Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Review

Michael Bay doesn't really do subtle. Don't go see this if you want your comic book stuff all high brow, go rent Watchmen. This is your classic summer blockbuster, with an extra billion spent on explosions.

There's much to criticise. It's too long. You can not always tell whether it's a good robot hitting a bad robot or a bad robot hitting a good robot. Surely just making them all different colours would have helped this? Didn't Hasbro get that right 20 years ago? The one set of characters you want to connect with, the robots, get little further development beyond the first movie and new robots get little screen time. Sideswipe in particular is criminally underused, and he's not red!

But I loved it. This movie just does what it's supposed to on lots of levels. Big robots hitting each other, a lot. One scene of Optimus Prime fighting Megatron (? hard to be sure) in a woods is breathtaking, CGI used to its best.

Jetfire is actually amusing, although how much longer we'll enjoy hearing an English accent swear with our crazy English swear words in films is questionable, but he's a welcome distraction from the rest of the robot cast.

Transformers were an iconic toy when I was a kid and there is still a thrill in seeing them brought to life so convincingly. It is at least as good as the first film, so if you enjoyed that, you will love this. Entertaining, sometimes funny, a bit like the A-Team really... but with robots and Megan Fox. Yum yum.

4/5