Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

[abomb]

Meh.

 

[Renz]

The first movie sucked.

 

[Mulli]

The first movie sucked.

Your expectations were too high. It is the Transformers. Kinda dumb to begin with.

 

[dreamcastrocks]

Meh.

The first movie sucked.

You guys suck.


Here is the new poster.

You must be registered for see images

Michael Bay also talks a bit about the new movie.

“Okay it’s time to turn up the heat on Transformers - Revenge of the Fallen. We’ve waited low in the weeds letting all the summer movies get their stuff out. We’ve seen the great year end movies, and watched the upcoming clips of the upcoming summer fare. We’ve seen certain movies coming out even try to duplicate Transformer size robots in their ads. Please, come on. Well, I promise you we will rock your world with Transformers 2. The fans wanted ROBOTS KICKING ASS - well we got it. Today we are releasing the teaser poster and soon the onslaught will continue with a steady drum beat until June 26th.”

 

[Jersey Girl]

Your expectations were too high. It is the Transformers. Kinda dumb to begin with.

I loved it. Saw it at IMAX. Awesome!!!

 

[Brian in Mesa]

http://vimeo.com/4208071

Footage first unveiled at 30th Annual ShoWest.

 

[RON_IN_OC]

http://vimeo.com/4208071

Footage first unveiled at 30th Annual ShoWest.

password?

 

[PDXChris]

password?

http://themovieblog.com/2009/04/watch-this-new-transformers-2-footage

You can watch it there too

 

[Mathew81]

I've been reading reviews and it's getting ripped apart. It has a whopping 22% on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm still going to see it but I have hardly seen anything good said about it.

 

[Shane]

I've been reading reviews and it's getting ripped apart. It has a whopping 22% on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm still going to see it but I have hardly seen anything good said about it.

I know the hype is there still. Every single midnight movie in town on a Tuesday night was sold out.

 

[Shane]

I've been reading reviews and it's getting ripped apart. It has a whopping 22% on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm still going to see it but I have hardly seen anything good said about it.

Average viewer raiting on Fandango is 4.7 out of 5

On IMDB its getting 7.5 out of 10

Here is a fan review that explains my feeling about movies like this:

People ignore all the negative reviews about storyline, plots, character development, acting, comedy and so on. Transformers is a glorified summer blockbuster that's meant to entertain us and boy does it. The effects are amazing and in places mind boggling. I didn't sign up for a story, acting or character development, I wanted to see transformers transform and Michael Bay blow up stuff we would only be in shock at if it were to happen. Good all round entertainment and thankfully at last one decent action blockbuster this summer!

I'm not gonna break the story down and write a review for every set piece. Just grab ya popcorn and soda and enjoy some mindless fun! Worth watching for sure. Enjoy!!

 

[Gaddabout]

God bless Roger Ebert.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

// / June 23, 2009


by Roger Ebert

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Deceptibots and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed "The Rock" in 1996. Now he has made "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." Faust made a better deal. This isn't a film so much as a toy tie-in. Children holding a Transformer toy in their hand can invest it with wonder and magic, imagining it doing brave deeds and remaining always their friend. I knew a little boy once who lost his blue toy truck at the movies, and cried as if his heart would break. Such a child might regard "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" with fear and dismay.



The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although--hello!--you can't outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!" The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.

There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to a flawless perfection and look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines. The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal. They take their son away to Princeton, apparently a party school, where Judy eats some pot and goes berserk. Later they swoop down out of the sky on Egypt, for reasons the movie doesn't make crystal clear, so they also can run in slo-mo from explosions.

The battle scenes are bewildering. A Bot makes no visual sense anyway, but two or three tangled up together create an incomprehensible confusion. I find it amusing that creatures that can unfold out of a Camaro and stand four stories high do most of their fighting with...fists. Like I say, dumber than a box of staples. They have tiny little heads, except for one who is so ancient he has an aluminum beard.

