Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Review Rating: 7.5

The Autobots and Sam Witwicky return to take on the Decepticons and a whole new class of bad guys!

This is actually a much better movie than I thought it would be. It is so very very a Michael Bay creation, which is to say everything is HUGE and BLOWS UP! Sadly, the misguided attempts at injecting humanity here and there, the scenes with Sam’s parents trying to get him installed in college and that sort of thing, are so over the top as to be utterly ridiculous and unnecessary. But, that’s a minor complaint. It’s been two years since the last movie, and the military has teamed up with some of the Autobots, prompting the line from one of the soldiers, “Hey, we’ve shed blood, sweat and precious metals together.” Woot!

So the film itself is more or less split into two segments, the first half and the latter half. The first half deals a lot with the story of the Transformers and how they visited earth already a long time ago, how The Fallen is actually an ancient Transformer being with designs on eating the earth (or, his version of eating), and centers around how the Transformers are actually aliens, rather than great bloody transforming robots. Don’t try too hard to wrap your brain around the actual plot; while it’s a good thing to have to add a framework to all that CGI, the in-depth plot is mostly superfluous. I did find it very hard to believe that, no matter who he might be, Sam Witwicky had the nerve to tell Optimus Prime NO when the alien robot taller than a skyscraper asked for help. In the real world, Witwicky would either volunteer for such a thing or get volun-told into it by the military, there is no NO.

For the latter half of the film, we have Shia LeBeouf in all his glory, running around the back alleys and pyramids of Egypt being chased by mad Decepticons. Which is actually fine too, because, having LeBeouf fighting giant mad robot aliens in the backdrop of Egypt is still more believeable than what happened in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and better looking too. Might as well call the latter half of the movie the apology for Indie 4, frankly. And hey, I like the idea that at least one of the pyramids is actually an ancient alien piece of technology that will convert our sun into food!

“More than meets the eye”, is absolutely right for this fine journey of a sequel.