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Transformers: Revenge of the (yawn) Fallen
19 September 2010
Picked up a previously-viewed copy of the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen movie at Rogers last week. Thought it would be a fun, action-filled but light movie for weekend watching. We had seen the previews and both of us thought it would be entertaining. We both like sci-fi, and action films. Seemed like the perfect mix of the two.
It was bloody awful. It was a snorefest.
It's 20 minutes of entertainment in two-and-a-half hours of drearily repetitive scenarios. It's as slow as the remake of King Kong without any of that film's (few) redeeming characteristics, but a little murkier and dumber than Kong was.
There's a vague, poorly elucidated plot, a clumsy, all-too-unbelievable romance, lots of explosions (and US warships floating in Jordanian waters but able to fire on Egyptian pyramids) and run-of-the-mill CGI effects. The actors could have mailed in their dialogue and probably not been any worse than when on camera. There's humour, but it's thin and sparse, and some of it borders on racial stereotyping.
The careless geography in the film is worse than awful. It's embarrassing in its ignorance. It has Egyptian pyramids towering over the landscape in what's supposed to be Jordan, has Cairo visible as a "village" outside the Jordanian monument of Petra and has the protagonists drive all the way across the Sinai in a few short hours (it's at least a full day's drive) to get to this bizarrely Egyptian-pyramid-rich version of Jordan, without the inconvenience of having to drive through the intervening state of Israel. And then the scriptwriters place Aqabah (on the Gulf) close to Petra which is actually 2-3 hours' drive NNE of that port.
There's a crudely religious after-death scene in which the main character is returned to life after an uplifting chat with the spirits of robots of yore. It's not even good enough to be silly and it made me wince to watch.
Panned by critics, it was actually a box office success, probably because it would appeal to under-12-year-olds whose critical sense of plot, dialogue and geography are perhaps lower than that of anyone post-puberty. (Maybe I'm being uncharitable towards pre-puberty kids: even at that age I would have spotted the flaws in the film's abysmal geography).
Overall, I'd give it a quarter-of-a-star out of five. It's certainly not the worst film I've ever watched, but it's a challenger for the title. It's not even good enough to rate as a 'B' film.
It was bloody awful. It was a snorefest.
It's 20 minutes of entertainment in two-and-a-half hours of drearily repetitive scenarios. It's as slow as the remake of King Kong without any of that film's (few) redeeming characteristics, but a little murkier and dumber than Kong was.
There's a vague, poorly elucidated plot, a clumsy, all-too-unbelievable romance, lots of explosions (and US warships floating in Jordanian waters but able to fire on Egyptian pyramids) and run-of-the-mill CGI effects. The actors could have mailed in their dialogue and probably not been any worse than when on camera. There's humour, but it's thin and sparse, and some of it borders on racial stereotyping.
The careless geography in the film is worse than awful. It's embarrassing in its ignorance. It has Egyptian pyramids towering over the landscape in what's supposed to be Jordan, has Cairo visible as a "village" outside the Jordanian monument of Petra and has the protagonists drive all the way across the Sinai in a few short hours (it's at least a full day's drive) to get to this bizarrely Egyptian-pyramid-rich version of Jordan, without the inconvenience of having to drive through the intervening state of Israel. And then the scriptwriters place Aqabah (on the Gulf) close to Petra which is actually 2-3 hours' drive NNE of that port.
There's a crudely religious after-death scene in which the main character is returned to life after an uplifting chat with the spirits of robots of yore. It's not even good enough to be silly and it made me wince to watch.
Panned by critics, it was actually a box office success, probably because it would appeal to under-12-year-olds whose critical sense of plot, dialogue and geography are perhaps lower than that of anyone post-puberty. (Maybe I'm being uncharitable towards pre-puberty kids: even at that age I would have spotted the flaws in the film's abysmal geography).
Overall, I'd give it a quarter-of-a-star out of five. It's certainly not the worst film I've ever watched, but it's a challenger for the title. It's not even good enough to rate as a 'B' film.
