Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

A sequel with a vengeance. It did all the horrible things you hope sequels never do, and did it with gusto too. Irrelevant (and often campy) details such as Mrs. Witwicky's loopy behaviour, Sam's maladjustedness, and the sexual awkwardness (or obsession) of adolescence, which, in the first movie were touches of humour, got blown entirely our of proportion in the second one. Campiness pretty much upstaged the noble autobot mission for half of this 150-minute long flick, followed by an interval of aaargh! aargh! aaargh! chased by deceptic---aargh! aargh! aargh! And then a long explosive battle scene when everybody gets their 15 minutes of fame, except for the autobots. The US army gets about half an hour, so does Optimus. The other bots just flash in and out of the scenes, unlike the first movie where there was at least some effort at drawing out the characters of the different bots.

I could rip the screenplay and storyline apart, but then it is a teen flick meant to ride on the wave of profits and hype generated by the first movie, so maybe it's not worth the effort, nor even fair to do so. I'll just say that it had something going for it, but flashy CGI cannot make up for the terrible pacing, in which each meaningful chunk of the plot deflates in an anticlimactic and prolonged joke of a scene, like Mrs. Witwicky's antics, or the twin robots' antics, or Witwicky's roomate's antics. Perhaps the team was aiming for the comic book's ability to pitch from slapstick comedy to rough talk, to noble ideals--mashing and bending genres. But it looked more as if, in putting together big, flashy and putatively emotional scenes, tastelessly decked out with innuendo and campiness, they lost artistic control of the overall effect.

There is truly nothing like a bad sense of rhythm to spoil what ought to have been at least an enjoyable movie. The beginning was a series of repeated episodes about the ridiculousness of Sam's family and the awkwardness of his first day at school, hyper-exaggerated by his actions under the influence of the Allspark (no, it's not a type of drug). The middle was generally a lot of running and screaming and things exploding left right and centre, followed by more running and screaming; it felt like a failed hybrid of horror and action. Even the climactic battle scene dragged on a little too long, despite being so fast-paced that one hardly knew who was who at times (which is all part of the fun, I feel, in this particular movie)--this mostly again the fault of random cut scenes to irrelevant jokes that dragged on for half a minute at a time. Hey, forget slow motion, there's nothing like campiness and weepiness in the middle of a big battle to impress upon the audience the all-important desire to focus on the fight. Yes, camera, let us see anything except that smart-talking soldier or hysterical college kid, please please, please.

Well, to admit, I only watch these movies because I admire CGI, and I think special effects artists who put so much work into their creations should get admired. Scripts and screenplays coming out of the US don't seem to hold much right now. All bowing to mass consumption, profit margins and the like. It's obvious when a screenplay rehashes to an audience what the writers/producers think the audience wants. You end up with an inchoate and contradictory piece, rather than a piece which says something, if not about the world, at least about itself.