Transformers : Revenge of The Fallen

Take a hot chica Megan Fox and clothe her in really sexy clothes – and make her work on engines all day and a biker babe as well. So when she seductively says ‘camshaft’, the men just cant stop drooling over her. Then take a few giant robots and make them fight – with lot of slow-motion jumps and rollovers. And then fill in the gaps with explosions !! Big ones, even bigger ones and then some really big ones. Tadah – movie complete !!

Ok, I might have exaggerated a little, but Transformers : Revenge of The Fallen really feels like a script written by an 8-year-old. While movies without good scripts are dime-a-dozen, what sets this sequel apart is the singular disregard of everything that was right in the first Transformers movie. The transformers – neither the autobots nor the decepticons - are given any time for character development. The reason we were rooting for the autobots in the first Transformers movie was because each of them appeared to have a human soul – there werent just robotic machines. This time around, Michael Bay doesn’t give us any time to distinguish between the good and bad guys – its just fight on.

Valuable screen time, is instead wasted on the Sam (Shia LeBouf) and Mikaela (Megan Fox) love story – does it make ANY difference who says ‘I love you’ first in a relationship ?? There were too much time spent on the emotional relationship things – Sam and his parents, Sam and Mikaela and even Sam and Optimus Prime !! If only some of this time had been spent on the transformers or even smoothing out the jerky script ..

(And the ones who did get some screen time were the two stupid Mexican small bots who were almost completely irrelevant !!)

Even with allowance for plot holes (e.g. notice the security of the high-security facility, or the lack of self-safety instincts of the submarine crew), the scriptwriting cannot be condoned. Having no flow whatsoever, the movie seems almost episodic. There is no continuity between scenes, neither is there any time or device to allow intensity to build up before any big sequence. Consequently your involvement in the movie just doesn’t happen.

But aren’t the Transformer movies all about cool fight sequences between huge robots ? Yes, they are supposed to be – but even that isn’t a redeeming factor in this movie. First of all, there are just too many explosions in the movie. With director Michael Bay, huge onscreen explosions are a given – so lets not crib about that too much. But because of this explosions fascination, the transformers seem to prefer fighting firepower to a slugfest. So you don’t actually get to see too many hand-to-hand combats so to speak.

The second reason why even the slugfests aren’t impressive is that because so little time has been spent distinguishing the good bots from the bad bots, that its impossible to make out who is fighting whom. And because all the fights are captured in the same slow motion way, the fights appear a bit repetitive after sometime.
Not all is gloom and doom though – the franchise throws up a new tiny robot who is very amusing as well as an old surprise – Agent Simmons. He produces most of the laughs of the movie - though the roommate Leo is a waste. And some of the fight sequences with Optimus Prime are still a killer

This movie could easily have been as good as the first one – only if they had tweaked the script a little to introduce some flow – and done some character development for the autobots. In its current form, it’s not an recommened movie.