Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Two years after the Battle of Mission City, Sam Witwicky is trying to be an ordinary teenager again and leave for college, but a leftover shard of the destroyed AllSpark burns a torrent of ancient Cybertronian symbols into his mind. Those symbols are a map.

The Decepticons want what the map leads to. Regrouped under a revived Megatron and his long-imprisoned master, The Fallen, they are hunting a buried Star Harvester, a doomsday machine that drains a sun for raw Energon. It is hidden inside a pyramid at Giza, and switching it on would extinguish Earth's sun.

Branded a liability after a Shanghai battle goes public, the Autobots and their human strike team NEST are nearly disbanded, and when Optimus Prime falls defending Sam the war tips toward the enemy. The hunt for a way to revive Prime and stop The Fallen runs from a Smithsonian hangar to the deserts of Egypt and Jordan.

Everything is bigger than the original: more robots, more countries, more spectacle, building to a sprawling desert battle in which Sam briefly dies, meets the ancient Dynasty of Primes, and returns carrying the Matrix of Leadership, the one thing that can bring Optimus back for the final stand.

Paramount had sequels in development before the first film even opened, and once Transformers grossed over 700 million dollars in 2007 a follow-up was a foregone conclusion. The studio wanted it fast. Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who wrote the original, initially passed over scheduling, then returned, and Ehren Kruger was added for his deep knowledge of Transformers lore. The trio was paid a combined eight million dollars.

The budget was set at around 200 million dollars, fifty million more than the first film, with Variety reporting the real outlay above 210 million after rebates. A further 150 million went to marketing. Orci framed the theme as being away from home: the Autobots cannot rebuild Cybertron and weigh making Earth their world, while Sam leaves for college and tries to walk away from the war.

Principal photography ran from June to November 2008 and was unusually far-flung. The Shanghai opening was built from the old Bethlehem Steel works in Pennsylvania combined with the Long Beach harbor. College scenes were shot at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, though both schools refused to let their names appear on screen, objecting to a scene in which Sam's mother eats marijuana brownies.

The desert finale took the production overseas. Bay said it was the first film in roughly thirty years granted permission to shoot at the Pyramids of Giza, and the first ever allowed to film atop Petra in Jordan, where the Monastery stands in for the Tomb of the Primes. King Abdullah II, a science-fiction fan, helped clear access, and the Royal Jordanian Air Force assisted. A forest battle was shot on Mescalero Apache land in New Mexico, where the production was permitted to fell about a dozen trees in exchange for planting some six thousand afterward.

The film leaned on more than a year of United States military cooperation, showing hardware from four of the five service branches: C-17 transports, the Army's Golden Knights parachute team, M1 Abrams tanks firing live rounds, Navy submarines and an aircraft carrier. Filming wrapped on November 2, 2008 aboard the USS John C. Stennis.

The visual-effects leap was enormous. Where the first film had fourteen robots, the sequel had forty-six, built in roughly the same year-and-a-half schedule, with ILM reaching around sixty major builds in total. The studio's render farm ran near 95 percent capacity, its crew peaked around 350 artists, and storage ballooned from about twenty terabytes on the original to roughly 150 terabytes.

The centerpiece was Devastator, a giant combiner formed from construction vehicles. Counts vary by how parts are tallied, but he is often cited at over fifty thousand parts and around thirteen million polygons, standing about 150 feet tall, with single frames taking on the order of 72 hours to render. The shots of Devastator tearing the top off a pyramid were the largest rigid-body simulation in ILM's history at the time, several times bigger than the studio's previous record, and took months to compute. Bay also shot the forest fight and the climactic battle with IMAX cameras, whose frames carry roughly eight times the area of standard film.

The sequel crowded the screen with new Cybertronians. The Fallen is the title's reveal: the first and founder of the Decepticons, a betrayer Prime and Megatron's master. Jetfire is an ancient, cane-walking Seeker who scanned an SR-71 Blackbird, switches sides, and sacrifices himself so Optimus can fly and win. Devastator and the Constructicons form the towering combiner of the Giza climax, killed by a Navy railgun, a beat added late to showcase a real new weapon.

Around them came Demolishor, the excavator wrecked in Shanghai, the surveillance Decepticon Sideways, the satellite spy Soundwave with his drone Ravage, the reformed Decepticon Wheelie, the Pretender Alice, and, most notoriously, the bickering Autobot twins Mudflap and Skids. A small Autobot named Jolt was added at General Motors' request to promote the Chevrolet Volt.

With a marketing budget around 150 million dollars, the campaign was everywhere: a Super Bowl spot in February 2009, tie-ins with fast-food and retail giants, a NASCAR car in the film's livery, and a wave of Hasbro toys. The world premiere was held in Tokyo on June 8, 2009 before the North American opening on June 24, with an IMAX version that carried extended robot-fight footage not in the standard cut.

For all the bad reviews, the commercial result was staggering. Midnight shows took around sixteen million dollars, then the most ever for a Wednesday debut, and the first day grossed roughly sixty-two million, breaking the record for a Wednesday opening and ranking as the second-biggest opening day to that point behind The Dark Knight. The five-day launch reached about 200 million dollars, and it was the first 2009 release to pass 300 million domestically.

It finished with 402.1 million dollars in North America and 434.2 million abroad, for 836.3 million worldwide, comfortably out-grossing the first film by well over 100 million and ranking as the second-highest domestic earner of 2009 behind Avatar. On home video it was the best-selling DVD of the year.

Revenge of the Fallen became the cautionary tale of the whole franchise, hard proof that audiences would turn out no matter what critics said and equally hard proof that bigger is not the same as better. The filmmakers' candid post-mortems about its broken, strike-damaged script turned it into a case study in blockbuster excess.

The course-correction was immediate. Dark of the Moon two years later handed Kruger sole writing duties for a more linear story, cut the twins entirely, and dialed back the juvenile comedy, clawing back a measure of respectability with notably better reviews. There has been no real critical rehabilitation since: retrospectives still rank Revenge of the Fallen as the series' low point, the one entry even its director disowns.