Santikos Cine-opsis

4

(start watching at 2:34 for the best part — go Lion!)

Transformers!

Products in disguise!

Ever since the original TV series and movie, “Transformers” has succeeded at one thing: selling stuff to kids.  The plot of the show was never very important, other than that the Autobots and Decepticons needed to fight each other at least twice per episode.  The writing was corny at best, and the drawing and animation were often slapdash.

But Hasbro sold a transforming-dumptruck-full of action figures.

Fast-forward 20 years, and the generation that grew up brainwashed into buying toy cars now needs to be brainwashed into buying the real ones (right, Chevy?), and also needs to be brainwashed into thinking that Megan Fox is not CGI.

Autobots to the rescue!

None of this is earth-shattering news, of course.  The partnership between Chevy and Hasbro and Dreamworks has been well-documented throughout the news-o-sphere since before the 2007 “Transformers”.   I just want to mention it to remind viewers and critics of why Transformers exists before they head into this sequel expecting “The Empire Strikes Back” (speaking of franchises dedicated to selling toys!)

Ok.  Rant finished.  On to the review!

In many ways, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is vastly superior to Michael Bay’s original re-hashing of the franchise.  The action scenes are done with a much more experienced hand (although at times it’s still hard to tell who’s beating the crap out of whom) and the Autobots and Decepticons are much better (visually) defined than in the first film.  The sound is amazing, and constant.  There’s a scene where a puma-bot decepticon pukes up a thousand little ball-bearing bots down a vent (it makes sense in the movie….sorta) — the clings and clangs of the detritus falling down the shaft and hitting the floor of the compound are fantastic.

Yet despite its technical and action prowess, the second film feels much clunkier than the first.  Granted, there are no 20 minute “watch Shia Lebouf sneak around the house with giant robots in the backyard to keep from waking his parents” scenes, but those have been replaced with even longer, and more pointless, expositionary dialogue.  I don’t need to see Josh Duhamel explain to his squad exactly how they’re going to fan out along the perimeter to stop the oncoming Decepticon invasion.  The movie spends way too much time doing things like that, and not enough explaining how all those little bots are morphing into that big bot.  Likewise, the names and allegiances of the robot aliens get confusing, to the point where I cheered when the big green robot got blown up, only to be told by a friend that it was the Constructibots and not the Devastator (or something to that effect).

The original series had each episode down to a fine science.  Introduce the new toys.  Pit them against each other. Add a bunch of explosions.  Have the autobots win and Starscream and Megatron fly off in defeat.  Profit.  The new films get some of that right.  But they spend way too much time on the humans, and not nearly enough on the giant alien robots who turn themselves into Chevys.

All my negativity aside, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, is still a darn good reason to go to the theater and buy popcorn.  And isn’t that what “Transformers” is all about?