Revenge of the Explosions

That is the title Michael Bay should have given his new movie. Transformers: Revenge of the giant fuck-off insane explosions. I think he may have set a world record for the most number of explosions on screen in a single film.

It picks up 2 years after the end of the last movie, with the autobots having set up a goverment team with Captain Lennox and Co, hunting down decepticons across the globe, apart from bumblebee who seems to live in Sam's garage doing bugger all. By picking up 2 years later, the film can happily skip over explaining details of new Autobots and Decepticons, and instead pretty much taking the attitude of "They're here. Deal with it.". Which in some respects works, but also throws up a lot of questions. Namely how did they get there, WTF is NEST, and what the hell happened to John Voigt?

The entire film pretty much hurtles along at breakneck pace after this, hopping across the globe as things explode, things collapse, and robots go on the rampage and beat the shit out of each other.
It pauses about an hour and a half in to explain about Optimus Prime, The Fallen and the other 12 original transformers, but then quickly throws you back into the action again. The problem with the last hour of action is that an explosion occurs about once every 20 seconds. Which is nice and all that, but seriously, there is only so much Bayhem the brain can take before it becomes a pile of quivering mush amd you simply give up caring. After seeing forests explode, paris explode, and then being sent to a desert that, yes, exploded, my brain was ready to explode.
Complimenting the explosions are more explosions, robots exploding, pyramids exploding, vehicles exploding, and yes, people exploding. Exciting stuff. It's hard to tell who gets more screen time, the CG Robots, or the CG Explosions.

On the plus side, the 'bots have a lot more screen time than the previous outing. This provides a lot more interaction and involvement on their part, and gives a bit more of a feeling the film is about the robots, not the humans. It also allows for some nice talky bits by prime, and some more interaction between bumblebee and Sam.

On the downside of this, there are now so many robots that some barely get any screentime before being thrown away/killed/ignored in favour of newer ones (Including fan favourites such as Arcee, Soundwave and Sideswipe, as well as a pretender who is never explained at all - each gets about 2 lines in the film, and no introduction), and flaws in the animation are a lot more obvious as you have more time to notice them (One epically long scene with Optimus and Megatron going all Medieval on each other looks oddly un-natural and too smooth compared to the real shot of sam and the forest they're in. It is as if the film was shot at 24fps, and then somebody at ILM decided to do all the animation in 60fps, and convert the entire movie from 24 to 60fps to fit with the animations, rather than fitting the animation to the film). Also, a lot of the 'bots screentime is taken up by jokes or poor sterotypes. Most annoying are the autobot twins, Mudflap and Skids, who are generic, afro-american wannabe gangsters, complete with generic afro-american "Hoooooo-ey" accents and gold teeth, followed by Wheelie, a decepticon RC Monster Truck, who proceeds to call Megan Fox a "Crazy Bitch", "Warrior Princess", and then later on in the movie gets an overly long and slightly disturbing shot of him dry humping her leg. As much as any guy in the world would like to do that, seeing a 1ft tall robot do it is downright weird. I can only assume this kind of humour and characterisation is to appeal to a larger audience.



Thrown into the mix this time was the Matrix of Leadership, which was a bit odd and completely off kilter with the majority of the franchise. The matrix of leadership is what is in Prime's chest that makes him the LEADER. And what makes Hot Rod become Rodimus Prime and the LEADER. And is generally considered to be what makes a Prime PRIME.
Instead, in this film it's a key to powering some machine that the Fallen wants to use to blow up the sun to make energon (Don't ask why, this is never fully explained other than he wanted to blow it up years ago and still wants to now - despite the billions of other stars in the galaxy). Queue a race across the globe to find it. It's never fully explained why Energon is needed either, but is declared by Starscream in a scene reminiscent of the human farms in the matrix, except with decepticons instead, so I assume it's to do with making baby 'bots.

There are a lot of plot holes in revenge of the explosions fallen, but the film attempts to overcome them by instead throwing so many things on screen at once that it vaguely covers them up, albeit poorly. However, you'll be hurtling along at such a speed, with so many explosions going off in your face that by the end, you won't actually remember much of what is going on, so you really won't care.



6/10 - Whilst visually overwhelming at many points, with more explosions than you can shake a stick at and a plot like a slice of swiss cheese, Revenge of the Fallen somehow manages to make itself watchable by having giant robots beating each other to death with their bare hands, and almost as many shots of Megan Fox as there are of explosions.