Special Effects + Mediocre Movie

Rating: 5/10 (20 June 2009)

I went in expecting this to be awful. The first transformers was total tripe, a special effects orgy with an underlying movie so thin and poorly scripted that I felt somewhat conned and underwhelmed by the whole experience.
In this regard, Transformers 2 is a big improvement. The number of human characters gets reduced, there is far more meaningful dialogue. The robots, as with the first, looked great. The humour was much better, although still too many overly idiotic scenes. The human character development was a marked improvement.
It does fall short in many areas. Several scenes look impossible (think big robots superimposed onto rooms / roads / scenery that they are too big for), the CGI often doesn't blend totally with the real scene (giant robots walking on sand do not leave footprints and a sand sucking robot sucks up imaginary sand whilst you see the actual scene unaffected underneath the digital sand, and many more examples).
Where Michael Bay really fails is in tying together humans and robots in death defying action. The worst point is when we are expected to believe that our intrepid antagonist Sam (Shia Le Bouef) can run a mile with his girlfriend Michaela(Megan Fox) in tow in the midst of a giant battle. Apparently the Decepticons can't run much faster than their human foes, nor aim their guns at them. It was all a little unbelievable and you would have hoped that a better story writer would have come up with a more plausible way (and there were many) for the plot to unfold.
Add to that some incredibly corny moments, and some terrible ideas like humping transformers, terminator-3-like transformers, and generally the movie flowing simply from one special effect to another, and it's just hard to actually get drawn in and take the movie seriously.
Don't take this movie seriously and you'll enjoy it. Expect any depth and you'll simply hit the bottom almost straight away.