Last night my girlfriend and I went to an advance screening of Transformers 2. I have been asked by several people today how the movie
was, and my initial response remains the same: Transformers 2 was 2½ hours long.
I'll start off with what they got right with this movie; this section will be very short. One of the problems with the first movie
was that the action was impossible to follow because all the transformers were chrome jumbles. They made the transformers much brighter
in this movie and slowed the action down a lot, even using bullet time at some points. This is a huge boon for the film as the
action scenes are really all it has going for it. Another one of my big complaints with the first
movie was that it was stupid for Starscream to want to free Megatron from the bottom of the ocean since five minutes couldn't pass
in the original cartoon without Starscream trying to usurp power. They definitely got this dynamic better in the second movie, although
Starscream came across as a little too sniveling for my taste.
And now onto the bad. There will be spoilers in here because, honestly, nothing I do could possibly ruin this movie for anyone.
This movie made the exact same mistake that the first movie did: they focus WAY too much on the humans. Transformers is about giant
battling robots, so where the fuck are they for most of the movie? The fact that, once again, this was a movie about Shia Lebouf and Megan Fox
and NOT about robots made the 2½ hours feel like about 4 hours; I was sitting in a chair made out of the same material
as temperpedic beds, and it STILL felt like I was sitting there forever. Also, I tried my hardest to shut my brain off yesterday, but
it's just not possible to suspend your disbelief enough to enjoy the plot of this movie.
First of all, are the transformers aliens or not? They keep saying they're an alien race, but at the beginning of the movie Shia Lebouf
has a shard of the cube from the first movie and it brings his home appliances to life. That doesn't really make them a fucking alien
race, does it? I mean, unless Cybertron is located right next to the planet Kitchenaid. After coming to life, all the appliances then
went into Shia's room and tried to kill him. They caught him off guard at point blank range, opened fire, and he was able to open his closed window,
with NO cover, and escape out the window completely unharmed. You would have to go out of your way to fire automatic weapons at
that close range and NOT hit him, even with a ricochet.
The handling of Soundwave was pretty poor too. I understand that they would want to change him from being a boom box, but a satellite?
Soundwave existed in this movie for the sole purpose of avoiding having to deal with plot; he hacks into a military communications satellite,
so anytime the military is having any sort of exposition, the Decepticons immediately know it all. Of course, we should be thankful for this
because it probably cut the movie down by another hour or so. In a nod to the original Soundwave, the satellite version also fires out a little pod
that hurls toward earth and then transforms into a dog. As nice as it was for them to pay some sort of homage to the original Soundwave,
how the fuck is this thing supposed to get back to the satellite? This is kind of a one shot deal. Anyway, the dog is sent to
"the most secure facility on Earth" where a shard of the all spark is being held. Apparently the most secure facility on earth does not have a fence, guards,
motion detectors, sound detectors, heat sensors, or geiger counters (Because apparently the transformers are mildly radioactive).
I could go on explaining how terrible the plot is, but it would take longer to accurately describe how God awful the plot is than
for you to actually watch the movie. Basically, if you want to sit for 2½ hours for like 30 minutes tops of decent action, then this
is the movie for you. Oh yeah, there are also no less than three scenese of people running away from slow motion explosions and, if
my girlfriend is correct, Megan Fox has multiple costume changes after being stranded in the desert in Egypt with no possessions.
I've devised a new rating system that shows what disease I'd rather have than watch this film.
© 2009 by Dr. Jeebus