We were grateful for a forgiving schedule after our New Orleans mission trip. We drove home Friday after a very successful trip. That gave us Saturday to rest and do laundry. My wonderful wife sent me to my room, so to speak. I had both Transformers and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen from Netflix so she sent me up to the media room with a bowl of popcorn and orders to relax and watch them both.

First, let me just say that the media room is Oh-Mazing! Booming sound and razor sharp picture and all for half the price of a big flat-screen. I hope to get a post up about how we did it.

Now for the reviews:

I think it’s very interesting that nearly all the cartoons I used to watch after school when I was in the fourth grade have now been made into live-action movies. It says something about the people running Hollywood right now. They’re all my age and watched the same stuff. (Hmm. Not sure if I like that or not.) Transformers was my favorite show, followed closely by GI Joe and Thundercats. GI Joe flopped and Thundercats is slated for 2012.

Transformers had a lot to live up to for me. And I’d have to say it came pretty close. The CGI was really amazing. But I’m left wondering if we’ve reached that sad day when mind-blowing CGI isn’t enough to make a movie good (ahem… Avatar). I think we’re so used to not believing our eyes anymore that no effects can be “shockingly” good. Still, the effects really were good enough that the should have been shocking.

The story line was interesting enough. The plot was well presented and the characters were (mostly) well developed. I’m not sure about the Aussie government code cracker. She seemed kind of tacked on, like duct tape over a gaping plot hole. But otherwise, not bad.

The acting was… ok. The movie stars the guy with the sissiest name in Hollywood, Shia LaBeouf. (Poor kid must have got beat up every day at recess.) Shia, like many other “movie stars” (I hesitate to call them “actors”) comes across as the same guy in every movie he’s in, including the last Indiana Jones. The movie’s eye-candy girl, Megan Fox, also turned in a thoroughly forgettable performance.

You have to go waaay down the credits to find the voice talent that was so exactly the way I remembered it was almost scary. There’s good reason though. The voice of Optimus Prime was none other than Peter Cullen who voiced the cartoon in the 80’s (along with Eeyore on Winnie the Pooh… weird).

So, with C- acting, but a solid A in every other category, and a healthy dose of nostalgia, I’ll give it three grins.

I was more than a little surprised when I heard they were making a sequel. “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, from the get-go, strikes me as one of those unnecessary sequels. One of those, “Hey, that movie made a lot of money, we should do it again,” kind of sequels. Especially since I watched them back-to-back, I’m confident that there were no loose ends or unexplored plot twists from the first movie. But, let’s give it a fair shake and see how it holds up.

As with many similar sequels, there’s no need to play out the initial mystery over who and/or what the transformers are. There’s no need to develop the characters. There’s no need to explain the plot. So, they don’t. Well, that’s not entirely true. The plot needed a lot of explaining. In fact, even with a little too much time spent on exposition, I still felt like I didn’t know the whole story.

Maybe I’m not hard-core fan-boy enough. Maybe this was all part of the obscure Japanese comic book series that predated my 4th grade afternoon diversions. But I just didn’t buy the whole Simarillion-esque back story on which the plot for Fallen rests. You know, the old “long before anything you know about this story, there were these super-powerful god-like dudes that are suddenly relevant. In fact, they’re still around and now they’re going to destroy the world.” Or something like that.

Anyway, there wasn’t much that made this movie anything more than “just another Transformers”. They didn’t up the realism because there wasn’t much room for that. They didn’t introduce any new characters other than the afore mentioned god-guy and some comic relief (and believe me, no movie is improved by adding Jar Jar Binks, much less two of him). Oh, and remember what I wrote about five paragraphs ago about Sissy LaBeouf’s acting? Yeah. Copy and paste that here. And the same for Miss Meat-Market Fox.

My rating system doesn’t seem to handle “It doesn’t suck, but it’s not great.” If I allowed for half-grins, I’d give this one two and a half. But I can’t start that. Besides, half a grin is just a smirk, and that means something completely different. So, I’m left giving this one three grins. with a note that it’s not really quite good enough to earn it.