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You know I think it's funny. I actually laugh when people try to blame each other because of it. The question of course being, "Why is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen such a success?" After all, the fanboys can't decide if they love it or want to run to the nearest corner with their Optimus Prime action figure crying about all the movie's injustices, and the critics unanimously hate it. So why is it doing so well at the box office? This situation is mounting to a comical, "Whose fault is it?" scenario with the critics pointing the finger at the fanboys and the fanboys giving the finger to the critics. So if both the critics and the fanboys hate it, why is this film so successful?

The simple answer to, “Why is this film successful?” is because the movie is awesome. It's because of that simple fact that audiences love it. The action and special effects made us say, "Wow". And before people start to say that I'm just someone who loved the film and doesn't want to see it trashed, take a look at my review and you'll see that even though I say that I liked the movie, I only gave it a 6.5 out of 10. ( See my review here) Another thing people might think is that I'm not a real fan of The Transformers. You'd be wrong there to. I grew up watching the Transformers and I love them. Trust me, you don't want to go there. So all prejudices aside, let me expand a bit on this wow factor of mine.

I’d be pretty hard pressed to exactly define a wow factor, because I believe it’s different for everyone. The closest term I can think of to describe it for everyone is an element or ‘factor’ that made us love something. It’s that single awesome memory or moment when something, somewhere took your breath away. I also know that sometimes an audience yearns for a move that makes us remember the wow factor. Much like a professional ballplayer who yearns to go back to basics with his friends on his local neighborhood court, or that old dusty baseball diamond in that beat up field. These games fulfill a need to remember why they started to love the game they play in the first place. A moviegoer has this desire to, and sometimes a movie appeals to us so much because it fulfills that. With the RoTF I think the need fulfilled is to simply sit back and be amazed. I mean, yeah some of the acting wasn't that great and I even warm people about the cheesy dialogue, but did the special effects and sheer scale of the movie wow audiences? Absolutely.

Think back to when you were a kid, think about what your favorite movie was. Did you love that movie because the dialogue was supported by well-developed characters and an intricate plot? Or did you love it simply because it made you say, "Wow"? As a kid I used to love watching Godzilla, and last thing I thought of when I watched him was the horrible dialogue or the crappy acting or the fact you could see the zipper on the guy’s Godzilla suit. I just thought he was awesome to watch. This is what Transformers 2 did for a lot of audiences.

The wow factor doesn't have to deal with action movies either. It can be something completely unrelated to action. It doesn't have to have amazing special effects or a multi gazillion dollar budget. All it has to do is make us say, "Wow" for whatever reason. For example, take another movie that did this long before the time of pundits, or bloggers or even popular usage of the Internet for that matter. The 1988 film, Beaches. Critics hated this movie describing it as, "emotionally cloistering", "over dramatic", and "sappy". And yeah even Roger Ebert, the guy who makes no bones about how much he hates Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, hated Beaches to.

But audiences loved it. It was a huge hit that grossed over fifty-seven million dollars, putting it in the top 15 for the entire year of 1988. Now fifty-seven million dollars may not seem like much now but when put into perspective that in the same year, Cocktail earned just over seventy-eight million, you see just how well Beaches really did. All because that film made us say, "Wow".

There has always been a gap between how critics and audiences think, the result being movies that critics and audiences disagree on. But every now and then there comes a movie that reminds just how different critics and audiences really are. When that time rolls around it doesn't matter how old we are, whether we're a fanboy or a nerd or a geek. All that matters at that time is what the audience needs.

So in a year that had earlier promised to wow us with films such as Xmen Origins: Wolverine and Angles & Demons which failed miserably to do so, we needed something. Quite frankly, we needed something to wow the shit out of us. Either by the amazing special effects or the sheer joy of seeing their favorite Transformer on screen, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen gave that to audiences, not critics, and audiences love it for that.