Filmonic » Transformers 2

How Transformers: Revenge of the Fallan should have ended

Liam — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:26:58 +0000

Sometimes I’m actually quite glad Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen had a bunch of plot holes and inconsistencies, because now it can be spoofed and made fun of until the end of time. The How It Should Have Ended team have made videos on lots of movies such as Spider-Man 3 and Lord of the Rings, and now they’ve made one that pokes fun at the biggest blockbuster of the summer.

The HISHE short that made me lose any kind of summer tan I had, “Transformers 2.” I hope you enjoy our latest addition. I have wanted to make a “Transformers” title for many years now, and when “Revenge of the Fallen” came out, it was obviously the appropriate time. Despite the massive amounts of money that movie made over the summer, there are actually an insane amount of plot holes/errors as well. So many, in fact, we had to pick and choose which ones we’d like to point out most, otherwise this short could easily have been 8 minutes :) Some of yall might not have a problem with that, but we gotta keep our vid length reasonable.

You can watch more videos like this on other movies on their YouTube page.

China’s answer to Transformers: Kung Fu Cyborg

Liam — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:07:33 +0000

The Transformers movies have provided a lot of laughter, whether it was the comic relief from the parents, the poor storyline, or the robot testicles. However, where as most people just shrug it off as a fun popcorn flick, others go a step further and decided to make their own movie involving kung-fu robots.

From The Guardian:

Anything Michael Bay can do, Hong Kong film-maker Jeffrey Lau can do better. At least, that’s the theory behind Kung Fu Cyborg, China’s answer to the Transformers phenomenon.
Lau, one of the producers on Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, came up with the idea after watching Bay’s films and noticing that the various Autobots and Decepticons lacked martial arts skills. “I burst out laughing when watching Transformers,” he says. “The effects were amazing but the robots didn’t know how to fight. So I decided our Chinese superheroes should be kung-fu experts.”
Kung Fu Cyborg was reportedly made on a budget of $14m (£8.5m), a third of which went on motion-capture and CGI technology to produce the robot action. That’s an awful lot less than the most recent Transformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen, which cost an estimated $200m.

So what does a $14 million kung-fu Transformer knock-off look like? This:

Which would you rather see? The Transformers we have now, for Kung Fu Cyborg’s?

Transformers: Critics Didn’t Get It

Dave — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:59:07 +0000

As of Sunday, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen has grossed $201,246,000 in the US and an estimated $281,430,013 worldwide. So, why am I writing a review of a movie after it’s been out long enough to make its production budget back? Because with very few exceptions, critics got this film completely wrong.

I sat down to watch Transformers with low expectations. I wanted to see two things: I wanted Megan Fox to sweat, run, bounce, and never-close-her-mouth, I also wanted to see giant robots, rendered in exquisite detail, beat the living robo-shit out of each other.

What was everyone else expecting?

Roger Ebert, critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and owner of one of the most valuable thumbs in the industry gave this film one star, and began his review: “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments.” Which is all well and good coming from a man who has walked me through Fight Club frame-by-frame and provided a whole generation of movie-goers with solid critical opinion. But…

…in his companion article at the Sun-Times blog titled “The Fall of the Revengers” he begins the piece: “The day will come when “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals.” He argues this because he sees Transformers: ROTF as the biggest, most useless summer blockbuster movie and he can’t imagine that this will do anything but kill movies this big. In Ebert’s mind, Revenge of the Fallen is as far as we’re going to let blockbuster cinema go.

We don’t yet know if that’s true, but that’s exactly why I can’t give Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen anything but an incredibly positive review. Because I haven’t had my face raped this hard in awhile, and Bay pulls it off in that creepy/charming way where I’m starting to wonder if I egged on this film’s lustful robot libdo with my short skirts and flirting. I was asking to be brought to the brink of seizure by robot-battle cinema, so why should I be pissed when the film leaves me used, confused and with my critical pants around my ankles?

I’m not going to summarize the plot, both because it doesn’t matter and if you really want to know it and haven’t seen the movie there are dozens of sites and probably 3 or more of your friends who are willing to tell you how bad it is. The process this film went through when it was being developed doesn’t lend itself to a coherent plot. Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman made a 20-page outline before the writer’s strike, which Bay developed into something like 40 pages as he started to design the robots (and if you think Hasbro wasn’t pushing cool toys all the while, you’re dead wrong). The strike ended and the film was already coming together, so what we have is a plot of faint ideas of why the characters should be in any given place at any given time. The character “arcs” are so one-dimensional that the dialogue is just padding to get us to the next racist joke, bout of physical comedy or massive explosion.

