Transformers 2 Revenge of the Fallen. Really that Bad? or Misunderstood?

[Fury]

So my review is finally up after so many technical problems. The reviews will be rolling in a whole lot faster now. Pretty surprised I liked this movie? yeah so am I ...I think there's a whole lotta people who enjoyed this movie but they are scared to come out. I invite them all to have a nice discussion here about what worked, what didn't and ultimately, is this movie REALLY that bad?

[Kicks419]

The movie was okay just okay. It wasn't the disaster some critics are labelling it but its still not a great movie. My big problem was the humor. It seemed that throughout the entire movie Michael Bay was more interested with cracking jokes and showing off Meghan Fox's body than actually developing a coherent plot. And some of these jokes are just forced I mean after they have that awesome battlescene in the beginning ending with Ironhide saying Bitch ass Decepticon I knew it was supposed to be funny but I failed to find the humor pluss the scene when we get an upclose shot of John Tuttoro in a thong and of course those fucking Twins. I hated them skids and mudflap they are the most racial stereotypic characters I have seen in a long time and it wasn't like they were only in there for a few minutes they were in the whole damn movie you got ironhide and sideswipe and jolt and instead you make these twins as a main focus just so you can here them spout curse after curse on the screen. I loved the action and could tolerate some of the plot holes like that whole sequence when Sam goes to Robot heaven or when you have that robot that can transform indto a woman. But one minute you got dogs humping and the next you try to make things serious with a big battle scene. In the end I guess the movie wasn't as bad as a lot of people are labelling it but it wasn't that good either

[EZRA'S HUGE REVIEWS]

I PERSONALLY THOUGHT THAT EVERYTHING WAS GREAT ABOUT THIS MOVIE. MUDFLAP AND SKIDS REALLY DIDN'T BOTHER ME. I ACTUALLY LAUGHED AT SKIDS WHILE KNOWING THAT IT'S THE GUY WHO DOES SPONGEBOB'S VOICE. HE SPEAKS LIKE HE'S FROM HARLEM WHEN HE'S WHITE SO, THAT MADE ME LAUGH. THE TWINS ACTUALLY HELPED THE FILM WITH IT'S HUMOR. I WANTED HUMOR WHILE STILL GETTING ACTION AND THAT'S WHAT I GOT. THE STORY IS WEAK BUT, I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT THE TRANSFORMERS WERE WEAK BUT, THE FIRST ONE PROVED ME WRONG.AND THIS WAS A REMINDER AND ALSO GIVING MUCH MORE THAN YOU ORDERED. A LOT OF PEOPLE WILL HATE ME FOR SAYING THIS BUT, I THOUGHT THAT IT WAS BETTER THAN THE DARK KNIGHT. THAT FILM WAS BEING TOO SERIOUS AT TIMES. DON'T GET ME WRONG, I LOVE THE DARK KNIGHT BUT, IT WASN'T THE BATMAN THAT I KNOW. THIS HAS FUN AND GIVES US ACTION AND COMEDY AT THE SAME TIME. I WOULD'VE GIVEN IT THE GOLD FURY AWARD IF I WERE YOU BUT, EVERYONE HAS THEIR OWN OPINION.

[Eric]

I enjoy the movie, but again, have bad luck and got me with the volumen too high, so give me headeache and couldnt enjoy too much as i wish. It was well done, except for the twins, some jokes and the aceleration and suden stop of the action witch make me feel a litle confuse and make me saying, "no come one, continue, you cant just stop now". I will seen again another time, but im satisfi with how is until now.

