Battle Sequences

Why couldn't it be more like this?

The fight scenes in ‘Revenge’ are just as jarring than in the original. Bay still hasn’t learned that the visuals get rough and indiscernible when you go into a close-up and hyper cut between two giant robots duking it out. The moment when Bay actually did dolly back to the appropriate frame for battle is bittersweet as he immediately went back to his obnoxious close-ups and left me pining for something I knew I probably wasn’t going to see again. There’s more fights and bigger explosions but it’s not worth the film it’s printed on if we can’t see it properly.

The Writing

I cannot believe two of these writers are the same guys who penned ‘Star Trek’. It is truly impressive to have both the best and worst action/adventure movies of the year on your resume. Perhaps the third screenwriter, Ehren Kruger was a bad influence on ‘Trek’ scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.

The plot, if you can call it that, is completely convoluted, bloated and forced. There’s no reason this film had to be 2 1/2 hours in length. It’s a bit contrived to add a character such as The Fallen in the sequel whose existence is completely overlooked in the first movie. If The Fallen had always been around why didn’t he teleport to Earth during the AllSpark battle and end the fight then? On top of that characters like Starscream, whose role was a little bigger in this film, are still completely underused.

(Potential Spoiler) And if the Decepticons can appear as humans, why not use that even more to your advantage? You could always clone Mikaela’s appearance to lure Sam rather than blowing up everything in sight. Oh wait…

“It’s a Michael Bay movie”

This is the response you’re typically going to hear on the way out of the movie theater, and to this article, as people try to justify the mind numbing assault that ‘Revenge’ is. It’s unfortunate that even when films like this season’s ‘Star Trek’ can set the bar high for blockbuster movies that Michael Bay can simultaneously shoot down expectations all while driving up profits. I admire Bay’s commitment to doing things his way and not being swayed by outside opinions and at times it has worked for him. It’s true that big action blockbusters don’t need all the character finesse that an independent film may need, but that doesn’t mean that you can gloss over all the film’s issues by parading Megan Fox through a fiesta of explosions and CGI.

How much better could this film have been if it were handled with the same care as ‘Star Trek’? This is a case of not knowing what’s better until you’ve seen it and until that better product is produced we are left making justifications for the current subpar content being released. Worst of all these justifications are made with our wallets.

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