say that the visual effects overwhelm the story, but to say so would imply that the film has a story to begin with. Yes, I know that the evil robots want to blow up the sun yadda yadda yadda but it's inarguably a paper-thin premise. I would say that the visual effects overwhelm the characters, but then I run into the same problem. Yes, Shia Labeouf does his best, but he's given nothing to do aside from running around and fulfilling the action hero role in the most shamelessly generic romance in recent memory. The human soldiers receive so little to do that I wonder what they're even doing in the movie at all. Their weapons are hilariously useless, and the movie has to go to the trouble of inserting a random slimy guy just to give the commander an antagonist to humiliate.The robot characters suck. They're boring and talk in clichéd voices that pretty much tell you everything you need to know about them (the sniveling, weak bad guy; the menacing bad guy; the solemn good guy; the comic relief twins, etc). Their faces look awful, and they're all completely devoid of personalities and thus impossible to cheer for or against. They're just CGI blobs."Revenge of the Fallen" contains plenty more of Michael Bay's trademarks. He still doesn't seem to understand that it's not the same time everywhere on the planet. I think I noticed once that it was night in the United States and day in Egypt, but aside from that the problem is the same as usual, such as during the sequence when the head evil robot (don't know his name, don't care) puts himself on television screens across the world. Seriously, if I were watching TV and that fake CGI face appeared and snarled out something about the impending destruction of the planet, I'd crack up and consider it a prank. As usual, Bay's camera is moving all over the place, typically without any purpose, and, as usual, we spend the whole film just hoping it'd stay still. The human characters, when they're not running from explosions, look like they're posing for magazine covers.It's truly amazing that the film manages to shove aside the one interesting dilemma in favor of more stupid exposition. The evil robot demands that the humans turn over Shia Labeouf, and the world responds by trying to catch Shia. Nobody has any luck until the oompah-loompah (seriously) in Egypt stops his car and some detective, sitting for absolutely no reason in the corner of a shady room under an old fan, notices him. Think about the issue: is it justifiable to send one innocent person to their death to save many others? You've just spent a lot more time considering the problem than anyone in the movie. For some reason the time-filler soldiers and Shia Labeouf himself never even consider the possibility of following the robot's decree, and for some reason the rest of the world and the time-filler slimy guy instantly go along with it.Putting aside the nitpicks I've already mentioned, much of this movie deeply offended me. I hope it also offended a lot of other people, otherwise our societal standards are much too low. Where to start? Shia Labeouf's first day of college is only a series of outrageous, bottom-of-the-barrel clichés. We see a loud party, drugs, a drunken frat kid, booze, hot girls, a professor hitting on the students. And that's it. Apparently there's nothing else. Oh, and a library gets destroyed in a boring chase scene while students cry out and dive for cover. Hilarious.Bay's treatment of women was reprehensible: the girls are all way, way too hot. Yes, I know that sounds absurd, but really, it was just sickening and degrading. Bay is most egregious in his treatment of Megan Fox. In one of the worst acting performances in film history, she spends most of the film running around as her clothes steadily disappear. Every time she's on camera she looks like a makeup crew just touched her up. She has no interesting dialog, no quirks or traits worth mentioning, and does nothing but pose. Is the fact that she looks gorgeous enough for us to care about her? Apparently it is for Michael Bay.What does this movie say about our culture? How do you think foreigners react when they see "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"? Bland, boring action, no thought or ideas, characters who do nothing but pose – THIS is what we do with $200,000,000? This is simply shameful.