[Fury]

I avoided all the reviews going into the film like I normally do(my friend didn't and read some spoilers that almost ruined the movie for him) so when I finally knew what I felt for the film I went online and started seeing what people felt. I was SHOCKED to see people thought those two characters were racist stereotypes. Rantee the Ranter has his opinion about this and I have my own which i'll share with you here.
They may have been stereotypes of hip hoppin' morons but I don't see how they are "racist". They could have been white guys, asian guys, mexican, I mean these days the hip hop/rap community is all about that talk. Ending every sentence with "you know what I'm saying?" no I don't know what you're saying because you didn't SAY anything.
anyway, people automatically assuming the 2 robots were black when nowhere in the story did it mention these were "black" robots is pretty racist itself and I'm not just referring to Kicks comment above, I have seen people claim these robots were racist on the NEWS. I just don't get it. Also, how many stereotype characters do we see in shows/comedy skits/ hell even the simpsons? In the simpsons there's that southern hick guy who is dumber than a sack of potatoes and nobody complains about that one or groundskeeper willie being a drunken irishman.
In my opinion those 2 guys are way worse than skids and mudflap. Were those two twins ridiculous? SURE..why they spent more time on them trying to be funny by cursing is their way of thinking that's what the youth of today would find funny. they missed the mark clearly.

[Robert Hemming]

I enjoyed the movie, although I can understand many critics. But calling it one of the worst movies of all time is not fair.

I expected nothing more than giant robots beating the crap out of eachother and stuff blowing up - and I got that.

The action scenes were really great, although the closeups and the camera spinning around were annoying sometimes. The CGI was spectacular and looked very realistic.

As for the story... well, it was nothing to complicated, and nothing to onedimensional. Some of the storylines in this movie were really useless and went nowhere. ( For example the entire college scenes, Sam's parents getting captured, or the Decepticons trying to get Sam's brain although they already have a shard of the Allspark.)

The Characters are another negative point. many of them were just there for comic relief, like Sam's roommate, his parents, Simmons ( although I kinda liked him ), some other characters that do nothing and most of all: Mudflap and Skids, which I found really annoying and useless. They sounded like some 10 year old kiddies to me.
Sam's character does not change much, and Megan Fox is just there for T&A ( but hey, the male audience likes it ;) )
The Transformers get much more screentime now, which is great. But I was disappointed that Optimus was missing most of the time, and the new robots had nearly no lines or impact on the story.

The humor was really annoying and stupid most of the time and felt forced. It was funny sometimes, but most of the time I had JarJar Binks flashbacks ( and I really hated him ).

Oh, and I never want to see John Turturros ass again. I nearly puked there.

After all, it was a movie that had it's problems ( the biggest is probably the humor ), but I felt entertained. It maybe a bad movie, but if you expect nothing more than action, you get it.

Greetings for Germany

[DistantJ]

I think it looks cool. I'll see it. It's a popcorn flick, those things always get given a hard time. Bit concerned about a 3 hour popcorn flick though.

It's huge robots fighting to Linkin Park; critics, viewers, EVERYBODY should know, just from that, what to expect, anybody looking for anything more is walking into the wrong movie.

As for racial stereotyping, the only real racists are the people saying it's not okay for robots to talk in a non-white-American voice.

[DistantJ]

Sorry to say... I hated it... My girl and I actually left after an hour. It just made no sense whatsoever and the action scenes, well, let's say if Michael Bay duct taped a camera to a large magnet, hit record and rolled it through a scrap yard, that'd look about the same.

The whole thing went so fast that neither of us could work out what was going on (a lot like the way I felt about the cartoon actually), and even the non-action scenes were annoying and, to quote Robert Hemming, were like Jar Jar Binks flashbacks.

I also felt like the camera seemed to want me to see everything but what I actually wanted to. It was as if the robots weren't there (okay I know, they weren't, they're superimposed CG, but they could have at least focused on where they were going to be - we'd be trying to watch a robot fight while the camera focused on trees and the ground and panned past as if nothing was there. The other scenes were so incoherent, we'd just see metal flying at us and lots of explosions happening and we were never sure what was happening and why. In some battles they even had close ups on the robots landing and there'd be this huge mishmash of metal and dirt from the ground flying everywhere.

Unbelievable. Loved the first. Sorry Fury!

[Thomas Robinson]

I absolutely loved the first film. TF2 on the other hand.....not so much. The first film had a coherent plot,was well paced, lots of characterisation, great action and had just the right balance of humour and drama. And to top it off, it was a good adaptation. It took the Transformers mythos and turned into a realistic and accesable live action film.

