Movie Review: Transformers 2 Revenge of The Fallen

Movie Review: Transformers 2 Revenge of The Fallen

In the sequel to the highly-acclaimed Transformers movie, the plot continues to revolves around the Autobots' fight against the Decepticons but this time, the latter has a new powerfully ally, known as The Fallen, one of the first seven ancestors of the planet Cybertron, who wanted to use an ancient super-machine hidden on earth to harvest the energy of the sun. With this energy, The Fallen hopes to continue to breed new Decepticons to conquer new worlds.

However, The Fallen seemed to have a probia against the descendants of the Primes robots and the last remaining one is Optimus Prime. So The Fallen sets out to attack and successfully destroy Optimus Prime in a deadly confrontation using Megatron (who was resurrected with one of the two remaining shards of the Cube destroyed in the first movie) and Starscream.

With Optimus Prime out of action, Sam, the originally reluctant young college undergraduate, now has to find a way to prevent the catastrope from getting bigger by using his remaining shard's images of strange Cybertronic symbols to help to rally the remaining Autobots to prevent The Fallen from re-activating the ancient sun-harvesting machine before it is too late for Earth.

The movie was one sensory pounding for me because the battle scenes were bigger than ever, the action faster than ever and the intensity and brutality fiercer than ever. However, the movie over-emphasized on the action scenes and carried too little plot development and humour to make it as interesting as the first Transformer movie. By the end of the two and a half hour movie, my ears were humming from the explosions, my eyes were dazed by the firing of lasers, missiles, artillery shells and machinegun fire, and my mouth, though speechless by the spectacular display of combat, was pursed with some disappointment.

I was disappointed that neither the Autobots nor the Decepticons were given enough screen time for the audience to understand what sort of characteristics and personalities they have. Although there were a lot more robots in the second movie, most of them did not speak more than two lines and were given very little room for character development to make them likeable. In the final desert showdown, as many as thirteen Decepticons deployed by The Fallen from the giant Decepticon spaceship just plummeted from the sky and started shooting and dying in the firefight. I did not even know which robot went down. Even the mighty Devastator (a gigantic Decepticon combined from six smaller ones) was not given much personality before it went down with a giant cannon blast from an American destroyer ship from the nearby coastal area.

I was even more disappointed that the supposedly iconic Jetfire, an powerful Decepticon who turned to join the Autobots, was portrayed as a feeble and rusty robot who had to walk with a walking stick and perpetually in an unsound state of mind, blabbering around like some old man when the original Jetfire in the Tranformers cartoons was much more charismatic and an even more capable fighter against Decepticons. The human actors were given too little screen time to grow more impressionable and were only given plenty of time to run and dodge pursuing Decepticons when I thought they could have more roles to play to contribute to the overall enjoyment.

All in all, I wished the movie could have less robots and more detailed (and slower) fights, with more human and robot relationships and plot development rather than just a high adrenalin slugfest with so many soldiers and robots dying but not given enough details on how the plot interwined between all these action. I thought The Fallen alongside with The Devastator joining forces with Megatron and Starscream would have been more than enough robots enemies to bring enough fight to the movie rather than cramming in too many things. I would have given a low 2.75 out of 5.00 for this highly-anticipated but not so impressive movie.