Daryl Tay.net

Finally managed to catch Transformers 2 and quite frankly, I was not impressed for a number of reasons.

1) Who’s who?
Somehow the film manages to do exactly what the first Transformers movie did, which is make every other character except for Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Starscream and Megatron utterly unrecognisable and indistinct. As someone who didn’t watch Transformers growing up, I have no affinity with them and unless the movie makes me care by letting me know who they are, then they’re just pieces of scrap metal.

2) I thought the movie’s name was “Transformers”, not “Explosions”
From the time the movie moved to Egypt, it was as if they ran out of CGI budget to make any real Transformer fights, and just blew up sand instead. Watching humans shoot Decepticons and explosions everywhere is not what I came to see. I want big, monster giants fighting each other and ripping each other to shreads, not flying sand. Oh and it makes it worse that the mega robot that was made up of the smaller robots did nothing but eat sand and half destroy a pyramid. How about at least wrecking one Autobot apart?

3) Humans have no place in this movie.
Yeah yeah without Josh Duhamel and Megan Fox no one would watch the movie, but seriously, the humans just add no value other than to insert the cheesiest of lines at the lousiest moments. Absolute waste of screen time.

4) Robot voices are inaudible
I don’t think I caught half of what the robots were saying. I know they have to sound all “metally”, but it’s not hard to make them sound clear at the same time now is it?

5) Saving on the soundtrack
The Linkin’ Park song played four times throughout the show, the Green Day song played thrice. Did they spend so much money on explosions that they couldn’t afford more tracks to be added in?

All in all I thought this was a pretty bad movie that not only didn’t improve on the first, but is probably worse, and that’s not saying a lot considering I didn’t like the first either. At this point, I’m not sure I’m going to pay money to see the third at all.