You’ve probably heard about it by now: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen isn’t exactly receiving raving reviews, as painfully punctuated by a pathetic aggregate score of 21% on Rotten Tomatoes which I suppose puts the movie well on the way to becoming the highest grossing piece of polished turd since Titanic.

But I wouldn’t go that far on the nerd rage scale for this one. After all, Transformers as envisaged by Michael Bay is a movie that cannot be judged using traditional benchmarks. Earning half a star out of five from the resident Straits Times critic may even be seen as a badge of honour. However, what really disappointed me was the fact that the movie failed to excel even within its own narrowly-defined spectrum of awesomehood.

I shall try to keep this post short as I do not have the nice pictures I usually use to pad the content.

1. Megan Fox

I realize that she is about 50% of the reason why many people watch the movie, but I found her role disappointing. Instead of the hot girl-next-door supporting character she portrayed in the first movie, Megan Fox now plays the role of a decorative overly-perfected supermodel being carried around like a piece of dead weight attached to a pair of mammae. I have the feeling that even those annoying twin robots Skids and Mudflap had more dialogues than she did. Also, slutty is not a synonym of hot.

2. “Awesome” animation

Everytime anyone mentions the word “plot” to a diehard Transformers apologist, the immediate comeback is predictable: “But the CG animations are so awesome!” This meme is but an urban legend. Transformers 2 had worse animation than many other brain-dead blockbuster Hollywood hits of recent times, including its own predecessor.

Whereas the original movie paid great attention to details and fully exploited the camera angles to make the CGI Autobots and Decepticons blend in naturally with their surroundings, the second movie clearly saw no need to put in any such effort. The robots generally float around the scenes looking like they are lit by a magical invisible light source from another direction. The twin robots look extremely cartoony and unrealistic, the exploding aircraft carrier looks so completely CG and fails to project the intended sense of grandeur and scale, Devastator looks about as awe-inspiring as its collectible-toy counterpart, fight scenes are often jerky and poorly choreographed, and the list goes on.

3. “Awesome” action

Another urban legend. The amount of explosions in the movie is pathetic. Fight scenes all play out in exactly the same manner. Michael Bay’s idea of fighting is basically robots crashing into one another linearly repeated about fifty times. And oh sure, some French and Chinese buildings received a few light scratches and maybe a few thousand people died in the movie, but at the end of the day not even a single city was annihilated! The Decepticons are a bunch of wimps who fail epicly at this villainous alien stint. There were probably grander action scenes in Harry Potter than this. I do not understand how people can honestly say that they watched the movie for the explosions because there weren’t really any.

4. Story

No one expected great insights into the human condition from Michael Bay. However, a movie has to possess some form of basic story-telling to link one explosion to the next. Transformers 2 has a story so terrible that it actually distracts the audience from the giant explosions and fight scenes. I walked into the cinema with the full intention of giving the movie free pass on its story but I realized that my capacity for bullshit reached its limit somewhere between the Terminator rip-off and the leg-humping Decepticon.

5. Lack of focus

There are so many things happening that the main characters become extremely diluted. Tons of new Autobots and Decepticons are thrown into the story to do nothing but sell toys. For a show that is supposed to provide excellent action, there is too much unnecessary distraction breaking the flow. The movie spends so much time showing off US military hardware that the Transformers pale in comparison. Who the heck is the Fallen again?

Conclusion

I guess the coolest part of the movie was actually the US military hardware showcase. Watching the cartoony Devastator climb a pyramid of poorly-animated CGI bricks is just not as cool as a realistic B-1B Lancer dropping a JDAM or a squadron of F-22s banking in formation before emptying their payloads.

I don’t pretend to be a connoisseur of fine cinema and Citizen Kane is definitely far from my favourite flick. I wanted to enjoy Transformers for the awesome graphics and explosions, but ended up being disappointed by this awful hodgepodge of Michael Bay’s adolescent attention deficit disorder and a corporate-sponsored toy advertisement.

Imagine an awesome martial arts fight scene painstakingly choreographed to perfection. Now imagine that the actors are realistic-looking giant transforming robots. Now add explosions to that. Transformers 2 is not that movie and that is the real reason, typical cinematic criticisms aside, why it is a huge disappointment.