What I liked about 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' (SPOILERS)

First: No, I hated this as much as the rest of you.
However, I never really watched the very original series, nor the G1 series, as I was born in '86, and I didn't develop the consciousness to analyze what I watched until I watched another Transformers series, the Canadian-made 'Beasties' that I took to the Transformers concept, and appreciated how the characters interacted, as well as being the second time I really saw the good guys get beaten (first time was Astro Boy). I couldn't bring myself to miss it, because it really was the first episodic show I could follow since the original TMNT (which I liked, but the screw-ups in the animation kinda threw me off a bit, until the cleaner follow-up series came out... Argh! Getting off-topic again!), and I was glad to be able to follow the graduating plot while enjoying the more one-shot episodes.
It's only now, after being able to watch 'Transformers: The Movie' (animated) that I can see correlations between Beasties and the rest of the Transformers Universe. The additions of other characters like Starscream and Unicron is retroactively kinda nice to see. I also watched most of the episodes of that 3D 'Transformers: Cybertron' show, which I believe may be the show that the writers of Michael Bay's movies watched.

Yeah, yeah, I'm getting to the movie. Well, let's start with the beginning of the movie, where we learn that the humans and Autobots have been working together to root out the Decepticons. That would've been a great way to develop the Autobot's personalities (I know you all caught that too). That concept I didn't expect, but thought it was kinda cool, like the BPRD in Hellboy, and I would've liked to see that concept fleshed out a bit more, but naturally it was passed over to have the focus put on Sam et al. There were two new Autobots they only MAYBE mentioned the name of, and I only caught Jolt (the blue car)'s name near the end. I think I heard that the name of the silver car was Sideswipe.

The second thing I liked is how the Decepticons actually got personalities to them (at least someone did). Megatron and Starscream's relationship was kinda messed up since they're both serving The Fallen, so Starscream taking over for Megatron TWICE shouldn't really have been as big a deal as they made it (Does anyone else think they skipped a bit making this movie: why was Megatron searching for the Cube to give himself an army when he planned to search out the Matrix of Leadership so that The Fallen would have Earth destroyed? What if they didn't find the Cube first?). They got Starscream about as accurate as possible, although he's quite an ugly sucker.

Next, the true plot. Once we FINALLY were told what the movie was about, I immediately thought I could've written something vastly better with at least an hour shaved off of it. Anyways, I'm gonna summarize the plot so you can see why I think it had far more potential than they gave it:
"The original Decepticon, named The Fallen, has returned to our solar system to reclaim an artifact known as the Matrix of Leadership, which was left on Earth after The Fallen's brothers stopped him from destroying the Sun to create a vast supply of Energon fuel and leaving our planet to wither away.Though outmatched, the Autobots, along with their human allies, a special-ops team known as NEST, must use what little information they can get from the small fragments left of the Cube to find the Matrix first and destroy The Fallen's machine."
You gotta admit, there's much more they could've done than focus that half-hour of Skids and Mudflap, and just leave the whole Witwicky family out of it. I think all the humans we needed were Josh Duhamell and Tyrese there.

Finally is the reason why I think they got their info from the Transformers: Cybertron series: In that series, Jetfire could transform into an armour upgrade just for Optimus, giving him flight capability and a major weapons boost. The fact that they did that in the movie, although it was more of a sacrifice on Jetfire's part, I thought was a nice touch.

No, none of that possibly makes this movie all that great. It was nice how they refined the graphics so the Transformers looked more like they were really there - they looked a bit out-of-phase in the first one, and now looked like they were in the same dimension, but that's really nothing I should have to say.

The real only reason someone should want to watch this movie is for the fights, which are finally able to be followed, though the final one is a bit too long before Optimus is back up and running. I'm sure that since this was bashed pretty bad critically, and I doubt his "serious" attempt coming soon will not bode well after seeing the rest of his films, so I fel it's unlikely Bay will have much more work coming his way, and we may well have someone else do any possible Transformers 3, and maybe Steven Spielburg could put his neck out for our sakes, and not insult us with such dreck a third time.

OX9