The basic plot of the movie is this: Megatron's mentor known as The Fallen (voice: Todd), is exacting his revenge on the six primes who thwarted his plan to destroy the sun and obtain a vast amount of energon. To do this, Megatron (voice: Weaving) is brought back to life with a remaining piece of the Cube shard, and is in search of the machine and 'key' to harvest the energon. Meanwhile Sam (LaBeouf) is having psychotic breaks after coming into contact with another shard of the cube, and Mikaela (Fox) is pestering Sam to say the three words no guy ever wants to say.The movie operates under the premise that two years after the events of the original movie, the audience would still want to follow Shia Labeouf. In actuality many went to catch more of the tatted canvas known as Megan Fox. To our satisfaction, and later dissatisfaction, there is more of her in the film.
Her first appearance is that of the trailer, sitting on a bike with a bit of side ass flesh through jean shorts. That's all well and fine, only it's spliced in the middle of a dialog and seems almost completely random, as if by mistake. Next we see her changing, from a leather motorcycle outfit into a short white dress in the middle of yet another conversation. As fan service, the audience gets a 0.3 second or so blast of camel toe through some white undergarments. Also, later in the film there is a David Hasselhoffian slow motion Baywatch boob bounce run scene.
Many of her scenes are out of place and appear to be extra footage that was shot and had no place in the film, or were not needed. Most scenes came off as tasteless, and were only trumped by her increase in poorly executed lines. As my grandfather would say, "she's not fit for talkies."I talked with a couple hard-core Transformers fans (and perpetually single guys) about what they thought of the film. "I can't believe what they did to Jetfire," one says in exclamation! One of the most loved characters from the series is now a SR-71 Blackbird and portrayed as an absent-minded old man upon being revived by a shard. He tells Sam and crew of the energon harvester and states that it's somewhere in the Middle East. Then, almost randomly, he teleports them all to Egypt. "Did they even explain the Space Bridge teleport?" says another Transfan. The movie in fact didn't, and the scenes are poorly meshed together.
The general consensus I gathered from the Transfans was that the movie was worth the watch, even on opening day at 1:30am (getting out around 4:00am), but was not much more than a revamped Transformers 1. A constant complaint was that the battles were often too short, but that the forest battle was the best, a scene that gave homage to the final battle in T1. My only gripe on the battles was that the movie should have shown the 'bots a little more prior to the fight scenes because the battles were gaggles of detail that I had nothing to 'lock on' to when they fought. Both bots, for me, meshed together and I couldn't follow it like I could with a martial arts/action film. That has to be the only drawback to CGI with extraordinary detail in HD.The movie incorporated many sad attempts to diversify the franchise's fan base. Several setbacks ended up ruining whole scenes of the movie. One such inclusion was the pair of autobots where one was obviously ghetto black, and another street latino. The caricature was intended to bring humor but turned out to be offensive. One African American male I talked to referred to them as just plain "stupid." Another setback was the inclusion of Sam's paranoid conspiracy theorist college roommate, Leo Spitz (Rodriguez). The character was perhaps a replacement for Turturro's character, Agent Simmons, in the first film (who ends up appearing later anyways). Leo is an abomination to the film and appears as a sniveling spineless latino who annoys more than entertains. However none of that compares to Sam entering Robot Heaven and having a conversation with the dead primes...
The large culmination of negatives is slightly overshadowed by moments of pure awesomeness held up with fantastic explosions, excellent CGI, bot on bot action, and stunning locations. Overall, my rating comes as a 7/10 and I would say this: Think of T:ROTF as Transformers 1 revisited, with bigger explosions, more fights, and worse acting.
