Ok, I don’t get the whole Transformers thing. I appear to be pretty much the only person on the planet who thought Revenge of the Fallen in its theatrical cut was much better than the first film. Transformers 1 is just a mess of a film, terrible humour, horrible acting and incoherent directing/editing. On top of that, the giant robots are hardly in it, when they are their scenes are edited so badly you can barely work out what’s happening, and they have virtually no characterisation. For me, Revenge of the Sith generally had these to a far lesser degree. The obnoxious humour remained, but I felt Shia Labouf and Megan Fox seemed much more comfortable in their roles. We get an interesting mythology and backstory given to us, the Primes, the Fallen, the intermingled history between Earth and the Transformers. On top of that, we get some actual robot personalities. The twins are racial stereotypes, but I also find them quite funny. Similarly, I find Jetfire a very entertaining character (in spite of fart and scrotum jokes). But perhaps most importantly, Revenge of the Fallen gets right perhaps the single most important aspect of the franchise, the giant robots fighting. In the first film, the fight scenes were ugly and incoherent; here, not only are the smooth, with much slower editing and longer shots, but they very cleverly incorporate the two very different perspectives that the action is occuring on. For every skirmish, we have a well-choreographed battle between two robots, and also the effect on their surroundings (mere obstacles to them, massive buildings, trees and architecture to us). The use of scale in this film is incredible and infact I can’t think of another film that has captured it so well since Honey I Shrunk The Kids and The Incredible Shrinking Man before that.

But, having defended the film, I will say that Transformers 2 isn’t without deep flaws. I am not a Michael Bay fan, his films contain a level of chauvenism and stupidity that I generally find too offensive to get any actual enjoyment out of. For me, the biggest problems of Transformers 2 are the horrendiously lowbrow humour (honestly, who enjoys dog humping jokes?), its length, and a few other bits and pieces that need tweaking. I watched the Uncanny Antman edit of the first film a few days ago, which I found generally enjoyable but felt the original material was too lacking for a good complete film to be made.

On an editing level, I would describe Kevinicus’s edit as excellent, no noticible mistakes.

In terms of the plot, I do not remember very much from the original cut, so I was viewing the film on its own terms, with only the memory of how I felt about the original cut (rather than being able to identifly altered or missing scenes). I did miss the opening with the Aztecs, which I found a very entertaining intro to the movie. For the first half, things move smoothly. The characters do feel slightly short-changed, including Megan Fox (who I recall finding a lot more tolerable in this film). The film definately benefited from a lot of the missing humour, and infact I felt you could have gone further. I find Shia Labouff’s parents, particularly is mother, very obnoxious; but I suppose humour is subjective and maybe some people actually like her acting/dialogue (just as I like the Twins and Jet Fire who noone else can stand). The action scenes seem to be left in tact and they’re still impressive.

I also missed the mythos which the film developed. I’m not sure what was actually taken out, but I recall learning more about the Primes, the Fallen and the Transformers history first time around. Again this is a personal choice, most people cannot stand this film and I guess this would be part of the reason (what I found interesting they found boring/unnecessary/silly exposition?). John Tuturo is excellent in this film and I am glad his gratuitious ass-bearing scene has been removed, although again the removal of the NEST subplot does a) hinder the film, and b) leave it with an empty subplot at the start of the film.

Now the only real problem I had with the film was the ending, but I’m not sure if this was the fanedit’s fault. The final 20 minutes feels rather rushed, all the action suddenly takes place together, and it felt like a lot of content was missing. Perhaps the missing content did not work and is better removed. I did think the “energon” plot seemed to be missing more exposition, which meant the ending was less exciting (but maybe I missed it this time round).

Given what I considered a weaker finale, I rate this film (independent of editing quality) film a 7/10. It definately loses a lot of the poorer material from the original, but I feel it loses some of the important aspects too. Coming from a fan of the film, this opinion is obviously not going to reflect most other people’s tastes.

On a separate note, this edit did give me two ideas to think about.

Firstly, given the 3rd installment has now been released (which I wont be seeing at the cinema), I wonder if it would be possible to re-edit the entire trilogy, narratively speaking. I think potentially the first film would benefit from a lot of the story from the second film being transfered over. Given the third film, the trilogy could be reshaped around the character arcs of the entire franchise (for example, bringing in “The Fallen” in part one and not having Megatron die just to be resurected at the start of the second film.) But this is a young idea that I will have to think about.

Secondly, I think the film could do with some artificial awe. Remember the scene in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex first appears. It has a slow build up, a great score, and a thrilling pay off. Transformers 2 is full of “pay off” scenes but the film moves so fast and the soundtrack is pretty dull so they tend to fly by. A new soundtrack here could do wonders, you could really build up the suspence (something Bay’s frenetic editing completely lacks!) before the massive reveal. A perfect example is towards the end, Labouf and Fox are hiding in that house, Decepticons are akk around, suddenly Megatron (or whoever) rips the roof off and they are exposed. With a different score, this scene could be incredible, instead of just another action scene amongst many.

But enough of my ranting, it was a very enjoyable edit and I recomend it to anyone who theoretically likes the idea of 30 foot robots performing intense violence upon one other.

Enjoyment: 1/10 – the experience sadly didn’t change

Technical Aspects 10/10

the cuts are not noticeable etc. the faneditor did a great job on the technical aspects especially when it comes to:

Video Quality: well… watching fanedits in Bluray is pretty amazing and this is the main scoring point of this edit – damn it looks way better than a normal fanedit, the file is HUUUUGE (20 gig) and I’m curious how long it will take for fanedits to go full bluray (but if i remember correctly there was a HD fanedit mashup of Superman and Batman, so technically this is the second HD fanedit ) but currently I don’t know if it will be a standard. The fanediting world can sometimes be very unpredictable and the greatest premise might become a movie you won’t watch again. Or you read through the cutlist, thinking how amazing this will be but the final product is interesting, but overall “meh”
but i can see a Bluray Fanedit future for fanedit jewels like “Revisited” (which Adywan already confirmed to be in HD or other fanedits that are great and so popular that the faneditor might go back a second time to give us the same great experience but this time HD (looking at Jorge for Dark Knight Revisited in Bluray )

so this makes an overall 5.5