Recencies van critici

When we watch Revenge of the Fallen and feel an uncanny familiarity accompanying images of soldiers on a night raid or readying for battle in the desert, and we come to expect some sort of a tagline ("Army Strong!") to slam onto the screen at any moment to the tune of an earworm jingle, whose handiwork are we watching? Are these bits of action Michael Bay at his best, or do these images belong to someone else? What is the point at which influence intersects with and overwhelms authorship?

...I wouldn't characterize the first film's imagery as this loopy and looping, as this kind of catch-all pageant; not since his 90s camp sensations has Bay made his neon world so jumpy and laughably-enjoyably-idiotically dazzling with fireworks and endless, ostentatious camera swoops and circles.

That's the perverse genius of Michael Bay. Despite the tediousness of his stories and inanity of his visual ideas, he always manages to keep you laughing and shaking your head in disbelief at the outlandishness of his cinematic spectacles, with their orange explosions, armament fetishism and even their noxious stereotypes.

The special effects are better and the dialogue slightly more humorous than in the first movie, but the anti-Arab subtext is repugnant: the ensuing armageddon destroys both an Egyptian pyramid and part of the antique Jordanian city of Petra.