Transformers Revenge of the Fallen: Your Worst Nightmare from Bay Films/Michael Bay Dot Com on Vimeo.

On Friday 12th June were were invited to attend the FDA screening of Transformers Revenge of the Fallen at the Oden in Leicester Square, London.  The event was an invitational only affair with over a thousand people in the audience form all types of media forms.

Before the film began it was announced that we were the first audience to see the final edit of the film despite the world premier in Japan a few days before hand which showed a pre-finished edit of the movie.

The review will contain spoilers though we will try to limit them as much as possible.  As with most press events their has been an embargo on reviews which was lifted today.

The film takes place a few years after the end of the first movie an opens with a flashback scene showing the Transformers first arrival on Earth thousands of years ago.  These Transformers were the original Primes including one who would later be cast out and forever dubbed as The Fallen.  The film jumps to modern day China and the first action scene with narration from Optimus Prime explaining how more Autobots have now arrived on Earth and how they have teamed with the humans to protect Earth and round up the last remaining Decepticons.  The first thing you notice with the Transformers Revenge of the Fallen is the improvement on the visuals during action sequences.

The film then jumps back to the human side of the story of which the premise is Sam moving away to go to college, trying to cope with a long distance relationship with Mikaela and return to a normal life.  After discovering a shard of The Allspark in his old jacket Sam starts to see Cyber-glyphs which is soon followed up by a small action sequence involving various home applicances coming to life.  There are various comedic scenes involving Sam and his parents both at their house and on campus which helps to keep the mood light-hearted and is clearly designed to give his parents more screen time in the second film.  For those with small children their are various seuxal and drug references throughout these scenes.  Bumblebee is back not being able to speak again which is explained with a throw away line commenting that he has been "having trouble with his vocal processor again". Whilst at college Sam meets two new human characters in Alice and Leo.  Leo is another comedy relief character who is often teams with Mudflap, Skids or the returning Agent Simmons with Alice being a rival love-interest with a secret.  During this time Soundwave (one of three characters voiced by Frank Wellker), a Decepticon satellite, track down another Allspark fragment which is being held on a military base.  He sends down Ravage (who is never named) to retrieve the fragment in order to resurrect Megatron.

The pace of the movie picks up again as it builds towards one of the major points of the movie which takes place within a forest including one of the better fight sequences with Optimus Prime taking on three Decepticons.  Prime is even more bad-ass than in the first movie and now has two blades and two guns whilst the Decepticons seem some what weaker.

From this, which is feels like the mid-point of the film, the pace then slows down dramatically with heavy focus on the Humans.  Some more characters are introduced, as are more plot holes, with the story progressing slowly.  Its this part of the movie which will no doubt  come into criticism from reviewers for its pacing.

The locations change as the film starts to set itself up for the finale.  The build up is a little slow, contains a mix of comedic and serious scenes as well as explaining some more of the back story and introducing The Matrix of Leadership.

The pace picks up again for the finale which visually is much clearer than the first film with the full cast on show.  There is a lot of Transformers in the end sequence, although some of the models are reused.  Devastator appears towards the end of the movie though we ended being a little let down with the use of the character.  The visuals were certainly impressive and no doubt the combination sequence in the Imax version should be extremely impressive.

Overall Transformers Revenge of the Fallen is more of the same.  Its bigger and louder than the first, visually its still stunning with vast improvements in the fight sequences although it is let down by the pacing in the middle of the film, some plot holes and once again lack of characters for many of the Transformers.

There are several new Decepticon characters in the movie, 99% of which are never named, very few speak, even less have characters and several towards the end are just generic CG renders.   The Fallen is introduced as a sort of Emperor to Megatron's Darth Vader and is used to explain more of the Cybertronian history.  Like the first movie a lot of the Decepticons are killed (many very easily), Megatron seemed like a watered down version of his character from the first film.  Devastator felt, unfortunately, rather week and although not in the film massively Starscream certainly gains the most from the movie with some nice lines showing his character.

Plot Holes
The first movie contained a lot of minor plot holes with the sequel continuing this theme.  Timing once again is a problem for the film with an examples being when Mikela flies out to college and Jordan being suddenly a lot closer to Cario than it actually is.  Geographically speaking the location of some of the temples in Egypt are wrong.  Jetfire's alternative mode doesn't make any sense.  He's suppose to have have been off-line for a very long time and yet his spark is inside a SR-71 Blackbird which is from the 1960s.

In the final scene "the Constructicons" appear in both combined (Devastator) and individual modes at the same time.

Some little nods
There are once again some nods for the fans.  Mentions include Engeron the Matrix of Leadership, a line from Epps "if god created us in his image then you have to wonder who created him" which is to tease thoughts of Primus and Unicron amongst others.

Overall
Overall we both enjoyed the film and will certainly be seeing it again.  It fits in nicely with the first, should certainly sell well.  Die-hard fans may be a little disappointed with the amount of screen time that some of the new characters receive as well as the lack of dialogue for many of the cast.

The movie opens first within the UK and Ireland and then is released worldwide.  Whether it will out gross the first movie will be interested to see.  I expect it will perform better at the UK box office this time around as it has less competition and is opening much earlier.

Many thanks go to Simon Dick, Alan Taylor, Barry Shaw, Peter Brown and Matthew Messenger for sending us through various images of Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers Henkei and Transformers Animated figures.

The new Transformers toy galleries feature 

• Transformers Animated Blurr
• Transformers Henkei Hot Shot
• Transformers Henkei Jolt
• Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Legends Bumblebee
• Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Legends Optimus Prime
• Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Legends Jetfire
• Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Barricade
• Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Rampage
• Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Ravage
• Transformers Revenge of the Fallen The Fallen
  

 Koujin Ohno–who is credited with inventing Transformers as we now know them–gave Michael an Optmus Prime statue to show his appreciation with what Michael has done for the franchise.

Linkin Park have placed their video for New Divide, one of the theme tunes to the Transformers Revenge of the Fallen movie on their myspace page.

Linkin Park – “New Divide”
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The UK Transformers site has been updated by Paramount Pictures to include a CGI render of Soundwave in satellite mode. Looking from the flash files using an extractor we've grabbed out two of the images­

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Michael Bay has updated his blog with images from the Korean Premier of Transformers Revenge of the Fallen.

More images from this event will appear on Getty Images and will be mirrored on various Transformers fan and news sites.

TFW2005 member ninety has spotted the Wal-Mart Exclusive Decepticon jets, Skywarp and Ramjet, at the Brig O' Dee Asda in Aberdeen.

Asda is owned by of Wal-Mart, so it's not a major suprise that the figures have appeared in these stores.

Seibertron have a pretty cool news story regardinft yahoo.co.jp. If you visit the site and search on ??????????(that's "Transformer!" in Katakana) you'll get a neat little suprise.

Unfortunatley the designers have forgotten that the world doesn't just use Internet Explorer, so you may get errors in some browsers such as Firefox :-(