The action scenes and CGI are awesome (the forest scene is as good as you expect from the preview): there’s two stars. Megan Fox: there’s the remaining half for 2.5/5. And the praise ends there. Who the hell wrote the dialogue? In particular, the parents and the twins.¨Ü The parents seem cartoonish even among robots from another planet. And the twins seem like robots from an even more unbelievable location: a mystical place where Jazz wasn’t enough of a stereotype. Chud.com has a good post about the twins:
Would they have been as offensive if Bay had gotten a black actor for the voices? There certainly would be less of a feeling of weirdness if Katt Williams had come in for some shucking and jiving, although it would still have been… off. Bay’s defense seems to be that Tom Kenny came in and just Sambo’d it up, as if he had no way of knowing what sort of racially insensitive schtick the actor would bring.
Bill Simmons always talks about the idea of a VP of Common Sense for sports teams to do things like, say, veto that Pau Gasol trade. VP of Common Sense would be great for movie studios too (and I get the sense that Simmons has mentioned that before).¨Ü That guy could start by vetoing the Transformer that can take human form and the addition of an entirely new character ranked higher than Megatron.
Time to contradict nearly everything I just wrote. Not that anything I say was really stopping you from seeing it in the first place, but make sure to see it while it’s in theaters. Special effects are a part of summer and this is probably the best 2009 has to offer in that department. Revenge of the Fallen is the horrible movie people expected Michael Bay to make the first time around, but it still has giant robots fighting each other.