Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

When the animated Transformers film came out in the 80s, my father and I went to see it. For me, the movie was if they had made a really long episode of Transformers, with celebrity voices. I was young at the time, and didn't see the big deal in getting Orson Welles to do the voice of the giant planet-devouring Unicron, or Leonard Nimoy as the voice of the reborn Decepticon Leader Galvatron. It was the robots that I came to theater to see -- my favorites like Optimus Prime, Hound and Ironhide, and within the first ten minutes of the movie, in no uncertain terms, those characters were gone. Instead of sticking with the familiar robots that we had seen coming to Earth and taking on the disguises of humanity's machines and following their adventures, the animated movie was a huge reset button, and the characters for the most part were all new.

After coming out of the theater I asked my father what he thought of it, and he said "I couldn't tell the robots apart -- who were the good guys, and which ones were the bad guys? After a while, I fell asleep, so I had a nice nap."

Michael Bay already pressed the big giant reset button when he decided to make Transformers a live-action movie; prior to the release of the first movie, I wondered how they could make humans relevant; the movie may be about robots, but you can't have a two-hour long movie about cgi-robots fighting each other over dominion of the planet without showing the effect on the human population of the planet.

One would think after the chaos caused by the climatic battle of the Transformers in downtown LA at the finish of the first movie that the entire world would know about the Transformers, but it turns out that the majority of the population know nothing about them, and as a matter of fact, have successfully covered it up; the first glimpse we see of the Transformers we know is a battle in Shanghai, but just as my father had trouble distinguishing the good robots from the evil ones so long ago, so it was with the robots in this movie; the Autobots are Crayola colored, while the evil Decepticons are all silver with red eyes. The plot revolves around a shard of the Cube that survived, and is now part of Sam Witwicky's mind, and Decepticons chase Sam, and much running, screaming and explosions ensue.

Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a typical Michael Bay movie; explosions, the U.S. Armed Forces, and lots of cgi battles. As a followup to the first Transformers movie; it's really the Optimus Prime / Shia LaBeouf / Megan Fox movie, the other robots have little need to appear, much less speak except to force the plot forward or provide comic relief.

Impressively, the 5-day box office taking of 201.2 million comes close to matching last year's The Dark Knight which took home 203.8 million in the same amount of time.