Aware that this movie opened in England seven hours before Chicago time and the morning papers would be on the streets, after writing the above I looked up the first reviews as a reality check. I was reassured: "Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!" (Bradshaw, Guardian); "Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!" (Tookey, Daily Mail); "A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror). The first American review, Todd Gilchrist of Cinematical, reported that Bay's "ambition runs a mile long and an inch deep," but, in a spirited defense, says "this must be the most movie I have ever experienced." He is bullish on the box office: it "feels destined to be the biggest movie of all time." It’s certainly the biggest something of all time.

Footnote 6/24: Does it strike you as a lapse of Pyramid security that no one notices a gigantic Deceptibot ripping off the top of the Great Pyramid? Not anyone watching on the live PyramidCam? Not even a traffic copter?

 

[Mulli]

Spoilers!!!!!!

Why do people expect so much from a movie based on a cartoon.



Ebert can bite me. I can't wait to see this.

 

[Shane]

Spoilers!!!!!!

Why do people expect so much from a movie based on a cartoon.



Ebert can bite me. I can't wait to see this.

Exactly. It kills me what peopel expect from movies like this. Thsi is meant to be nothing more than an action blockbuster with a few laughs and nothing more. People expecting more are quite frankly delusional.

I think the $$$$ this is going to make will speak for itself.

 

[MigratingOsprey]

i can agree with that - my only problem starts when movies like this try to get bigger than their premise

i grew up loving the cartoon, playing with the toys and enjoyed the styling of the first one ........ if this one follows through then i'm all for it

i'm cool with a cheesy cartoonish movie

 

[MigratingOsprey]

as for ebert - he didn't seem to mind the first one, with his only complaint being the robot fighting and overuse of CGI

to me it sounds like the 2nd movie took it further in that direction and he felt the need to be a basher ........ it's funny he didn't even mention the accents and things like that in his review of the first one and gladly plays along with the suspended disbelief that a car can turn into a large robot

Transformers

/ / / July 5, 2007

by Roger Ebert

Now I have fans who say, "We are so sorry, Michael Bay, you still suck but we love you." That's what the director of "Transformers" told Simon Ang during an interview in Seoul. He could have been speaking for me. I think Michael Bay sometimes sucks ("Pearl Harbor," "Armageddon," "Bad Boys II") but I find it possible to love him for a movie like "Transformers." It's goofy fun with a lot of stuff that blows up real good, and it has the grace not only to realize how preposterous it is, but to make that into an asset.
The movie is inspired by the Transformer toys that twist and fold and double in upon themselves, like a Rubik's Cube crossed with a contortionist. A yellow Camaro unfolds into a hulking robot, helicopters become walking death monsters, and an enemy named Megatron rumbles onto the screen and, in a voice that resembles the sound effects in "Earthquake," introduces himself: "I--AM--MEGATRON!!!"

I think that's the first time I've used three exclamation points. But Megatron is a three-exclamation-point kinda robot. He is the most fearsome warrior of the evil Decepticons, enemies of the benevolent Transformers. Both races (or maybe they're brands) of robots fled the doomed planet Cybertron and have been drawn to Earth because Megatron crash-landed near the North Pole a century ago and possesses the Allspark, which is the key to something, I'm not sure what, but since it's basically an alien MacGuffin it doesn't much matter. (Note to fanboys about to send me an e-mail explaining the Allspark: Look up "MacGuffin" in Wikipedia.)

The movie opens like one of those teen comedies where the likable hero is picked on by bullies at school, partly because he didn't make the football team, and mostly because he doesn't have a keen car. Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) talks his dad into buying him one, and he ends up with an old beater, a yellow Camaro that is actually the Transformer named Bumblebee and gets so mad when his paint job is insulted that it transforms itself into a shiny new Camaro.

This is more than a hot car. It plays the soundtrack to Sam's life. It helps Sam become visible to his sexy classmate Mikaela (Megan Fox), who says, "Do I know you?" Sam mentions casually that they take four classes together and have been in the same school since first grade. The high school stuff, which could be a teenage comedy on its own, segues into the battling robot stuff, and there is some low-key political satire in which the secretary of defense (Jon Voight) runs the country, while the president (not even credited) limits himself to a request for a Ding-Dong.

