Director Michael Bay’s concerns (elaborated in a famously misspelled email) that Paramount under-promoted Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen turn out to have been misplaced. The film’s opening broke records and it’s five-day gross comes second only to The Dark Knight —- and the Batman movie had the advantage of not totally sucking. At any rate, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen begs many questions, some of which are probably explained if you know the two decades of Transformers lore.
1. The Internet Movie Database “goofs” page for the film already lists dozens of continuity mistakes and factual errors for the film — but most movies have those, no matter how good or bad they are. However, one sticks out so blatantly that most reviews I’ve seen have mentioned it:
When Jetfire is reactivated at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, he blasts open a hangar door and steps outside, the exterior shot showing him and the other protagonists being in the “boneyard” at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona – the opposite end of the country.
Having taken such pains to establish the characters in the Washington, D.C. area, it’s a blatant disregard for continuity (sort of like the way night falls in a matter of seconds in X-Men: The Last Stand). Can this be explained consistently within the movie? Does the Center even have airplanes out front? In the movies alternate version of America with alien space robots, could the layout be a little different? Jetfire has teleportation powers, as shown by the subsequent scene, but when he uses them he makes the humans violently ill, so that probably wouldn’t explain it.
THE PITCH: The Autobots, those heroic space robots, must protect Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) from the evil Decepticons when the all-American teen journeys from college campus to Egyptian desert to find an Earth-shaking artifact called the Matrix of Leadership. No, really.
MONEY SHOTS: Cool robot shapes include a mechanical tiger; a parasitical satellite; a flat, origami-like thief; and the giant Devastator made of multiple pieces of construction equipment. Decepticons rain from the sky and destroy an aircraft carrier. Some of the battles are great in theory — like Autobot leader Optimus Prime brawling with three Decepticons in a forest — but the robots have so many moving parts, and there’s so much editing and camera movement that watching the fight scenes is like trying to watch rollercoasters screw.
WORST LINE: “You’ll always be my first car,” Sam tells the Camaro-robot Bumblebee in a dopey semi-break-up scene that is, nonetheless, less boring than a subplot over whether Sam will say “I love you” to his mechanically inclined girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox).
Yesterday saw the announcement of the official line-up of the robotic cast of characters in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, this summer’s sequel to Transformers, which features this little detail:
Arcee, the female Autobot, who will be Megan Fox’s pink motorcycle. She was actualy supposed to be in the first movie, but Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci felt “we needed to win the audience over before asking for that suspension of disbelief: a feminine alien robot.”
… because masculine alien robots are so, you know, ordinary.
Now that the long-anticipated, much-hyped pop epic Watchmen has reached theaters, we can finally get on with our lives… by anticipating the soon-to-be-hyped pop epic summer movies! Several studios have recently released a batch of new, full-length trailers for the would-be biggest blockbusters of the hot months, including the latest from Pixar and several relaunches of science fiction’s most lucrative franchises. Based on these clips, which do you most want to see?
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1)
Oscar host Hugh Jackman stars in this prequel to the X-Men trilogy that fills in the backstory of Wolverine and should answer questions like, “How old is he?” “Why does he have a metal skeleton?” and “Why is Liev Schreiber portraying Sabretooth, a bad guy played by huge wrestler Tyler Mane in the first film?” Director Gavin Hood previously made some heavy dramas, including South African Oscar nominee Tsotsi and the homeland security thriller Rendition, but hasn’t helmed a huge Hollywood action franchise before. At any rate, it’s the season’s only big comic book movie.
Director Michael Bay’s concerns (elaborated in a famously misspelled email) that Paramount under-promoted Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen turn out to have been misplaced. The film’s opening broke records and it’s five-day gross comes second only to The Dark Knight —- and the Batman movie had the advantage of not totally sucking. At any rate, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen begs many questions, some of which are probably explained if you know the two decades of Transformers lore.
GENRE: Rock ’em, sock ’em robots