In Screen Rant’s latest Pitch Meeting video, Ryan George takes aims at 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Following on from the success of 2007’s live-action Transformers, winner of the Best Movie in the 2008 MTV Movie Awards as well the recipient of multiple accolades for its ground-breaking visual effects, work had begun on the planned sequel even before the first film had hit cinemas. The first sequel in a long-running franchise helmed by Michael Bay, Revenge of the Fallen would eventually become both the last Transformers film to star Megan Fox as well as the last one to be distributed by Dreamworks Pictures.

In the sequel, the original film’s Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LeBeouf, is once again caught up in the ongoing conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons, opposing forces of sentient, shape-shifting robots based on the popular line of Habro toys from the 1980s. While production on the film was threatened by delays due to the 2007-2008 writer’s strikes, Michael Bay was able to forge on and meet the film’s intended release window by relying on early script treatments which were handed in just hours before the official strike action began. This lack of a more developed screenplay would eventually be hard to ignore, however, as despite pulling in over $830 million at the worldwide box office, the film came under critical fire for its lack of coherent plot and multiple contradictions to the events covered in the original film.

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Those complaints and shortcomings provide Screen Rant’s Ryan George with plenty of fodder for his latest Pitch Meeting episode. Offering his version of what happened in those early production meetings, Ryan George hilariously goes for the jugular by narrowing in on the film’s confusing plot and Michael Bay’s reliance on explosions over cohesive storytelling. Check it out below:

When looking back at Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and the issues it faced during production, it is easy to see how a burgeoning franchise so easily flipped from producing an MTV Movie of the Year winning film, to what eventually won the dubious triple honor of Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay and Worst Director at the 2009 Golden Raspberry Awards. Unfortunately, this would not be the only misstep in the big-budget action franchise, and Bay would go on to make three more Transformers sequels which also suffered a range of poor critical reactions, with Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight both scoring lower on Rotten Tomatoes than Revenge of the Fallen’s already dismal 20% rating. It was not until Paramount undertook a soft franchise reboot with 2018’s Bumblebee, directed by Travis Knight, that public confidence in the potential of the franchise began to take hold, and it still ranks as the highest-scoring film in the entire Transformers series.

Moving forward, fans can only hope that the next steps in the franchise will more closely follow Knight’s prequel/spin-off. Recent reports have indicated that plans are already well underway for a seventh Transformers film to be helmed by emerging director Steven Caple Jr, and starring Anthony Ramos (Hamilton) and Dominique Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah). In the meantime, perhaps it might be worthwhile for fans to go right back for a rewatch of the original, Movie of the Year award-winning film.

Next: Transformers Future Explained: What Movies Are In Development