Voight sends the armed services into action, and we see a lot of Sgt. Lennox (John Duhamel) and Tech Sgt. Epps (Tyrese Gibson). They and their men labor during much of the movie under the optimistic impression that a metal robot the size of a 10-story building can be defeated by, or even brought to notice, automatic weapons fire. Sam and Bumblebee are crucial to the struggle, although a secret ops guy (John Turturro) asks the defense secretary, "You gonna lay the fate of the world on a kid's Camaro?"

Everything comes down to an epic battle between the Transformers and the Decepticons, and that's when my attention began to wander, and the movie lost a potential fourth star. First let me say that the robots, created by Industrial Light and Magic, are indeed delightful creatures; you can look hard and see the truck windshields, hubcaps and junkyard stuff they're made of. And their movements are ingenious, especially a scorpionlike robot in the desert. (Little spider robots owe something to the similar creatures in Spielberg's "Minority Report," and we note he is a producer of this movie.) How can a pickup truck contain enough mass to unfold into a towering machine? I say if Ringling Brothers can get 15 clowns into a Volkswagen, anything is possible.

All the same, the mechanical battle goes on and on and on and on, with robots banging into each other and crashing into buildings, and buildings falling into the street, and the military firing, and jets sweeping overhead, and Megatron and the good hero, Optimus Prime, duking it out, and the soundtrack sawing away at thrilling music, and enough is enough. Just because CGI makes such endless sequences possible doesn't make them necessary. They should be choreographed to reflect a strategy and not simply reflect shapeless, random violence. Here the robots are like TV wrestlers who are down but usually not out.

I saw the movie on the largest screen in our nearest multiplex. It was standing room only, and hundreds were turned away. Even the name of Hasbro, maker of the Transformers toys, was cheered during the titles, and the audience laughed and applauded and loved all the human parts and the opening comedy. But when the battle of the titans began, a curious thing happened. The theater fell dead silent. No cheers. No reaction whether Optimus Prime or Megatron was on top. No nothing. I looked around and saw only passive faces looking at the screen.

My guess is we're getting to the point where CGI should be used as a topping and not the whole pizza. The movie runs 144 minutes. You could bring it in at two hours by cutting CGI shots, and have a better movie.

 

[Chaplin]

An action/sci-fi blockbuster can be bad just as much as any movie. Look at Battlefield Earth. I wonder if Shane came on here before it was released and defended it from its bad reviews??

I personally don't think there are any good actors in the film except for John Turturro, but I can almost guarantee he won't be "good" in this movie.

As for the robots, they tried to develop them to be the most complicated machines they can find--there really is no definition to any of their body parts except they all have a head, two arms and two legs. Other than that, you can't tell what the hell they are made of, and you certainly can't tell what they all can transform into. Ebert really nails it on a lot of his points.

 

[Shane]

An action/sci-fi blockbuster can be bad just as much as any movie. Look at Battlefield Earth. I wonder if Shane came on here before it was released and defended it from its bad reviews??

I personally don't think there are any good actors in the film except for John Turturro, but I can almost guarantee he won't be "good" in this movie.

As for the robots, they tried to develop them to be the most complicated machines they can find--there really is no definition to any of their body parts except they all have a head, two arms and two legs. Other than that, you can't tell what the hell they are made of, and you certainly can't tell what they all can transform into. Ebert really nails it on a lot of his points.

Really what does it matter when I defend it Chap? 2nd you are right summer blockbusters can be crap. BFE was a fantastic example. How much money did that make again? These movies are definitely not on par with BFE you trying to compare them IMO is laughable!

 

[Gaddabout]

Exactly. It kills me what peopel expect from movies like this. Thsi is meant to be nothing more than an action blockbuster with a few laughs and nothing more. People expecting more are quite frankly delusional.