Transformers 2 on the other hand just trys to do too much. It threw in everything, including the kitchen sink. The action was great no doubt, but they did too much of it. Story development and characterisation we're all sacrificed in favour of constant explosions. A great action film shouldn't be structured like this. When it comes to action, you need peaks and valleys. You times that are just dedicated to character and plot. These scenes not only make the film more coherent and 3 dimensional, but it also allows the action scenes to be built up, allowing the audience to anticipate the upcoming battle. There was just no down time in this film; no time for the audience to catch it's breath. As a result, the audience stops caring what is happening. They stop caring about the characters and the plot because it becomes little more then one, giant 2 hour and 20 minute action sequence that rushes full steam ahead at a million miles an hour.

If Bay had of slooooowed down, given us some downtime (valleys), it would have given the audience time to soak in everything that was happening. Unfourtunetely it didnt do that which is why I think most people found the story confusing; the film moved to fast with not enough down time that they just stopped caring about what was happening and so lost the plot.

Then we come to characterisation. One of the things that I most wanted to see in this film was more characterisation of the Transformers themselves. But we didn't get that at all. Most of the new Transformer characters aren't even introduced and so the action scnes become little more then 'random robot A fighting random robot B". Even for a hardocore Tranformers fan like me it was difficult, damn near impossbile, to figure out who everyone was supposed to be. In the first film, at least the filmmakers had the curtosy to introduce the characters, even if was just through those translated Cybertronian subtitles. Now I know we got more of Megatron interacting with Starscream, which was great, but I would like to have seen more character development of all of the other robot characters instead of having them be little more then just CGI shots to fill in the action.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy TF2 but nowhere near as much as the first film and it's for all of the above reasons. Hopefully the third film will fix these problems so we can get a truly great closing chapter.

[DistantJ]

Nice post, TR! Did you also find, like me, that the robot designs meant it was actually hard to tell what was going on in the action scenes, because you couldn't tell who was who? I mean like you'd see metallic arms and legs flying around everywhere but I could never tell which robot was winning, who was punching who, etc.

[Thomas Robinson]

DistantJ said:

Nice post, TR! Did you also find, like me, that the robot designs meant it was actually hard to tell what was going on in the action scenes, because you couldn't tell who was who? I mean like you'd see metallic arms and legs flying around everywhere but I could never tell which robot was winning, who was punching who, etc.

Indeed. Some people are saying that the action was more coherent in this film, but I felt it to be much more so in the first. By the time that scene in the desert rolled round, I couldn't tell you who was who, who was fighting who, or why I should even care about what was going on.

[DistantJ]

I gotta wonder how many people went to the cinema and how many people downloaded it, because the action scenes in it seemed like the kind which would benefit from a small screen (particularly sitting 10 inches from a computer monitor) due to so many closeups and shots where everything on the screen was important.

[Anthony Yeung]

I just recently came back from the movie and I have to say, all of those negative reviews are just really exaggerating and I believe it doesn't deserve the majority hate that it is getting.

Yeah, what bothered me about the movie is simple: the twins Skids and Mudflap. Everyone's right about one thing, they are the most annoying characters I've ever seen in quite sometime and those comparisons between them and the infamous Jar Jar Binks is pretty well deserved because they are just awful and if they were taken out, the movie would be a thousand times better without them.

The action scenes in the film were really great, although the closeups and the camera spinning around were annoying sometimes but thankfully, we actually get to see more better of the action sequences and see the action more clearly. The CGI was simply spectacular and looked very realistic, just like the original.

As for the story... well, it was nothing too complicated, and nothing too one-dimensional and I like that. The acting in the movie is fine, there's no one who stands out as a bad actor and no, I do not think that it's brainless because it's just following what the original started earlier in the first place. Both of these films are basically the same but what makes this film different is that it fixes the flaws of the original and just double what the original great.

There's nothing wrong with having fun with dumb movies every now and then and I did like Independence Day. Besides with this and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which one is more worse? You decide.