Reviews by Matt

The summer is the season of blockbusters. These are those big budget, special effects driven, explosion-palozza movies where heroes grapple with villains and the fate of the world is always in the balance. This summer is no exception. The newest film to throw its hubcap in to ring is “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”

The plot, near as I can tell, is the Autobots (the good robots) and the Decepticons (the bad robots) are again fighting to save and destroy the world respectively.

That is really it. The plot is really secondary to the explosions and the cars that transform into robots. In fact, the plot is almost nonexistent. There are hits here-and-there that there is more to the story that the robots, but it gets lost among the explosions and the robots fights.

In all honesty, you could take the human characters out and it would be just about the same movie. They serve so little purpose to the overall story that the fact that there are so many humans makes most of them redundant.

Take for instance the character of Sam’s roommate, Leo (Ramon Rodriguez). He serves no point. He never makes any big revelation, does anything to help or really anything at all besides give an weak excuse to have John Turturro come back (which is a good thing).

Even Megen Fox’s Mikaela is just window dressing, which as a guy I cannot really complain that much about. She basically spends the entire movie trying to get Sam (Shia LaBeouf) to tell her that he loves her.

Which brings me to Shia. I hate Shia LaBeouf, as an actor. Even with the aliens in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” he was still the worst part of it. The fact that they even joked/hinted that he would take up Indy’s fedora in future installments makes the movie geek in me want to swear off movies for good. As a person he may be alright, but is wide-eyed “I cannot believe I get to do this for a living” attitude seems fake to me and it is getting old.

Enough ranting.

Good stuff: special effects and…well that is about it. As with the first the special effects were top notch, but that is what you get with a movie directed by Michael Bay. And giant explosions like this one:


Did I hate the movie? No. Did I like it? Not really. It was worth the money, but the first one was superior in every single way. If you really feel like watching giant robots fight, watch the first.

6 out of 10
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action violence, language, some crude and sexual material, and brief drug material.
150 min