CINEMA: Transformers, Revenge of the Fallen

Oh dear. Director Michael Bay has taken a movie that cost millions to make and took a small army of SFX experts to complete and produced a totally impenetrable mess.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is certainly a spectacle; a spectacular jumble of machines that turn into other machines that join together to form yet more machines, the problem being you won’t have a clue what they are or what their purpose is. This is because while Bay has been concentrating on creating a series of visually full-on action scenes, the plot has been totally overlooked.

Actors Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, John Turturro and Josh Duhamel reprise their roles from the original (although Turturro is no longer a government agent but a conspiracy theorist) but are used as mere window dressing for the showdown between the massive metal monsters. So, the action may flit relentlessly from America to the pyramids of Egypt to the ancient city of Petra, and you may applaud the sheer scale of the explosions and destruction, but absolutely none of it will make sense.

It’s not just that the action in places moves so fast your eye really can’t follow what’s happening, but also the machines’ dialogue is delivered at breakneck pace in impenetrable electronically ‘enhanced’ accents. Frankly, 90 minutes of trying to figure out who are the good and bad guys would be more than enough to try the patience of most cinemagoers, but at two-and-a-half hours Bay stretches proceedings to breaking point. Even diehard Transformer fans will find this heavy going, especially those who are au fait with the original Transformer series and story – which seems to have been ejected wholesale.

This is a perfect example of spectacle over substance and may pull the punters in first time round, but will certainly not get good word of mouth.

Dee Pilgrim