Movie Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Have you, during Diwali times, ever put a can on those tiny little bombs only to watch it explode into smithereens or get flung away to unimaginable corners? Did you clap your hands in joy as it hit the nearby car or give yourself a high-five as you the shards of that erstwhile can fall to the ground? Then I believe you will love Transformers part deux too!

There are a lot of explosions, a lot of autobots and a lot of decepticons. There are the twins. There are the female autobots transforming into bikes (wiki search reveals three of them having a common consciousness, phew!) that got owned without too much of a fight, and there is the amazing devastator which seems like drawing upon its body parts by assembling a collection of automotives. There is Sam and Mikaela, with Sam doing the witwicky do and Mikaela holding her looks together. The useless parents for being comic and creating problems during the action sequence. There is Leo and Agent Simmons that add some more comic stuff (and I actually think they did add a few comic moments). But primarily, there are the large cool transforming machines that they call Transformers. The revival of an old decepticon “Jetfire” who walks around with a walking stick, and has chosen to switch sides and be with the autobots is quite funny in fact.  This is the quintessential Michael Bay with larger than life action, airplanes and tanks and people and machines exploding in your face, and the protagonist surviving all odds without having to explain why (or rather because he or she is the chosen one). Bayesian action gets contained by the dollars he can put aside, it seems. But it’s all good. It’s all fun. It’s all crazy. And that’s where the heart of the movie is (at least for me). I don’t want to watch a TROTF for its loopy/ retro/ kickass storyline, nor for the amazing acting skills of the team put together. All that is just frills or as we call it in my world, animation on the PowerPoint slides. The real stuff is the seriously “exploding” action. And there is plenty of it.

I and the others I watched with (Biwi, Sumant, Dodi & Divya) felt that this time round, it was far more difficult to differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys during the fight sequences. In many of the scenes, the action seemed muddled up and not very clear on who’s getting thulped. There was a time when Mr. Prime was getting thulped and I thought he was winning, and just when I thought he was getting thulped, he power charged his blades to crap the opposition.

Unsurprisingly, the movie gets bollywoodesque at times, with the hero almost dying before coming back to life, an Optimus Prime dying and getting revived and usual heroics from Galloway, Simmons et al.

Overall, I liked the movie a lot. For me, its 2 hours+ of engaging intense action sequences, and because Bay does not waste a time with pleasantries, I did not feel bad about him not developing the characters or explaining a few things here and there (like the leftover shard of the cube absorbed by Jetfire and never mentioned thereafter or the fact that if Devastator could have been taken out with a single strike, why not the other ones). My only grudge – Unlike Megatron from the first movie, “Fallen” looks like a pathetic and incompetent villain for such enormous action.

Watch it if you love explosive action. That’s what Transformers is all about. I will go in with a 4 on 5! It’s my kind of movie! J

BTW – my PJ from my Twit feed – what if instead of NEST/Autobots, Optimus Prime was chosen as the leader of a coalition government in India? He would be SUB-Optimus Prime-Minister