No.
It's become abundantly clear to me what type of person this movie was designed for through the MANY conversations I've had about it since seeing it Tuesday night. The conversations usually start with me simply saying that I saw the movie. The other person involved then asks the next logical question, whether it be out of actual interest or that they're just being polite, "How was it?" My response... Awful. The conversations always end with the other party saying, "... at least Megan Fox is hot... that shot when she's straddling the motorcycle at the beginning of the movie was awesome." I saw that shot in the preview for the movie before
Star Trek... then I got to watch
Star Trek.
Let's start at the beginning.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, being a 2h 45m blockbuster with the potential of reaching $300 million at the box office, I'm going to get into as much detail as possible without giving anything away. I'll do my best to refrain from being as bloated with unnecessary content as the movie was, but I make no promises.
The first 45 minutes of the movie were completely unnecessary. It's important that you remember the statement I just made because it will come into play again later... In the first 45 minutes, Sam (
Shia Labeouf) goes to college... meets new people... goes to a party. His mom is funny. His dad is cheap. Long distance relationship between Sam and
Mikelah (Megan Fox a.k.a. "
WOOOOOO!!! Yeah!" in theatres across America). If you saw the trailer, the first 45 minutes of the movie are summed up in 20-30 seconds.
Once Sam is brought back into the same old shenanigans from the first movie thanks to a
Decepticon that apparently can transform into the shape of a human (how? who knows. the technology is never explained, developed as part of the story, or mentioned again by anyone), the rest of the movie is just metal hitting metal, gunfire and explosions with brief interruptions by inane, stammering, unnecessary dialogue or establishing shots of the many different locations that the characters travel to by car, plane, or ...
teleportation(?).
Rottentomatoes.com quotes Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian [UK] as saying "At once loud and boring, it's like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan."
Mr. Bradshaw is dead-on balls accurate. The last 45 minutes of the movie was an action sequence where Sam is being hunted by the
Decepticons in Egypt. The
Autobots are fighting the
Decepticons, loudly, and Sam and
Mikelah are running, several miles, through the desert. It felt like they were running for hours. When they finally take a break in a rundown structure to hide, they can hear the evil robots outside looking for them. The camera flies through a hole in the wall, around the building, back through a different hole in the wall and over to Sam again... THEN BACK THROUGH THE SAME HOLE THAT IT HAD FIRST GONE THROUGH AGAIN, to show a mechanical alien fly that was helping the
Decepticons to locate Sam. Why?
They spent a lot of time trying to explain that the Transformers were being covered up by the government, that they were part of an elite squad of military
personnel established to capture and destroy the remaining
Decepticons. That the U.S. government was regretting the decision and wanted them to leave the planet. While the military should obviously have been involved in the story, the specific characters portrayed by Josh
Duhamel and
Tyrese were entirely unnecessary and the plot points listed in this paragraph were extraneous.
I'm tired, so I'm going to finish by saying that even with the assault on my senses, I was so bored by the story that I actually fell asleep twice. To be perfectly honest, as
irrelevant as they were, the first 45 minutes were the most entertaining minutes of the movie. Don't waste 3 hours plus travel time to get to
Revenge of the Fallen when you can just watch
Transformers (2007) at home.
No.
