Dave's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Review

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     People have been asking me for a review, but I normally prefer to avoid
reviewing movies or TV shows in order to leave at least SOME of my
entertainment free of the excessively critical eye I bring to my reviewing.
But I figured I could provide a short, spoiler-free set of comments that
might help people enjoy the movie more.

     Here's the big one: read the novelization (or at least the Junior
Novelization) first.  While a fun bit of Baysplosionery for summer
entertainment, the movie left much of the plot on the cutting room floor, and
the novel can fill in the missing pieces for you.

     There's certain authors whose movie novelizations I regularly read
because I like their writing, but over the years I've started to see that for
certain movies it's a good idea to seek out the novel first regardless of who
writes it.  This is because novels are to movies as movies are to comics in
terms of information levels.  A comic adaptation of a movie will often be
bare-bones and unreadable, but a novelization will have all sorts of detail
that couldn't possibly fit into a movie.  So there's additional nuance and
background that the movie has to omit or at best include in a shorthand
form.  For instance, the opening credits of Ang Lee's Hulk have a LOT of
information crammed into them, information that is spelled out much more
clearly in the novelization, information that makes the movie's story much
more comprehensible.
     
     Thing is, while there's plenty of that sort of "never in the shooting
script" detail in Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Revenge of the Fallen
(and some bits are "wrong" being based on earlier versions of the script or
just filling in holes that were later filled in a different way), that's not
the real reason to read the novel.  You see, I strongly suspect that in order
to trim the movie down to a mere 150 minutes, big chunks of actual "we filmed
it and did the FX" plot-important scenes got cut.  Sometimes you'll even see
followups to missing scenes, like Leo Spitz arriving breathlessly to tell Sam
something that he found out in a scene that is not in the actual movie, or a
general realizing something we never got to see wasn't what it appeared to
be.  

     The novel won't help you with names for all the unnamed Decepticons
running around, mind you (and it got kinda annoying in places where ADF was
working pretty hard to use a character whose name he wasn't given and
couldn't provide himself).  Nor will it explain why there's two sets of
Constructicons (I figure Megatron bought two sets, one to display combined
and one to display individually).  But there's a LOT of missing plot in there
that will turn an incoherent exercise in fight scenes and FX into something
resembling a solid story.  And knowing the skeleton of that story helped me
enjoy my afternoon spent watching Baysplosions.

     That big one out of the way, here's a few little ones.  Don't sweat the
lack of names for Decepticons, we'll probably get toys of all of them
eventually and those names will do.  We already have Grindor for the unnamed
Pave Low in the movie, for instance.  If you find the Witwicky parents
intolerable, don't worry, they don't spend too long on screen, it merely
seems that way.  The Twins have been called racist caricatures, so if that
sort of thing bothers you, be warned (I saw them more as a couple of kids
playing at being thugz, like Riley from Boondocks, but as a white male I'm
not allowed to claim something isn't racist).  I figure Bay threw that in
just to get more press due to controversy.  Finally, Wheelie isn't the
annoying little kid he was in the 1980s.  He's closer to a more obnoxious
version of Rattrap, and when he humps Mikaela's leg he's clearly doing it to
mess with Sam (he's even saying "Hump!  Hump!  Hump!" as he does it).
(Ironically, I once designed a pre-Beast Rattrap as a descendant of Wheelie.) 

     Dave Van Domelen, pondering making a rack of his spare heads, masks and
faces to display with Optimus Prime.