I realized this about the time when Megatron was raised from the bottom of the ocean. The military are tracking the Decepticons as they sink to the lowest depths of the ocean to retrieve the body of their leader, and the radar operator very clearly says there are 5 targets sinking to the depths. Megatron is revived after a tiny robot named “The Doctor” orders four of the Decepticons to destroy the smallest one for parts to rebuild Megatron. The Hugo Weaving-voiced robot then begins to rise our of the ocean along with his cronies and the radar operator says there are now 6 targets rising up out of the waves at an alarming speed. If you can count: 5 going down, one gets destroyed, one gets revived: there should be 5 targets, not 6, rising out of the ocean.

My reaction: “Oh, I guess I should stop listening to the dialogue or caring about the story, because it’s obvious Michael Bay and the script supervisor don’t give two farts.”

The film then goes on to actively try and fight whomever tries to follow the plot. Even if you gloss over the Optimus Prime-sized holes, the climax has Sam going to Autobot heaven before being resurrected like Robo-Jesus. If you haven’t given up on logic by then, I have news for you: You’re watching a movie where the biggest damn robot I’ve ever seen has wrecking ball testicles.

Remember the slow-news-day story of McG challenging Michael Bay to a dick-measuring contest because both of their summer movies had giant robots? Micahel Bay wins. Even though they both made movies that had plots I’d like to transcribe on my toilet paper so I could wipe myself with them, Michael Bay never seems to lose control of science experiment in BOOM. McG, for all his good intentions, made promises about his film that the flick couldn’t keep. The only promise Michael Bay made is that this movie would be the biggest thing you’ve ever seen, and guess what? It is.

I can see where most critics are ready to screw Transformers into the ground, because we’re a picky bunch. There’s always pressure to steer the audience towards something that’s going to elevate the storytelling form. Films that swim around in shark-infested festival waters only to emerge as a popular indie get championed because they had to pay their dues with the sweat of their creative department, on the merits of their stories and characters. But that doesn’t mean that every film that comes out is meant to be judged in the same way. I’m not going to compare every movie to Citizen Kane or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. If I want to see interesting dialogue, I’ll watch Coffee and Cigarettes. If I want a neat-o character study, I’ll pick up something like American Splendor. But, if I want to see a film that abandons what traditionally makes a film “good,” namely the story-telling elements, my critically-lauded choice is…I don’t know, something like Koyaanisqatsi.

Revenge Of The Fallen showed me visuals that made my mind want to explode, and since I sat far enough away from the screen, I don’t have any of the gripes about the action direction from Bay making things visually confusing. Bumblebee, the smallest Autobot, fights like a bad-ass every time he graces the final battle. He shakes Ravage to f-ing death! Optimus Prime is out for robo-blood in this installment and rips a robot’s face in half. The camera swoops, gibs, pans, flies and twists because it knows you’ve given up on the why, you’re just supposed to focus on the what. And the wow.

The film is like a calzone that has embedded jalapeños made of racial stereotypes and sight-gags. If those “jokes” weren’t so broad, you wouldn’t even notice them amongst the red onions of robot fights and banana peppers of Megan Fox’s blank-stare sexiness. The stereotypes in this film are just being as big as they have to be to get noticed, like the guy who brings fire-crackers to a dildo party.

Ebert might be right in the sense that this might be the pinnacle of the blow-em-up summer movie. Watching the previews for 2012 and The Last Airbender trying to prepare me for the massive CGI fest I was about to see just highlighted how much fighting robots work. Seeing Scorpionok return in slow motion and plunge himself into Jetfire happened so fast and was so lovingly rendered that prolonged shots of an aircraft carrier destroying the White House in the 2012 preview look gratuitous. Michael Bay only shows incredibly cool and unique action/CGI for 30 seconds while Roland Emmerich is doing little more than animating a mildly impressive storyboard.

If you want to see a movie with fantastic characters and a coherent, complex plot, I’m guessing you see a lot of movies in theaters between September and January. When Avatar comes along later this year with the high hopes of being a game-changer, I’ll coax it towards my face, making sure it’s aroused and ready to make love to me. With Transformers, I was straight up assaulted and abused, but I smiled through the whole ordeal.

How is that not a valid film experience?

Despite being a fun explosionfest Transformers 2 has a lot of numbers involved

Liam — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:08:47 +0000

Michael Bay’s blog has been updated with a list of fun facts about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, some of which are mind-numbing.

