TF: ROTF discussion

Just saw a midnight showing here in the UK. Overall impression not as good as tf1. It felt rather unstructured, a bit like the Wolvie movie. More when I get home!

EDIT: OK home. Typing a full review on an iPhone felt kind of daunting  

The film was overall kind of what was expected, ie brainless action, but slightly disappointing. I think a lot of that was down to the way the film was written and structured. It felt an awful lot like OH MY GOD here's A PRETENDER and the HOLY SHIT THE MATRIX OF LEADERSHIP and whatnot. Everything seemed a bit thrown together without any explanation. Now I'm not suggesting that we need to know why Arcee's female or anything (cue rabid fanboy discussion about TF breeding) but it would kind of be nice to know how the hell they've gone from scanning trucks, planes, cars etc. to mimicking a human? And if they can, why the hell doesn't Prime just scan Obama or something?  

A lot of the characters also felt very underused or odd. Jetfire hardly has any screentime, and I think he had a lot more potential to be used before he kicked the bucket at the end. Same with the Fallen - he's supposed to be this massive bad guy, right? And he probably has literally 5 minutes total of screen time, of which a lot of it is pretty much posturing. Sideways gets offed after about 30 seconds, Arcee gets two lines (although she's voiced by Sue Blu, which is cool!). Soundwave just sounds ODD. I'm not sure if it was even Welker actually, certainly no vocoder involvement anyway.

And what about Megatron? He's turned into a subservient wimp - pretty much the G1 Starscream to the Fallen's G1 Megs. If they were a gay couple, Megs would definitely be the bitch.

Starscream's character is a bit more interesting, he's definitely fleshed out the most in this one, with a lot of nods back to G1. A bit more self-serving but fairly loyal to the "oh mighty Megatron!" original. Which is a bit odd given the character portrayed in the canonical comic preludes, but hey.

Another problem was that it just kind of jumped around too much. Structure was poor, no real development / arc / conclusion. Hell, there was what FELT like a crescendo in the middle when

Spoiler

Prime bites the dust

- it made it feel a bit like two films kind of glued together.

Having said all that - the fight scenes were very, very well filmed and the effects were very impressive. A shame that Sideswipe didn't get more screen time, he seemed rather cool from what we saw. Ravage was awesome til Bumblebee ripped out his spine (harsh!).

I think on balance, while it's disappointing, it's probably worth seeing. Just don't go with high expectations. Or even moderate ones  

And before I get some sort of rabid response - I actually really enjoyed the first movie, so I'm not a Bayhater  

 

How awesome are the twins?  

 

A hell of a lot less annoying than I expected actually   they were quite good comic relief.

Actually, so was Wheelie. And Mojo humping the pug.

 

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