I haven’t seen Transformers 2 yet. No real rush. I hated the first one and all the stupidity I keep hearing about with TF2 like the sambo-bots, Devastator’s testicles, Bumblebee crying and still not able to speak, not being able to differentiate Megatron from the other Decepticons, sex jokes, pot jokes, etc. really soured me on wanting to see it. I’m a big Transformers fan – and when I say fan, I don’t mean that I saw the first Michael Bay movie and ran around proclaiming I was a fan, like James Thoo on Joblo.com. I mean I’ve known the TF franchise and all its moving parts since I was 5 or 6 and Transformers first appeared in North America. Now, I’m not a pig about it. I know that because there have been different incarnations of Transformers and different generations to experience them at different times, there will be those out there who have their favourite. Some people are fonder of the Beast Wars era than G1 or what came after. Some probably liked the one-off Robots in Disguise series. And there are young ‘uns who will worship Armada, Energeon and Cybertron (the so called Unicron Trilogy) when they’re older. And – Lord help us all – when kids today grow up, there will be a fan base for these trashy, non-sensical, disrespectful Michael Bay Transformer movies.
I picked up the comic adaptation for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen because I was curious to see this sequel with all the jokes, the noise, and most of the action distilled out. Let’s just look at this thing from a story perspective.
Overall, in comic form, Transformers 2 isn’t half-bad. The plot holes and logic leaps aren’t as gaping as G.I. Joe. The story is generally what you know: Thousands of years ago the Primes stole energy from suns of uninhabited solar-systems to supply Cybertron with power to run their planet. One Prime (the Fallen) wanted to steal energy from a particularly juicy sun (Earth’s sun) and the other Primes refused because our planet was inhabited. So, the Fallen kills all the Primes save for one. That Prime hides the Matrix so the Fallen can’t power his sun destroying machine and seals it in a tomb contructed of parts from the other Pimes and seals it with his “own life essence”. Anyhoo, there is a young Prime who is constructed around this time who turns out to be Optimus and doesn’t know his connection to the matrix and sun destroying machine. In current times, the Decepticons are still hanging around Earth, the U.S. government blames it on the Autobot presence, but really the Decepticons are looking for Megatron. They find him and somehow Megatron is able to communicate directly with The Fallen, like the Fallen is the Emperor to Megatron’s Darth Vader. Optimus is defeated by Megatron, Megatron is looking for the Matrix of Leadership in order to power a sun-destroying machine that is covered by the Pyramids (yes, those pyramids), Sam finds the Matrix first, radios the two military guys from the first movie to drop off the dead husk of Optimus at the Pyramids so he can use the Matrix to revive him, he does and Optimus goes toe to toe with the Fallen.
As a story, all the fundamentals are sound here. This adaptation seems to come from a script stage before all the jokey ad-libbing and animation flourishes like Devestator’s testicals and Skids and Mudflaps’ jive-talking attitude were thrown in. Gone are the pot jokes and stuff. The only stupid thing I didn’t like was Bumblebee blowing up the Witwickeys’ house in the beginning because a couple of household appliances came to life via the All-Spark shard that Sam has (not only does Bumblebee not speak, but he is apparently a dumbass too). Skids and Mudflap add absolutely nothing to the story, only appearing alongside Bumblebee throughout. This might explain why the filmmakers felt the need to beef up their appearance in the movie, so you knew they were there, by adding all the “cap in yo’ ass” language – for the “kiddies”. Megatron gets a lot of speaking lines in this adaptation, along with Optimus. Optimus is shown to be a hero that everyone from human to Autobot respects and leans on in a crisis, which I like. As for Megatron, he and Starscream bicker in one scene (after Megs is revived), then Starscream fights alongside Megatron for the rest of the movie. There is one scene I liked in the adaptation where Megatron takes over all of Earth’s communications and appears on every TV at once demanding that Earth hand over Sam in 24 hours or the Decepticons will rampage through Earth. This reminded me of General Zod in Superman II when he calls out Superman on TV. Is this in the movie? If so, that's frickin’ cool! Just Megatron threatening Earth on the world’s TVs is cool. All other characters get short shrifted. Soundwave speaks alot in this adaptation, but he's still a stupid satelite, so he just hovers over Earth telling the Decepticons where to find everything. What a waste of a popular character. Ironhide and Ratchet are back and do nothing. Arcee disappears after the first scene. Bumblebee still doesn’t speak. Another thing that struck me was how serious the Agent Simmons character was (John Tuturro) in this adaptation. He still works at a pizzeria like in the movie, but gone are references that he lives with his “mummy” and he’s the one that actually kills Devastator (this probably happens in the movie too – as I’ve said I still haven’t seen it) but he’s actually useful in this comic. The two army guys from part 1 are pointless except for carting Optimus’ lifeless body to Egypt.
After reading this adaptation, I couldn’t help think that Transformers 2 could have been awesome had they went in the direction of this comic (which represents some sort of early script stage) and just beefed up the robot characters more, like give Ratchet and Ironhide more history with Optimus and more importance in the Autobots’ operations. And give the Decepticons more screen time to actually speak and develop personalities, like maybe teasing human “fleshlings” for sadistic fun, or have some Deceps join with Starscream while others are more loyal to Megatron. As it is, Devastator appears at the very end and the Constructicons never appear before that scene. And Fallen hovers somewhere for the entire movie and shows up at the end when the Matrix is finally taken from Sam. It’s stuff like that that makes me shake my head. There was certainly room to add more depth to the robots if they cut most of the useless human stuff (do we need a five-minute pot-gag?). If they concentrated less on the stupid human characters like Sam, skanky Mekaela, Alice the useless Pretender Transformer who fails, Leon or whatever Sam’s friend is called, Agent Simmons, etc. and more on the Transformers whom this movie is named after, this could have been much better. And stop with the stupid jokes already. This adaptation doesn’t have any of that stuff and it’s fine!
