Over long CGI-fest

Rating: 3/10 (22 February 2010)

To be fair I must point out that this film was my introduction to the world of Transformers; I've not seen the first film nor the original TV series. Since this is a sequel it can be forgiven for not spending too much time introducing the characters or explaining the back story of why the two groups of robots are at war, even so it was not difficult to figure out who was good and who was bad and what they were trying to achieve. If the idea of watching CGI robots beating the living daylights out of each other while Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox try to prevent the bad robots achieve their evil aim then you might enjoy this. Unfortunately the story never really grabbed me and I found my self thinking "is it nearly over?" when there was in fact another hour to go and while the action was pretty much non stop the fact that is was CGI made it feel unreal. I may have missed something but I was also rather confused by the films geography; one minute they are in the Smithsonian in Washington the next they are in an aircraft storage facility, another time they are in Petra in Jordan then after a bit of running about they are in Egypt, it was as though Michael Bay just wanted to destroy some well known Middle Eastern landmarks and assumed viewers would think they were within walking distance of each other.
It is hard to comment on the quality of the actors as all they had to do was run around avoiding the bad CGI Robots. The good robots were somewhat annoying, some of them were given characteristics which were presumably meant to be funny but just made me hope they'd end up scrap metal. It is clear that Michael Bay's expertise is in action set pieces and not in characterisation or comedy although the fact that his films rake in vast amounts of money suggest there must be lots of fans for this type of thing; I'm not one of them though.