Alden Bates' Weblog

Having seen Revenge of the Fallen at long last, I can see that Michael Bay has taken on board a lot of the criticisms from the first film:

• We complained that there wasn't enough screen time for the Transformers, so the sequel has a lot more screen time for the Transformers


• We complained that there wasn't enough interaction to establish personalities in the Decepticons, so there's a lot more Decepticon interaction.


• We complained about the rampant comedy, so the sequel has a lot more comedy.

Oh wait, that last one isn't a positive. The first ten minutes of the film is a great action sequence, as Autobots and humans hunt Decepticons together in Shanghai. Then we cut to the Witwickys' house, and are hit with the sight of Mojo taking his new pal doggy-style on the Witwicky sofa.

COMEDY GOLD!

Yes, if you loved the scene in the first movie where Bumblebee pees on Sector Seven agent Simmons, you're sure to love the humour in Revenge of the Fallen. If not... well, they don't raise the bar. At all. It's sad when Transformers Animated, a cartoon aimed at children, is more mature than the live-action movie series.

So, anyway, ROTF is two and half hours of robots beating the crap out of each other while the humans have comedy antics and occasionally some plot happens. There's an even better, though spoilery, review on io9.com, but it's very spoiler. Speaking of, the plot left me with some lingering questions, which I'm putting under the cut to avoid spoilering anyone who lands on the main page.

My lingering questions from ROTF:

When Michaela captures Wheelie, she tortures him for info by burning his eye out with an acetylene torch. Later on when they release Wheelie in Simmons' basement, she again menaces him with an acetylene torch. What?! She can't have been carrying it around with her all the time, since she flew there. Did Simmons happen to have an acetylene torch just sitting around in his basement? Did they go out and rent one?

So apparently the map to the Tomb of the Primes was stored in the AllSpark, so the Decepticons were after the piece of it which Sam had. Meanwhile, the Decepticons wanted to resurrect Megatron so Ravage stole another piece of the AllSpark from the military. Was there a reason given why they couldn't just download the map from that piece?

Devastator's junk appears to be missing a vital piece. Was it Paramount or Hasbro who balked at giving him a huge crane phallus?