Movie: "Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen"
Year: 2009
Rated: PG-13
Genre: Action / Adventure
Directed by: Michael Bay
Writing credits: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Ehren Kruger

Reviewer: Protoclown
Posted: 11/30/2009

Plot: A bunch of giant robots chase a variety of MacGuffins and punch and shoot each other a lot and stuff.

Review: Though I managed to stave it off for months, morbid curiosity eventually got the best of me, so finally I watched Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or How Many MacGuffins Can We Chase Anyway, Seriously? and I was pleasantly surprised to find it much more enjoyable than its predecessor.

Nah, just kidding. It was fucking horrible. Even worse than the original, if such a thing is actually possible. I rented it for $1.00 from one of those Redbox machines and I felt completely ripped off. I seriously want to find Michael Bay the next time I'm in Los Angeles, kick him in the balls, and tell that fucker he owes me a dollar. This movie isn't even worth the effort it would take to steal.

Once again, the characters look like random bits of scrap metal glued together in vaguely humanoid shapes (that give you a eye strain to look at in the same way that staring at the tiny complex workings of a watch for too long will eventually give you a headache), and the inclusion of many more similar looking silver characters makes them even more indistinguishable from each other than in the first movie. Given that the vast majority of characters are never mentioned by name and have no speaking lines, I suppose it doesn't matter, but it's sometimes helpful to know whether it's a good guy ripping a bad guy's head off, or vice versa. Starscream still looks like an obese gorilla, but they actually gave him lines this time so he seems slightly more like his character in the 80s cartoon and comics. Oh, and Soundwave fans, you'll be momentarily happy to hear that he's in this film (and voiced by Frank Welker, no less--minus the vocoder this time though), but that happiness will instantly disappear as soon as I tell you that his only contribution in this film is to buttfuck a satellite. I wish I was joking. Oh, and once again, for no reason whatsoever, aside from the filmmakers thinking it was "cute", Bumblebee's voice is broken again, so he's forced to communicate via snippets he finds on the radio for the duration of the entire movie. Man, he sucks.

The only other new characters worth mentioning are Jetfire, who is apparently a cantankerous, bearded, elderly Briton, who uses one of his landing gear as a cane and can conveniently teleport wherever the story needs him to be. The movie also introduced Devastator, the construction vehicle combiner. Unfortunately, he's less than impressive in this incarnation, since all he can do is crawl around on all fours like a giant misshapen baby and eat lots of sand (and a pyramid). Literally all he does is suck. There's Arcee and two other identical motorcycles, who I would swear they referred to as "the Arcee twins", even though there are three of them. It doesn't matter though, because they never do anything. But most offensive of all are the actual twins Skids and Mudflap, who are the most blatantly racist caricatures I have ever seen in a mainstream piece of contemporary fiction. I had heard many people talking about how bad they were, but even with all of that preparation, I was honestly shocked by how overtly offensive they were. They look like monkeys, use modern street slang, are illiterate, are grossly incompetent (they serve no purpose in the film outside of a feeble attempt at "comic relief"), and have buck teeth (one of them with a gold front tooth). Seriously, my (or any) description doesn't do it justice. You won't believe that they actually went there when you see it. But you're not going to see it, because you love yourself more than I do. Right?

One of the other characters is a robot puked up by Ravage composed of little ball bearings that turn into little spiders, which in turn stack and combine into a robot so thin that you can't even see him if you're looking right at him. Apart from that being incredibly stupid in the first place, you would think his large round glowing red eye might be a little noticeable, but apparently, it is not. There are also a number of mini-Decepticons shown throughout the movie who all act exactly like gremlins from Gremlins 2. Seriously, take any gremlin from that movie, make a robotic version of them, and you have a Decepticon in this movie.

Apparently after the first movie, the humans and the Autobots are working together to root out Decepticon safehouses. This is an odd team-up since the humans invariably prove completely ineffective and useless. Their bullets may as well bounce right off their targets for all the good they do. The Autobots, in the meantime, using the same Earth weapons, manage to deal out some serious damage whenever they go up against the bad guys. During their downtime between missions, the Autobots apparently revert to vehicle form and chill out in a hangar doing a whole lot of nothing. I would find that a bit boring, but they are apparently okay with this.

So the Decepticons revive Megatron from the bottom of the ocean, and he goes flying off to another planet where Starscream is tending to a bunch of eggs, which he refers to as "the hatchlings". Yes, we learn that Transformers are hatched out of eggs. I don't know how that makes any kind of sense at all, but there it is. That's actually how my new cell phone was packaged--I had to break it out of a little techno-egg.

There's some old infirm robot that Megatron refers to as "master", so apparently he's important somehow. We find out that he is the Fallen, who looks like a Cylon Centurion would if it was an anorexic, gay wizard. He has pretty much no character at all except that he is evil. It seems there is a giant machine called the Sun Sucker or some such that devours all of the energy from a sun and converts it into energon. The ancient leaders of the Transformers, a body of seven wise warriors known as the Primes (because each of them is divisible only by one and himself, oh snap!) only use this device in a solar system with no life in it.

Well, the Fallen is feeling a bit energy-sapped one day, so he decides to use it on Earth during is primitive days. The other Primes won't abide by this, so they come up with a brilliant plan to stop him. Could it be to destroy the giant machine that destroys suns? Pfah! Too obvious for the Primes! How about destroy the Matrix of Leadership required to operate it? Nay, I say! The Primes won't stoop to such pedestrian tactics! Howzabout just simply kill the evil fucker who wants to use it? What are they, common palookas? No, their amazing plan is to hide the matrix by encasing it inside of a tomb made from their own corpses. Unfortunately, their plan fails to consider the possibility that the Fallen might find this tomb and then there will be nobody to stop him (apparently only a Prime can beat a Prime), because they all "sacrificed" themselves like morons.

Speaking of "sacrifice", I don't feel like it's a spoiler to tell you that Optimus Prime dies (gasp!) in this movie, but then he comes back, because that's how it works. The single funniest moment in the movie came when they airlifted Prime's lifeless body back to the military base where he was headquartered. All of these soldiers come out to solemnly witness the dead hero's return (he's just a robot, so why do they care again?), complete with sad, moving instrumentals. And then the helicopter cuts the line, dropping Prime's body from a good fifty feet, landing on the ground with a loud, unceremonious thud. It was the only point in the movie where I laughed out loud. The rest of the movie was spent wailing and gnashing my teeth, and I expect you'll do the same if you're bravedumb enough to experience it for yourself.

It pains me that I can only give this one half a pickle, because I don't feel like that properly quantifies its relationship to the first film (which I awarded a single pickle). So pretend that the half pickle there is actually negative two pickles and you're about where the movie should be rated. Some of you will say "Oh, come on, it wasn't that bad!" Yes, yes it was. And people who think otherwise deserve to be slapped.

Overall rating:
(Scored on a 0.5 - 5 pickles rating: 0.5 being the worst and 5 being the best)