It’s really hard to make a movie that wastes someone’s time. Usually people give a movie the benefit of the doubt if there’s something in there that people can relate to or find entertaining. Or, the movie makes no logical sense and is so unrelatable that it turns into an ironic watching experience. To truly make a scathing movie experience, you need to have a good amount of hype mixed with ambition, minimize your story to the level of a child to appeal to everyone, have lots of good looking actors who are asked to act as little as possible, and make this experience go on for a long period of time with no payoff whatsoever. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen hits all of these points and more. I never think about leaving a movie I pay for, but I came very close to leaving this one several times.
Our story leaves Sam (Shia Laboeuf) off to college, still dating his girlfriend Michaela (Megan Fox, eye candy until she speaks). Meanwhile, the Transformers have teamed with the army they befriended in the first movie to rid Earth of remaining Decepticons. Also, Megatron is revived and planning his revenge upon the Autobots with the help of the Fallen, an older Decepticon.
There’s more of a complicated story, but explanations are usually kept to a minimum so we can wait to see what has to be blown up. Instead of investing in more screenwriters, Michael Bay has decided a really expensive CGI fireworks show works much better. As a result, this vaguely defined story meanders through attempted explanation to try to get you to care about this story, but it is too poorly sketched to illicit a reaction.
Also helping ruin the story is the razor thin character profiles and dialogue the movie trots out. It takes the big character moments from the first movie and removes their purpose. There is no reason Sam should still be with and care about Michaela, and Michaela is forced into spending more time with him for no real reason. Major Lennox (Josh Duhamel) decided that his newborn child and wife were just not as important as teaming with huge machine robots to defeat other machine robots; the wife and kid are just not even mentioned in the story. They could be described with one line of dialogue, but why do that when you could spend money on cool looking robot explosions instead? Most importantly, the fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron is sidelined because of the Fallen transformer. The Prime/Megatron battle gave stakes to the first movie, but the Fallen is such a distant character with no real malevolence that the fight has no significance, it just happens. The characters are so badly drawn that some of the Autobots only speak in urban slang, and they happened to be the darker complexioned transformers. Apparently borderline racism is ok if the characters are robots.
These are all bad things above, but if the fights and special effects work, the movie is at least a fun spectacle to watch like the first movie. However, with no stakes, and inexplicable setting changes to the middle of the desert, there just isnt a lot to destroy and get scared over. The “surprises” in the last 30 minutes of the fight are just not good enough to save the 2.5 hour movie from the previous 2 hours of middling.
I sincerely hope this review gets read before this movie gets seen. Do anything else except see this movie. There are no real or ironic rewards for waiting around for the movie to complete. Spend some time with your family that Major Lennox forgot existed.