Anyhow, this adaptation is okay. It still didn’t make me want to see the movie anytime soon. It also makes me wonder how much longer this current run of Transformers movies lasts with the already flimsy foundation they’ve built for it. As I said, the movie seems like it could have been much better had they concentrated more on fleshing out story and characters. I’ll still watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen eventually, plugging my nose and holding my breath.
2.5/5
Deceptisean
I picked up the comic adaptation for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen because I was curious to see this sequel with all the jokes, the noise, and most of the action distilled out. Let’s just look at this thing from a story perspective.
Overall, in comic form, Transformers 2 isn’t half-bad. The plot holes and logic leaps aren’t as gaping as G.I. Joe. The story is generally what you know: Thousands of years ago the Primes stole energy from suns of uninhabited solar-systems to supply Cybertron with power to run their planet. One Prime (the Fallen) wanted to steal energy from a particularly juicy sun (Earth’s sun) and the other Primes refused because our planet was inhabited. So, the Fallen kills all the Primes save for one. That Prime hides the Matrix so the Fallen can’t power his sun destroying machine and seals it in a tomb contructed of parts from the other Pimes and seals it with his “own life essence”. Anyhoo, there is a young Prime who is constructed around this time who turns out to be Optimus and doesn’t know his connection to the matrix and sun destroying machine. In current times, the Decepticons are still hanging around Earth, the U.S. government blames it on the Autobot presence, but really the Decepticons are looking for Megatron. They find him and somehow Megatron is able to communicate directly with The Fallen, like the Fallen is the Emperor to Megatron’s Darth Vader. Optimus is defeated by Megatron, Megatron is looking for the Matrix of Leadership in order to power a sun-destroying machine that is covered by the Pyramids (yes, those pyramids), Sam finds the Matrix first, radios the two military guys from the first movie to drop off the dead husk of Optimus at the Pyramids so he can use the Matrix to revive him, he does and Optimus goes toe to toe with the Fallen.
As a story, all the fundamentals are sound here. This adaptation seems to come from a script stage before all the jokey ad-libbing and animation flourishes like Devestator’s testicals and Skids and Mudflaps’ jive-talking attitude were thrown in. Gone are the pot jokes and stuff. The only stupid thing I didn’t like was Bumblebee blowing up the Witwickeys’ house in the beginning because a couple of household appliances came to life via the All-Spark shard that Sam has (not only does Bumblebee not speak, but he is apparently a dumbass too). Skids and Mudflap add absolutely nothing to the story, only appearing alongside Bumblebee throughout. This might explain why the filmmakers felt the need to beef up their appearance in the movie, so you knew they were there, by adding all the “cap in yo’ ass” language – for the “kiddies”. Megatron gets a lot of speaking lines in this adaptation, along with Optimus. Optimus is shown to be a hero that everyone from human to Autobot respects and leans on in a crisis, which I like. As for Megatron, he and Starscream bicker in one scene (after Megs is revived), then Starscream fights alongside Megatron for the rest of the movie. There is one scene I liked in the adaptation where Megatron takes over all of Earth’s communications and appears on every TV at once demanding that Earth hand over Sam in 24 hours or the Decepticons will rampage through Earth. This reminded me of General Zod in Superman II when he calls out Superman on TV. Is this in the movie? If so, that's frickin’ cool! Just Megatron threatening Earth on the world’s TVs is cool. All other characters get short shrifted. Soundwave speaks alot in this adaptation, but he's still a stupid satelite, so he just hovers over Earth telling the Decepticons where to find everything. What a waste of a popular character. Ironhide and Ratchet are back and do nothing. Arcee disappears after the first scene. Bumblebee still doesn’t speak. Another thing that struck me was how serious the Agent Simmons character was (John Tuturro) in this adaptation. He still works at a pizzeria like in the movie, but gone are references that he lives with his “mummy” and he’s the one that actually kills Devastator (this probably happens in the movie too – as I’ve said I still haven’t seen it) but he’s actually useful in this comic. The two army guys from part 1 are pointless except for carting Optimus’ lifeless body to Egypt.
After reading this adaptation, I couldn’t help think that Transformers 2 could have been awesome had they went in the direction of this comic (which represents some sort of early script stage) and just beefed up the robot characters more, like give Ratchet and Ironhide more history with Optimus and more importance in the Autobots’ operations. And give the Decepticons more screen time to actually speak and develop personalities, like maybe teasing human “fleshlings” for sadistic fun, or have some Deceps join with Starscream while others are more loyal to Megatron. As it is, Devastator appears at the very end and the Constructicons never appear before that scene. And Fallen hovers somewhere for the entire movie and shows up at the end when the Matrix is finally taken from Sam. It’s stuff like that that makes me shake my head. There was certainly room to add more depth to the robots if they cut most of the useless human stuff (do we need a five-minute pot-gag?). If they concentrated less on the stupid human characters like Sam, skanky Mekaela, Alice the useless Pretender Transformer who fails, Leon or whatever Sam’s friend is called, Agent Simmons, etc. and more on the Transformers whom this movie is named after, this could have been much better. And stop with the stupid jokes already. This adaptation doesn’t have any of that stuff and it’s fine!
Anyhow, this adaptation is okay. It still didn’t make me want to see the movie anytime soon. It also makes me wonder how much longer this current run of Transformers movies lasts with the already flimsy foundation they’ve built for it. As I said, the movie seems like it could have been much better had they concentrated more on fleshing out story and characters. I’ll still watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen eventually, plugging my nose and holding my breath.
2.5/5
Deceptisean
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