I've been waiting for this for two years

[magicalmartha]

AAAHHHHH

So I thought Transformers 2 got knocked WAY too hard by the critics.  Despite its failings, which I'll get to in a moment, it was fun and fast-paced, high octane action.  The robots were shiny, the fights were cool, it had some funny lines.  It also made it clear that Transformers is now a real franchise, what with the gapingly open ending. 

One of the big criticisms I've heard is that there are simply too many robots - there's no way to get to know them the way you could in the first one, because every ten seconds eight hundred of them are crashing to Earth.  This is both true and not true.  There are a HELL of a lot of bots running around, but I didn't mind so much because they were getting mown down by the fistful.  This film is much more of a "war" action movie than the first one, and it did a good job of capturing the fact that on the battlefield, most people are going to die.  Both sides are hauling in their big guns and the casualties reflect that.  I had more of a problem with the fact that the bots I was SUPPOSED to get to know got lost in the scuffle.  Sideswipe and the ladybots are the examples that spring immediately to mind, and I can only hope that they (ESPECIALLY Sideswipe) will get larger parts to play in the next film.  He was woefully underused.

(Also, I know Arcee [the pink ladybot] and the blue on got killed, but the purple one is still at large.)

I did not have as much of a problem as a lot of people did with Skids and Mudflap.  The fact that I couldn't hear half of what they were saying probably helped that, but honestly I thought they were kind of funny.  Do I think their screentime could have been better spent?  With, say, Ratchett and Sideswipe or Ironhide or someone?  Of course.  But they didn't offend me to my very core, and I really liked it when Mudflap started ripping the face off the giant constructicon.

The story suffered from over-complication coupled with the sense that Michael Bay didn't really care enough about it to make it explainable or believable.  It was like he was trying for this big impressive mythos, but the only reason he was trying for it was to stage the robot fights against a suitably epic background.  I thought the script suffered for this too, since it seemed to made completely of huge blocks of outlandish exposition inbetween fights.  A little more care for the story and the dialogue would have been appreciated.

Also, I don't care what anyone says, the robot ghosts were WEIRD.  There were several moments where it felt like Bay had spilled Star Wars over my Transformers, and I'm just not down with that kind of fandom mix.

There were a couple of moments that fell completely flat for me, or were just totally wasted from the start.  Optimus' death was not upsetting for me at all, because Megatron had already come back to life, and also because of all the "Prime" foreshadowing.  It was impossible for me to believe that Optimus wasn't eventually coming back, so I wasn't sad when he died.  I thought they wasted Scorponauk's re-entrance, although watching the geezerbot tear him apart was really cool - it just wasn't a substantial enough moment to do honor to the part the scorpion played in the first movie.  Optimus' fight with the Fallen was also very anti-climactic, because for the life of me I couldn't tell why he was the only one who could defeat the baddie.  What, precisely, was so special about being a Prime?  Also, they did a craptacular job of guarding that Matrix thing, if Bumblebee could open the tomb with one gunshot.  And the humor felt like it was trying too hard (robot testicles?  really?), but it wasn't like the movie stopped for those moments. 

But I liked it, and I'll probably end up owning it when it comes out on DVD after I buy STAR TREK of course.  And I OBVIOUSLY can't wait for the third one.

 

Today will probably be my last day at my dad's office, which means I get a couple days of downtime before starting at Borders.  Which I'm really glad about; it'll be nice to just enjoy the summer for a couple of days.