Life and Leisure. Tech and Toys.

I had a chance to catch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen this past weekend and it was less than stellar. It actually made the first movie look better in comparison. But according to the box office its all about movies with unlimited budgets, leading actresses and nostalgic branding. Yea that’s the formula for success right there.

Let’s start with what I did like about the movie. First of all the movie started off well, trying to tell some story with Optimus Prime narrating. It built up some energry and made for a decent launching point. From the start to the finish the robots just look flawless. They look like they could really be there acting along side the human actors. Even the amount of robots and the size of the robots were pushed to another level this time around.

Now for the bad. Once the human actors come into play the only real actor is Shia LeBeouf. He’s acting his goofy self the whole time but it comes off pretty naturally. Everyone else, including Megan Fox, are just place holders. Well maybe not Megan. She’s definitely there for some other reasons. The movie might as well have been a Megan Fox photo shoot. Who needs robots anyway. Actually, I would have preferred they spent all that money to make the most out of this world Megan Fox photo shoot. I’d pay $11 for that. Megan doesn’t show off and inch of talent in this movie, unless you’re considering knowing how to be sexy and showing inches of more skin. Her lines were recited awkwardly and show little chemistry with her co-star at all. She’s probably still bitter she has to makeout with the prepubescent Shia. Who really cares though because we all love her right now and she knows it.

This movie fails in too many ways and deserves its 20% rating on rottentomatoes.com. Even the Autobots seem to have less character which is partly attributed to the additional anonymous Autobots. In fact, almost the entire cast of Decepitcons are anonymous making killing them off utterly numbing. It didn’t matter how many of them were destroyed because they’d be replaced by another one that looked exactly like Megatron. In parts of the dessert battle I honestly couldn’t tell if one of the Decepticons was actually Megatron or one of his look-alike cronies. I guess this is all attributed to the poor robot design. I never liked how the Decepticons looked so gnarly.

The Fallen and Megatron themselves see little action in the movie at all, only to be beaten down by Optimus rather quickly in the end. The battle that dragged on for nearly half the movie was wrapped up so quickly that it left me with an empty feeling inside.

I still need to find out what college Sam Witwicky went to because I was obviously going to the wrong one…