410 out of 742 people found the following review useful: Absolutely awful, 29 June 2009 Author: sbrobin from United States
I wasn't expecting much going into this film. I'm aware of director Michael Bay's history and his habit of making mindless popcorn films with huge explosions, scantily-clad women, and awful cheesy dialogue. However, I thought the first film was okay for what it was, so figured maybe I would like the sequel. I was dead wrong. "Revenge of the Fallen" is the most ridiculous campy, poorly-written and poorly-directed piece of garbage to come out this year. The acting by Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox is average, and the special effects are extremely well done. That's about the only saving grace for this film.The writing is so unbelievable you almost have to see it to believe it. At one point a character actually utters the line "not on my watch." No one in the history of the military has ever said this outside of a film. Reading over the screenplay, you would think it was some terrible Transformers fan faction written by a tenth grader and posted to the Internet. The dialogue is HORRIBLE. This would be a great movie if it was targeted to 9 year olds, but the overt sexual references and language suggest an older demographic. Maybe it's because Bay is trying to please a wide range of people, and maybe that's why we have jokes made about Transformer Testicles and there's a scene where a transformer (with a Jersey accent much less) tries to hump Megan Fox's leg. What possible reason is this robot trying to hump her leg? Is that the way they procreate? There is ZERO excuse for it other than a cheap laugh. And that's ALL the jokes are, cheap laughs. I honestly would not have been surprised to see a transformer fart in this film, or maybe a scene where a transformer gets high. It wouldn't matter if it made sense because an intoxicated transformer would be HILARIOUS. But don't worry, because there's plenty of scenes of Sam's mother accidentally getting high at college and proceeding to follow the Robin Williams/Jim Carey acting formula of physical humor. Then there are Skids and Mudflap - two Decepticons who can't read, speak in "jive," act like gangster-wannabes, and fight a lot. One of them even has a gold tooth (I am not making that up). I am one of the last people you will meet who cares about things being PC or will ever claim anything is racist unless it is blatant, but this was a BLATANT stereotype. I cannot believe this made it into the movie. I wouldn't call it racist, but if these characters had actually been human, the NAACP would have freaked out.This movie is also insanely long, at a running time of 2.5 hours. This probably could have been avoided if there wasn't so much slow motion footage of people running. I was miserable after the first 45 minutes. Bay should have cut at a minimum, the last half hour off of the movie. The action scenes, while good, were way too confusing. The robots are so complex you can't tell what is happening since it's so fast and you can't figure out Transformers: "Revenge of the Fallen" is not Armageddon. It is not Bad Boys. It is definitely not the Rock. Say what you will about those films, they at least had somewhat decent plots and required some brain activity. This movie is nothing but pure mindless action, awful jokes, and gratuitous shots of Megan Fox (and only one of those is a good thing).
490 out of 920 people found the following review useful: Very sad, very bad, 2 July 2009 Author: Ennemie
Most people before me have said this already. This movie stinks. When I heard that Michael Bay was at the helm of the first Transformers movie, I was very worried but then by some fluke of nature he actually managed to pull off a watchable movie, perhaps because he was kept on a tight leash by the studio.This debacle of a sequel is another story. Bay must have been given full power over this one due to the success of the first. Big mistake. This guy can’t make a decent, realistic and entertaining movie. He makes action/soft porn trash. A good script, story or dialog are just inconvenient afterthoughts for him and it shows. He probably thinks he can distract the audience away from these gaping holes by adding a lot of nonsensical action and unfunny humour.Sorry Mr. Bay you can’t fool people all the time and the people who grew up with the transformers are absolutely hating this movie. I heard that you didn’t want to make the first movie because you didn’t even like the transformers but you became very keen for the sequel after the first movie made so much money for you. Here’s a tip: lay off the third and let a real director and a real team make that one for us because you have just totally trampled on the transformers legacy.
256 out of 463 people found the following review useful: A real snoozer., 21 June 2009 Author: l_biu from London, England
Transformers 2 suffers from complete utter lack of direction. The movie tries to be so many things and fails at all of them. It tries to be a comedy but the jokes have all been done time and time again, it tries to be dark but with no real threat and characters coming back to life it fails at this, it than tries to be a family adventure movie but with the crude language and sexual innuendo the movie fails at this too.The plot is non-existent. There does not seem to be anything other than MacGuffins to get from A to B. This would be fine if the characters are interesting or at least relatable. Not the case for this film as every single character is a thin as a paper. Even Shia, who I thought was the best thing in the first movie, loses all his charm and charisma and sleep walks through this.The action is surprisingly dull....the camera-work is just to shaky and far too close-up to grasp what is happening on screen. Robot fights take nothing more than 5 minutes at a time and the similarity of the robots designs makes it hard to see who you are supposed to be rooting for. Its even harder when none of the robots are even introduced properly.The first hour of the movie is easily the best part. Some of the charm is still intact. The film than comes to a crashing halt and gets very very boring. The finale does not live up to the build up and you find yourself looking at your watch or slightly drifting off. Continuous explosions, with no feel of threat or danger, draws you completely away from what's happening on screen.The first movie was decent but lost its charm after repeat viewing...Transformers 2 does not have any charm to begin with. A dull, boring mess.