Robots
– 14 robots last time, 46 robots this time (ILM only)
– If you had all the gold ever mined in the history of man, you could build a little more than half of Devastator.
– Optimus Prime will be life size on IMAX screens in many forest fight shots.
– Devastator’s hand is traveling 390 miles per hour when he punches the pyramid.
– The pyramid destruction simulation was 8 times bigger than the old rigid simulation all-time record holder at ILM.
– All robot parts laid out end to end would stretch from one side of California to the other, about 180 miles
– Devastator’s parts stacked tip to tip would be as tall as 58 empire state buildings.
– If all the texture maps on the show were printed on 1 square yard sheets, they would cover 13 football fields.
Disk space
– TF1 took 20 Terabytes of disk space. Trans2 took 145 Terabytes. Seven times bigger!
– 145 terabytes would fill 35,000 DVDs. Stacked one on top of the other without storage cases, they would be 145 feet tall.
Rendering times
– If you rendered the entire movie on a modern home PC, you would have had to start the renders 16,000 years ago (when cave paintings like the Hall of Bulls were being made) to finish for this year’s premiere!
– A single imax shot in the movie (df250) would have taken almost 3 years to render on a top of the line home PC running nonstop.
– IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!
ILM Screen Time is about 51 minutes.
Devastator
– Devastator is as tall as a 10 story building.
– Devastator has more than 10 times the number of individual parts found in an average car.
– Laid out end to end, Devastator’s parts would be almost 14 miles long.
Devastator totals
– Number of geom pieces: 52632
– The total number of polygons: 11,716,127
– The total length of all pieces: 73090 feet
– The total length of all pieces: 13.84 miles

After all of that there’s no wonder Michael Bay wants to have a year off and do a small movie before Transformers 3.

Megan Fox vs. foul mouthed robot

Liam — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:08:33 +0000

I don’t usually like posting clips because I prefer to see the whole film in sequence and the way it was intended, however this new clip from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is too good not to post. In the clip Sam (Shia LaBeouf) tells Mikaela (Megan Fox) that he started seeing symbols after he touched the ‘cube splinter’, meanwhile a small aggressive robot called Wheelie attempts to steal it. Watch below!

The Fallen revealed!

Liam — Sat, 30 May 2009 20:31:52 +0000

MTV got the first look at The Fallen from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. This is the guy who I assume will be doing all the revenging.

[Possible spoilers]

When Shia returns to screens as Sam Witwicky in the June 24th film, he’ll discover that his old Decepticon adversaries aren’t the only ones seeking revenge. This time they’ve brought in reinforcements, in the form of the biggest, baddest Transformer yet.
“Listen, the movie starts off like ‘What the f–k’ is going on?’ and just doesn’t let up,” Shia said of the Fallen’s importance. “And for us to end the film? The last fight has to be monstrous. It has to be better than every other fight in the movie. And that fight involves the Fallen. So, it’s going to be outrageous. It has to be.”
“He is the king bee,” LaBeouf told us. “He’s the patriarchal figure, he’s the main dude. He’s what all of this came from.”

He/it does look badass. However my only worry is if you reveal the “biggest, baddest Transformer” in the second movie, what the hell are they going to bring out for the third movie? An even bigger and badder king bee? Whatever they have planned The Fallen will kick some major metal in Revenge of the Fallen.

Less than 1 month to go!

New Optimus Prime image and trailer for T2!

Liam — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:40:03 +0000

Collider were sent an exclusive new image of Optimus Prime from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. You can see Optimus has his sword out, which will hopefully be ploughed through some Decepticon’s at some point in the film. Alternatively, Prime could have taken up fencing.

We also have a new trailer, which isn’t the best quality, but you can still see and hear what’s going on. Paramount/Dreamworks should really release these new trailers online. It’s similar to the last trailer we got, however this one has a few new scenes and as hoped, Optimus finds a use for that sword of his. Watch below!

Transforminators

Liam — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:39:08 +0000

I like Black20. In the past they have given us PG 300 and Batman vs. Batman vs. Batman, and now we have Transforminators which, as you can probably guess, is a mash-up of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Terminator Salvation. Watch below!

New Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen images!

Liam — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:42:16 +0000

We have three new images from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, however these images are special as they come from Megan Fox herself! Fox revealed these images exclusively on her Twitter page (officialmgnfox) and kindly gave Filmonic permission to post them. The images include new shots of Megan Fox, John Turturro, Shia LaBeouf and Ramon Rodriguez, who plays Sam’s roommate Leo.

In other Transformers news, Megan Fox and director Michael Bay will be presenting a new clip from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at the 2009 MTV Movie Awards. Shia LaBeouf will also be there to present a popcorn statue. (From ComingSoon.net)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen TV Spots

Liam — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:18:27 +0000

Michael Bay has cut out the middle man once again and has revealed 3 new TV spots for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen on his own blog. They contain a few new scenes and we get some good shots of Skids, Sideswipe, The Fallen, Jetfire and Devastator. Watch below!