Whos who at the Laurentian Abyss
Transformers; Revenge of the Fallen has dropped.
I saw it on Thursday. It really doesn’t hold together as well as the first one. Sub-plots and character scenes got cut left-and-right int he second half, and the result is that it’s almost solid robots, and Epps and Lennox feel a little useless. It’s a bit frustrating because review after review talks about being baffled by the plot, and I know it’s supposed to make more sense than that… it’s jsut that about half the movie’s exposition ended up on the cutting room floor. Bummers.
On the plus side, stuff explodes like every 30 seconds!
Not helping with the confusion in the film is the bazillion robots in the film. The official total is 42, but I’ve heard some people who were counting say that total was much higher.
Since they’re often in motion (stomping around like bags of jello with metal parts suspended in them) and almost none of them are named, telling who’s who can be a bit… challenging.
Fortunately, I have resourceful friends. So I present screencaps!
The Laurentian Abyss sequence has 4 Decepticons (plus ravage) diving off a ship.
Then then jump off the boat. First a tan fellow with long claws, then Mixmaster with his shell-wing things, then Long Haul (the hulking green one) and a red version of the pogo-stick-bot (Rampage or possibly Skypjack) does a backflip in front of Longhaul, actually entering the water ahead of him.
Later, two of the Transformers turn on a third. This outline could conceivably be the Jackhammer-bot, but he’s actually offscreen to the left… so it’s got to be the long-armed Decepticon who exited first.
And the clamp on his arm (seen earlier in vehicle mode) makes the victim readily identifiable as a Constructicon Scout.
Unrelated note: David (the inveterate movie pirate who got these to me) tells me the ROTF bootlegs out at the moment are “all crap,” and points out that he went to see ROTF in theaters.
(He recommends the IMAX experience.)