Autobots! Transform and Sell Out!

So, this is the IMAX-ed edition of Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen here, not the normal one, full IMAX-ed scenes.

And how does it fare?
Well, to be honest the first 45 minutes are great, some nice humour, solid action, bringing back characters and introducing new ones well, in the vein of the original, Shia talk-joke moments are still there, though few and far between, gone completely by the end of the first hour, Megan is purely sexualised once more, more-so than the last one too, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson are just military people this time, they have no character or point except that they were part of the events of the first one.

It all opens with action in Shanghai, military and autobots running around looking for decepticons, cue big bad one from the trailer, the one that smashes his hands don on the ground for an explosion and smashes through a motorway. In fact a majority of the first trailer is from the opening sequence, which I thought was a good idea when watching the sequence, not knowing as much about what is coming.

Of course this turned out to be another bad omen.

So Shia is off to college, he can't say he loves Mikaela because they need something near the end to get them back in each others' arms, and his parents are off to Paris for no reason, they get about 4 scenes before being scooped up by a Decepticon at about one hour 10 mins in, thrown back half an hour before the end for no reason. Cue terrible music for the college sequences, a roommate who is obsessed with alien robots and conspiracy theories, annoying as he is at the start he is dragged into the rest of the film, why? Because evidentially the writers wanted a new funny character on top of Tom Kenny's sweary min-decepticon hostage and the twin Smart car hispanics, gold teeth, odd eyes, always fighting, they can't read, great work Hollywood!

All the robots get nothing to do, The Fallen is nothing except some bad CGI moaning until the end, when he starts fighting in blurry shaky-cam classic style and is easily beaten. Megatron is found and re-energised just to beat up Starscream, thank goodness, and do nothing, Optimus doesn't even do anything plot-wise, except fight some baddie robots off (All baddies of course black, hardly subversive still) and then, now, how should I say this without any spoilers, go to a farm for a bit, then brought back to beat the bad guys with the ease no other autobot had, yet they can all be killed instantaneously.

Well, the whole final epic battle is a problem on itself to get to later.

So, the plot, Sam finds a shred of the cube in his jacket, how convenient, and touches it, causing him to get shapes in his head he has to write down. An hour and a half later he finds out what they are, and as always, a robot projects the scene and tells us the plot. Some stuff about a vixen in college wanting Sam, lasts about 20 minutes, happening upon John Turturro in the Kevin Smith Die Hard 4.0 role this time, with more action, a ball joke and the poor guy strips off to a jockstrap, in IMAX close up, erm, not exactly great, nor of course funny in any way.

Jon Voight is no where to be seen this time, a mention of Obama suggests that it's supposed to be set 2 years later and Voight was with Bush, who must have liked Ding Dongs and red socks then.
The voices are great, Hugo, Peter, Frank, Tom, all top jobs, of course a lot don't get much time and are skipped over, which is a dire shame, but it's not like the first where they were ignored for human characters, they were ignored for random action or shots of sand.

In IMAX the forrest fight, sand eater and subsequent pyramid fight were in full screen, though the final battle has three segments so only a third if that is up there, but the change in aspects, like TDK last year, isn't too horrendous. However unfortunately the CGI plays up even more at such a big screen. The first one, though limited in shots, looked amazing, and it's the attention to detail from the first one's small shots that is missed here, overblown so much that the CGI is disappointingly and annoyingly bad, Golden Compass bad, so it'll win the Oscar.

The acting from the humans is minimal to bad, nothing major here, they're only there to service a contract and to make money, there's no real reason any humans are in it with the lack of plot and function for 2 hours 30 of the film, add to that the lack of a conclusion, after the big battle the Linkin Park music starts up again and Optimus speaks out, no time to give much of a finish, in the same way that the whole film forgets to humanise the humans and autobots, they're all bloody robotic.

Now, the final battle. So much is just wrong here. For starters the CGI overload is poorly done and looks awful, the whole point of the final battle seems to be a mid-movie sequence with a final conclusion action segment added on to finish the film, the action is shot so poorly you can't make heads nor tales of the robots, again, and by this time you're so uninvested in the characters you kinda hope The Fallen does destroy the Sun and watch Shia and Megan's smug grins burn off their disintegrating faces.

Thankfully among all the turgid awfulness of the movie, the score is once again fantastic, hummable and far outweighs the boring-ness of the sub-par action on screen.

I mean, there's Baytarded, a kind of dumb-ness level for films that still retain the upbeat fun of the piece with explosions, and then there's retarded, where they forget the audience and just make things explode, and as much as I like explosions, there are too many in comparison to the character development the first one had for the most part. Add to that the complete dark nature the film's tone turns for the run time to make it seem slightly dangerous, eliminating the humour that made the characters so fun to watch in the first one, and from that brilliant epitome of a summer film you get a polished turd with little of interest after a solid 45 minute opening.

5/10 For those first 45 minutes alone.