By Frederic Germay
I wasn’t a great fan of the original “Transformers.” I actually labeled it as mindless entertainment for an audience that was clearly keen on witnessing countless robot clashes presented with admittedly spectacular visual effects. I felt that the film was ultimately forgettable. However, at the insistence of little brother, I watched the film later on DVD and I developed an appreciation for just how exciting certain elements of the film were. Sure, the story is absolute crap. And yes, the dialogue introduced a new level of corniness. Despite all that, I just couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t cool to see those cars transform into robots, or that I found myself caring about the hopelessly desperate Sam Witwicky. Call me easily-entertained, but I eventually began to enjoy the original “Transformers.”
Now the sequel is a tragically different story. In my opinion, “Transformers” didn’t need a sequel, but Hollywood is known for milking as much money as it can out of a successful franchise. Consequently, Michael Bay & Co. thought that by compacting a gargantuan amount of robot violence, along with a barely existent plot, into a nearly three-hour long timeslot would satisfy the masses. Essentially, Bay thought that audiences were drawn to the original film purely because of intense action sequences, which is partially true. That being said, critics (including me) almost universally stated that the storyline of the original was poor, at best.
Whether Michael Bay understood that and chose to ignore it is beyond me, but his apparent solution to the plot issue was to significantly reduce the plot altogether for the second film. I’m guessing he was operating under the assumption that to capitalize on his film’s strength, and eliminate or reduce the film’s weaknesses would provide an even better critical and/or box-office response for the sequel. What he should have done is directly confronted the original film’s weakness (the storyline) and actively engaged in increasing on the quality of the script, rather than overcompensating for it with excessive action.
The end result is a similar issue that I’ve noticed many action films currently face. In a good action film, the action should complement the story, not BE the story. For the first action-packed half hour of “Revenge of the Fallen,” I was extremely energized, but as the fights and explosions lumbered on endlessly, I found myself beginning to lose patience. By the end of the first hour, I was exasperated and that frustration later transitioned to complete exhaustion. Throughout this film, there were several “okay, now that HAS to be the final fight,” or “how is this film not done yet?” Towards the end of the film, I found myself writhing uncomfortable in my seat, desperately waiting for the movie to hurry up and end already.
Now I realize I just can’t say “this movie is bad” without adequately justifying it, yet if I were to list all the film’s flaws – this review would be quite long. However, there are some key issues that I’d like to address. Whenever the robots would get up close and personal during a fight, you couldn’t tell which robot was which. Aside from the helpful, yet undeniably annoying outbursts, such as, “Take that, Megatron” – there was really no way to discern what was happening in those epically overdone robot clashes. Also, as I’ve mentioned before, there was a tiresome amount of battles in this film. The action, while tastefully executed in the original, overwhelmed the sequel.
Another interesting tidbit that I’ve unearthed via my web travels is the stereotypical portrayals of the transformers Skip and Mudflap. These robots appeared to represent certain ethnic personality types in a very distasteful fashion, which were received very poorly by critics and some audiences. I’ve spoken with many people who found the attitude and behaviorisms of these particular robots to be quite offensive, and to some extent, I found these characters to be in bad humor myself. That being said, I recognize that no film that features fighting robots should ever be taken seriously, so I didn’t dwell on that particular subject. However, I’ve noticed upon reviewing the original film as well, that Michael Bay’s depictions of African Americans and other ethnic types (think of the Jewish deli in the second film) often feature a tangibly racist subtext. The fact that the script writers, Kurtzman and Orci, passed the blame to Michael Bay, who in turn, passed the blame to the voice actors, who blamed the script – proves that they all do recognize that there is something irrefutably offensive about this particular element of the film.
All in all, I did not like “Revenge of the Fallen.” It started out exciting, and became dreadfully tedious as the film plowed on. I enjoyed the small story with Sam going off to college and putting a strain on his relationship with his girlfriend, but that plot was soon swallowed up by countless explosions. I would not recommend this to my worst enemy. I give it a 3/10, half the score of the original “Transformers.”
