Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Blu-ray)

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With so many new characters, many of the original characters that the audience have known and become attached to are marginalized here. Lennox and Epps barely factor into the film. While Sam and Mikaela were able to get in on some of the action in the first film, they're relegated here to screaming at the top of their lungs or running away from explosions in slow motion. Ironhide and Ratchet, two of the only Transformers I can actually recognize, hardly do anything either. Even the Fallen, who is supposed to be the big bad, maybe only gets fifteen minutes of screen time and hardly seems more menacing than any other Decepticon.

No, the Transformers who appear to get the most screen time are the Twins, Mudflap and Skids (one voiced by Reno Wilson, the other by Spongebob Squarepants himself, Tom Kenny), who have garnered a lot of controversy in the press. The pair have big ears, bugged out eyes, buck teeth (one of them gold), and speak in Ebonics. They're stupid, illiterate and on a level of annoyance that rivals Jar Jar Binks. Two unfunny robots weren't enough for Michael Bay as he also throws in Wheelie, an RC 4x4 who looks like Wall-E's evil cousin and inexplicably speaks like an extra from "Goodfellas." He humps Megan Fox's leg too, not that I blame him.

Does the idea of a robot humping a woman's leg not seem funny to you? Michael Bay apparently thought it was hilarious; he also threw in two scenes of dogs humping each other. Bay's excesses and lack of originality run deeper than just recycling the same shots in every one of his films. He repeats the same lame jokes that revel in the fact that they target the lowest common denominator. We get the robots with bad teeth as well as a butcher with bad teeth trying to earn money for dental work. There's dry-humping, Transformer testicles, and an exceedingly long gag involving Sam's mother tripping out on pot brownies. Curse words are liberally dropped into dialogue that's already as clunky as the Transformers themselves. For a film that's essentially selling toys to kids, "Revenge" is hardly family friendly.

There are some positive contributions in "Revenge." The special effects are the usual top-notch work from ILM. The Transformers fit seamlessly into their surroundings and there are moments where you believe they are standing side-by-side with their human compatriots. Catching the film in IMAX and seeing Optimus Prime in scale was pretty cool. Starscream (one of my favorite characters) gets a bit more to do in the sequel and his additional dialogue brings him more in line with his G1 incarnation.

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is the perfect embodiment of every negative aspect of the summer blockbuster. It's a film that panders to the basest, adolescent desires. It's loud, obnoxious, and unrelenting. It's junk food, and for some people that's more than enough to satisfy their appetites. Personally, I'm more than happy to sit back and enjoy a dumb action movie every now and then. The thing about junk food is, it gives you a quick fix, but you're eventually left hungry for a real meal. Films like "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight" proved you can make a big-budget action spectacle with a smart story and genuine emotion.

"Revenge" simply substitutes noise and movement for any type of true emotional connection. The audience isn't taken along for a journey as much as press ganged into it and yanked along. This is the type of messy sequel that was churned out of the "Matrix" and "Pirates" franchises. Whatever weak plot it possesses is only there to service a string of action scenes that are directed either blandly or nonsensically by Michael Bay. In the end, "Revenge" offers nothing that we didn't already see in the first film.

Will's film rating: 4/10

Video:
As we might expect, DreamWorks/Paramount use a dual-layer BD50 and an MPEG-4 codec to reproduce the movie in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. And as with the previous "Transformers" movie, the high-definition results pretty much duplicate the theatrical experience (at least as I remember it). Colors are quite deep, sometimes bright and usually glossy, often too dark, though, for ultimate naturalness, with black levels showing up velvety smooth. Definition is uneven, tending to vary from extraordinarily sharp to somewhat soft. The whole affair has a comic-book appearance that the Blu-ray disc conveys nicely.

Audio:
If anything, the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 sound is too much of a good thing. It displays an extremely wide frequency response, a strong dynamic impact, and a thunderously deep bass. The results can not only be overpowering at times, they can be downright overbearing. Moreover, there is enough surround information here to fill out two or three audio systems' worth of side and rear speakers. It's exactly the kind of sonic spectacular one can use to impress friends and neighbors who haven't bought into Blu-ray yet.

Extras:
Disc one of this two-disc BD set includes the widescreen presentation of the feature film; twenty scene selections; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired. The primary extra involved on the first disc is an audio commentary by director Michael Bay and scriptwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

Disc two contains the rest of the bonus materials, which generally fall into the "what-else-did-you-expect" category. Mostly, they are a series of high-def documentaries, featurettes, and interactive exercises telling us exactly how the filmmakers got it all done and how well they did with it.

Things begin with a 134-minute making-of documentary, "The Human Factor: Exacting Revenge of the Fallen," divided into eight chapters and delving into production design, special effects, editing, and the like. Next is a thirteen-minute featurette "A Day with Bay: Tokyo," where the director premiered the film. Then, there are "25 Years of Transformers," ten minutes on the toy that became a cartoon that became a movie; "NEST: Transformer Data-Hub," an interactive program giving all the information you ever wanted to know, and more, about the Transformers characters; "The AllSpark Experiment," another interactive program where you choose and customize a car or tank; "Deconstructing Visual Bayhem," twenty-two minutes and fifteen chapters of pre-visualization and final product comparisons, with a choice of camera angles and optional commentary; three deleted/alternate scenes; "Giant Effing Movie," twenty-four more minutes of behind-the-scenes footage; a music video, "New Divide" by Linkin Park, just as loud and obnoxious as the movie; and "The Matrix of Marketing," with theatrical trailers, TV spots, and galleries of poster art and stills.

The two discs come housed in a standard, double-disc Blu-ray keep case, further enclosed in a handsomely embossed cardboard slipcover.

Parting Shots:
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" provides all the eye candy a person could ask for and makes a splendid demo piece for folks looking to show off their super-new home theaters. Just don't look for a plot, a story thread, characterizations, interactions, depth, variety, nuance, subtlety, or themes. In five-minute doses, the movie works perfectly well. Just don't make me watch it again in its entirety.

I'm giving the movie the benefit of the doubt, by the way, and going with Will's number for the final film rating below, since he went into more detail about it than I did.

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