blast-o-rama.

So this was a weird one.  I had passes for an early screening of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen last night, but due to work commitments, I would be unable to get to theater in time.

Never the less, I wanted to make sure you fine readers got a review. In turn, I looked to my friends to not just give away the pass, but write you a review.

Enter Sean Creef. Nerd. Geek. All around good man.

Sean decided to step up and not just see the flick, but write a review!

Here goes, gang:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

A story of lies, sex, and violence.

First of all, I enjoyed the 2007 Transformers movie. It was corny at times, and there are a few parts I dislike a lot. But overall, I liked the movie.

Revenge of the Fallen was much better.

For starters, there are robots in this movie. And not even just a few token shots of them transforming and then moving around in the corner of a shot, never to be seen again. If I had to guess, I would say there is at least 4 or 5 times as much robot action in this film. And it is generally front and center on the screen, clearly visible. This alone is such an improvement over the original.   Second, there are much less annoying human characters. They cut out 3 or 4 annoying people, and while they did add one, he was at least with Sam co pretty much the entire time, so we didn’t dick around seeing what aussie hacker and fat guy were doing. No Jon Voight, either.

The Military badasses are back. But they spend all their time palling around with Transformers in some sort of interplanetary alliance of asskicking. They have a decent amount of chatter with the Autobots, so instead of ‘annoying people doing stuff’ it is ‘somewhat less annoying people being buds with robots’.

Now the bad stuff. The movie has a lot of stupid comedic elements that somewhat break the immersion or, in my opinion, come off as just crude. Robotic leg humping, robotic testicles. At least nobody gets urinated on by a robot.

Back to the action. The robot on robot violence is fierce, fast, and brutal. I am pretty sure the level of bot on bot violence would not be allowed in a Hollywood film if the characters were human – limbs are severed and bodies torn apart with significant frequency. The initial chase and fight scene in Shanghai is confusing due to the reliance on new characters that we are never introduced too properly. Some car-form Decepticon is shown and killed without a name given.

And that takes me back to another thing I dislike – the Twins. Mudflap and his twin, whose name I honestly did not catch, and nor could I tell you which tiny annoying robot was Mudflap. Were they funny? Yeah, at times. But they were also somewhat retarded, and would have been better off in some other movie. In this one they seemed out of place and hokey. Also I personally thought they looked like Gremlins and acted like inner city teenagers on crack.

The movie culminates in a lengthy, epic ass battle in Egypt. Or maybe Jordan. I was a tad confused. IT was along the border so it is hard to say. But the battle was possibly the most epic modern battle I have ever seen. Tanks, infantry, almost 2 dozen transformers, air strikes, it had everything. Even something that will make sci-fi and military tech geeks spooge their pants.

In summation, Transformers 2 was a total upgrade of the original. It cut out most of the annoying crap from the previous film. It added an asston more robot on robot action. The stupid jokes were still there, and, while many were funny, they felt out of place or worse. Wheelie, the cowardly RC Car is the worst offender by far, though the Twins are more frequent.

Personally, I’m seeing the midnight show tonight (which could be a bad decision, if Roger Ebert is correct), but we’ll see how it pans out.