The fourth and final installment, of this run at least, of the Herald-Sun Geek Panel went to print today.

We had quite the interesting live-chat session; part Bay bashing, part ‘wtf was a robot humping Megan Fox’s leg for, and why did she like it so much’, and an earnest troll convinced there were massive religious subtexts to the film that we were missing.

This review was pretty short and sweet, mostly because I was on flu meds for the film, and we had a only a few hours between seeing it and submitting our reviews. Still, they cut out a bit, so once more, here’s the un-cut version:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a Michael Bay movie, so you expect it to be filled with slow-mo explosions, people walking away in slow-mo from said explosions and cliched sentimental dialogue in between explosions. What I wasn’t expecting was so many weird sexual scenes: from dogs humping, to the forcible intrusion of robot limbs into human orifices and one girl being covered in a suspicious looking goo. I guess Japan is still the Future after all.

Still, it was great to see Starscream and Megatron bickering on screen again. And John Turturro was as hilarious ever, both as former Sector7 agent, turned blogger “robo-warrior” and providing the voice for the antiquated Decepticon defector Jetfire.

There was much more screen time given to epic robot battles than in the first film, yet it was still 30mins to 1hr too long. Did they really need to divert into National Treasure territory?

Bonus points for using a rail-gun to take out the Devastator. Two steps back for collapsing half of the Middle East into a series of landmarks that you can run between.

Oh, and to quote the end of the chat:

Let us know in future if there’s any films in particular you’d like us to bring the Geek Panel back for - email extrahit@heraldsun.com.au begging for their return any time