Why Transformers 2 is the Worst Film of 2009 (and Disservice to Thinking People)

After reading the title and brief overview you might be wondering why I would be so hard on Transformers 2. The answer is that I struggled to watch the film for nearly 2 hours and ignore the fact that it flat out insults your intelligence and what thinking people have come to appreciate from action films. It especially mocks the fans who have always appreciated attention to detail, and have followed the original series since the 1980's when it was a cartoon.

First things first: I was initially very excited to see Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen when it came to movie theatres. I heard that it was a box office smash, and that it made a great deal of money from ticket sales (apparently I wasn't the only one hoping for a redemption or a sequel that would give Transformers the type of elevation that Terminator received with its sequel?)...I had really hoped for the best!

Instead, as the movie started, I found out that the U.S. military somehow overlooked Witwicky's clothes and wardrobe entirely from the last movie, but managed to become well aware of huge robots that convert into cars and conveniently house them.

Next, I saw that the ridiculously annoying parents are still there. There are also miniature decepticons which are made out of household appliances the moment that a piece of the allspark decided to burn itself through the floors of Sam's house and attach itself to kitchen appliances (but not harm Sam or his clothes). How convenient is that?!

The directors gave it their best "college try" (no pun intended) to make the story come alive as much as the black & decker decepticons did...but they just couldn't manage to do that and chew gum at the same time. There was little if any coordination or explanation at all between the actors and terrible script that was written in a hurry to create a Hollywood Cash Cow(tm) for the summer of '09.

Although Witwicky is starting college, he still seems to be as juvenille as before if not more so than the first movie in some ways. The allspark fragment that burned through his house makes him temporarily become either autistic or partially retarded to the point that he starts drawing symbols on everything from his dorm walls to finger-painting with cake at a frat party. His eyes start rolling his eyes back in his head, and he's a whiny little dweeb through the first half of the movie. I couldn't decide whether his acting, antics, and speech were best described as fake, cheesy, or lacking talent. I seriously feel that the 13 year old John Connor from Terminator 2 could have done a better job than Shia LaBeouf did. LaBeouf should be doing after-school specials with O.G. Readmore...not huge movie sequels that can damage a legendary 80's memory forever!

So getting back to the point: This movie has terrible music, the sound-effects are awful (sounds like clanking pots and pans mostly), the script and acting are worse than 5-minute amateur skits I've seen on Youtube, and the rest of the movie was pretty much free advertisement for the US military to show off its planes, weaponry, and war fields. The autobots and decepticons mostly look like something that I recycled or threw out after it got caught in the lawnmower. Despite being advanced robots from the future who can transform into cars, fighter jets, and battleships when not being robots 4 stories high...these robots hardly fire or use any advanced weaponry whatsoever. No, instead they use their fists, an uprooted tree, and an occasional...biggie-sized bullet shot in slow motion.

And two of the bots supposedly defending Witwicky cannot read. One of the film inconsistencies you may have already noticed came after Sam's initial insulting, immature, and ungrateful attitude toward his protector Bumble Bee, for saving his life but "not staying in his parents' garage" to do so. During his first appearance of Bumble Bee in this film, it becomes clear that the script writers did not get the memo for Bumble Bee's voice box having been repaired by the allspark at the end of the first film. Hence, Bumble Bee was back to having to use the radio to talk to Sam and others.

Another inconsistency is that the autobots were always aware of the decepticons and vice-versa on the first film. However on this one...a decepticon was able to take the form of a human female that wanted to have sex with Sam, and after having invited her into his car (which was Bumble Bee), neither Sam nor Bumble Bee could tell that she was actually a decepticon trying to get into his pants. (Say Whaaat?!)

There is an older robot named JetFire who is supposed to be a decepticon, but deceptively decides not to be that deceptive after all because Sam tries to talk to him like he's in some sort of hostage-negotiation. Makes sense, right? Yeah, didn't think so. JetFire, being an "old" robot, is given a robotic metal beard and a metallic "cane" to help him get around with his bad robotic back! Give me a break!

When the robots were fighting, most of the time it was hard to tell who (or what) was fighting who (or what) unless it was Bumble Bee or Optimus Prime. But even watching Optimus fight at certain parts became sketchy.
Unfortunately the best parts of the movie were Optimus Prime dying while defending Sam, and Bumble Bee parts when not watching Megan Fox dance around as a sex symbol.

There are a few shameful advertising plugs throughout this movie that I didn't even bother to give merit or mention here (painfully sit through this movie and you'll see them). One of the few redeeming qualities of this film is that it has Megan Fox in it. That's about it, though.

While Sam, his girlfriend Mikaela, and others are busy trying to out-run explosions (hahaha!) and trying to "hide" from decepticons and federal agents who are unable to find them (right!), the US military spends most of their time talking about what they might want to do, but aren't sure they want to do yet. Sam's parents should have been killed by one of the evil decepticons, but instead? The decepticon decided to turn into a Greyhound Bus off-screen and give them both a free ride to Egypt (at a better rate than Sam's girlfriend had flying Southwest Airlines!) so that they could be reunited for a pathetic cameo together by the end of this film. They never bother to explain why the parents were spared, where they went, what they were doing, or why. I guess the script writer wanted to do something about that, but figured they'd simply stop being bad actors and have loose ends as long as the decepticons were busy babysitting them both off-stage in silence.

Somehow, by the end of the movie, US military fire "suddenly starts to work" (the same bullets and weapons as before, which never worked on part 1 of this film and never worked on any of them on this film...they just 'start to work'). They try to tie-in some middle-eastern religious mysticisms along with the script they never finished, and it just doesn't work.

How they could have made this movie better: The actors, the directors, the script, the music, and the CGI graphics would have had to have been done differently. They should have taken the plot more seriously, had a little bit less slow-motion and pointless arguements between Sam, his parents, and nearly everyone else which made my ears bleed. They could have made robots smart enough to read and not be idiots. They could have avoided promoting tasers as fun items to use in bathroom stalls on airport employees. They could have had some substance of any kind to make up for the problems found on the first movie, and made up for the immature things like an autobot that "pees motor oil" on people it didn't like. They could have been more careful with their fight scenes, used more coordination and other weapons at the disposal of both the autobots and decepticons, they could have used better timing of events and distinguished the robots more so that you could tell who was fighting who and not have to pause the film to see it or guess. There is so much that could have been done to improve this movie...but one of the most important things would have been to keep with the original premise of the 80's cartoon, and not changed it into the biggest hollywood money-making nightmare of 2009.

When I began writing this review, I wanted to find a nicer way to say all this. But honestly, sometimes there is no way to say the truth differently than it stands. The only thing the film maker could really do at this point is hire a capable company, director, and script writer to do a sequel and pretend this movie never existed, or was a bad dream that Sam had after the first one.