If film is the American art form (and I think it unequivocally is) there is no grading curve for me. Each film lives and dies by the standards set by those before it. Summer blockbusters don't have to be dumb. Star Wars, for example, is not dumb. It borrows from timeless elements, relates to people of all ages, and tells a compelling story with characters that transition from one familiar place (discontent, selfishness, fear) to an uncommon place (contentment, selflessness, lack of fear).

I'm not saying you have to agree with a critical assessment of the film, but being critical of any film for lack of plot or character depth is a perfectly acceptable position to take. I've had the same complaints about children's movies for years. I wasn't alone, and I think Pixar got that message and raise the bar for everyone.

Don't you think films like Transformers would be better if they focused more on the human element than the technology element? Wouldn't the payoff be even that much more rewarding? You can keep all the EFX and still tell a story that says something about us.

 

[Chaplin]

Really what does it matter when I defend it Chap? 2nd you are right summer blockbusters can be crap. BFE was a fantastic example. How much money did that make again? These movies are definitely not on par with BFE you trying to compare them IMO is laughable!

Defending it sight unseen is irresponsible, and you know it. The point isn't the amount of money it makes. Transformers 2 being a blockbuster means nothing except that the people who watch it are sheep that don't care whether a movie is good or not. (That is, IF the movie isn't any good of course)

If you watch it and love it, then you can talk, but until then, why disparage another's opinion after they HAVE watched it already? What gives you that authority to tear down someone's opinion without seeing it?

It's a problem inherent in the critical treatment of movies. Everyone loves to trash other people's opinions but expect everyone to respect their own. It's a universal truth and I'm as guilty of it as anyone.

 

[Andrew]

I just came back from seeing it a second time. I went back to actually pay attention to the story since my first viewing was all hyped full. My only rant is that there were kids there, a lot and the most annoying sat in my row. A little old lady with all boys ranging from 4-10.

I got what I came to the movie for, to hear any dialogue I missed last night, pay attention to the story, but those kids got ANNOYING fast.

I went mid afternoon because I thought most adults worked, even in the summer and kids wouldn't be there as much, I was wrong.

I will see it again before July is over lol...

 

[Linderbee]

as for ebert - he didn't seem to mind the first one, with his only complaint being the robot fighting and overuse of CGI

to me it sounds like the 2nd movie took it further in that direction and he felt the need to be a basher ........ it's funny he didn't even mention the accents and things like that in his review of the first one and gladly plays along with the suspended disbelief that a car can turn into a large robot

To be fair, there are new autobots in this one that have the REALLY bad accents, which I found stupid as well.

The movie is exactly what it's supposed to be, I guess. I agree with Ebert on almost all of his points, but I still didn't find it awful. They do explain how & why the parents wound up in Egypt; that's about the only disagreement I have. It was a straight-up action flick, with a lot of special effects. Nothing more, nothing less. It was fun, but it isn't going to win any directing, producing, acting, or screenplay Oscars.

 

[Shane]

Defending it sight unseen is irresponsible, and you know it. The point isn't the amount of money it makes. Transformers 2 being a blockbuster means nothing except that the people who watch it are sheep that don't care whether a movie is good or not. (That is, IF the movie isn't any good of course)

If you watch it and love it, then you can talk, but until then, why disparage another's opinion after they HAVE watched it already? What gives you that authority to tear down someone's opinion without seeing it?

It's a problem inherent in the critical treatment of movies. Everyone loves to trash other people's opinions but expect everyone to respect their own. It's a universal truth and I'm as guilty of it as anyone.

That's quite the assumption assuming I haden't seen it wouldn't you say

 

[Shane]

That's quite the assumption assuming I haden't seen it wouldn't you say

Ok I reread what you wrote in first post. You were asking. I misunderstood that.

 

[LoyaltyisaCurse]

I was thouroughly unimpressed with the 1st one and will be dragged to the theater to pay 12buck per person to watch the 2nd installment of the crap.

The cartoon was head and shoulders better than the movie IMO for it acutally had character development and the Robots were the stars, not the people. You cant even understand why Prime and Megatron are at odds because the story was never told and--in the 1st movie--they kind of just forced it out...