125 out of 203 people found the following review useful: Drivel. It's shameful that this will be remembered in the Transformers legacy, 10 July 2009 Author: matchitehew from United States
Well, I enjoyed it as it happened, but after some reflection...I've come to the understanding that this film is very, VERY messy.A lot of people defending this film are saying the action scenes are spectacular. Sure, they're spectacular...if you like trying to figure out just who's who and what's going on. Most of the time the characters are so obscured by objects/smoke that you can't see the "action" that everyone's raving about. When they're not behind something, the camera's changing every five seconds that you can't focus on the mess before you. The only cool part about these action scenes is the intense way some of the Transformers are disfigured.The over-all plot, story, and script of this thing comes together in the most ugly way possible. Most people are complaining about it being too all over the place, or that there wasn't one at all. Unfortuneatly, it's hard not to agree on both fronts. There was no flow, no suspense, no build up, no up, no down, just one flat line of point a to point b to point c. The intense battles would have been made more intense had they been preceded by some sort of build up, but they just kind of...happened. The plot in and of itself has the makings of something epic. MULTI-FILM EPIC. The script used to flesh out this story was mediocre AT BEST. It could have been so much more than what it was, it could have spaced apart plot points by delving into the characters (specifically: the transformers). Instead, the film was littered with unnecessary, and often crude jokes.Heck, this overly cartoony humor was barely present in the first film. Now it's been ramped up to over 9000, and it severely offsets any emotional impact the film might have had. Most of it would have been better suited to something like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, at least there crude humor comes off clever. It's really sad we had to put up with all of that instead of enjoying some actual quality time with our favorite machines.And, speaking of which, the lack of Transformer character development presents itself yet again. You would think after fans complained about the infrequent amount of Transformer screen time in the first, then things would have been different now. Nope. We still don't know what they're thinking, who they are as living beings, or really anything about them except that they shoot at the opposing force. And why would they just sit around in car mode when they were hidden? They came from a planet where they walked around freely, one would think they'd enjoy being able to just be themselves.The annoying liberties that were taken here in the name of artistic licensing are nauseating. I understand this is an "adaptation" and that things aren't going to be 100% to the source material. However, completely rewriting a character's personality is like killing off a loved one and replacing them with someone completely different. They also went waaaay to far with appearance, as well. Being a fan of a character from the series isn't' going to matter much here because there's a good chance they've been overhauled beyond recognition. Heck, the only one that barely made the transition from cartoon/comic to this blight of a film is Optimus Prime. No one else even remotely resembles their previous incarnations. From personality to appearance, this piece of work tramples all of the work of those before it...AND the fans they had sought to please.The film's treatment of characters like Sky/Jetfire is utterly appalling. It's proof that the people involved in this film don't actually give a crap about the characters in their movie. Then again, the lack of character development makes that just as obvious.The character design here is also noticeably different from the previous film. In the last film, all of the machines were quite bulky, a little more humanoid. The new ones here all seemed to be cartoony or very streamlined. The mini transformers all seemed to sport bug eyes, where as the ones last time around did not. Why would this new batch, decepticon and autobot alike, differ so much from the others? It's not like they were all brand new, they'd been around as long as the others. I dunno, different art direction from film to film grates on my nerves, especially when it comes to character design.And, for the love of sanity, WHY can't they treat women like people? If I wanted to gawk at girls who were just there because they're pretty I would look up questionable material online. I honestly feel sorry for her and any other actress who doesn't actually get a chance to show off any acting talent they might have. I don't have a problem with them showing a girl as being pretty in the film...but if that's all they concentrate on then they can just get right the heck out.The rest of the talent on hand might as well have been treated the same way. No one was really given an opportunity to actually do much acting, it was all jokes and running.The movie's fun, but if you have a brain you'd better shut it off or your going to find yourself wanting to bring some pain to the creators of this drivel. And for the love of pete, just because it's an "action" film doesn't mean the film can't have substance. It's possible to have a load of brain-flexing story AND explosions.
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