I liked the movie a lot, and it's definitely a spectacular action picture. It's very cartoony in the sense that you don't see any actual people dying even though buildings are crumbling all around you. It's apparently supposed to be set in some made-up city, but having an obvious shot of Dodger Stadium and a fairly significant scene at the Griffith Observatory meant I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be Los Angeles until the husband and friends told me that after the movie.

I've heard some people express a general dislike for Shia Leboef (sp?), and I'd be curious where that stems from. I didn't see "Disturbia", but I thought he was terrific in this, and I'm looking forward to seeing him in Indy 4 - I can totally see him as Indy's son, even though he's fairly young.

The bots were incredible to watch, especially the transformation scenes. This movie would have been basically impossible to make as a live-action film without the invention of digital special effects.

Parts of the story confused me though.

I didn't completely understand the deal with the cube - which in and of itself was distracting to me since I kept thinking the Borg were related to the Autobots and Decepticons, but I digress - or what it's properties were. They said Megatron wanted it to turn all the machines on Earth bad and add them to his army, and when we saw the effect of the cube on the cel phone during the demonstration, it did make the cel phone turn violent. But why is the cube's effect always negative? It can't turn machines into Autobots? And when Optimus told Sam that he would sacrifice himself to destroy the cube, I thought he was just going to blow up or something, so I don't understand exactly what happened when Sam put the cube against Megatron. How did touching the cube kill Megatron? And was there any signifcance to Optimus pulling out a remaining part of the cube from Megatron? And speaking of which, what was with killing Megatron in the first movie? You've gotta figure they're thinking of this as a franchise, so you kill the amazing leader of the bad guys in the first film? Weird.

I really liked the actress who played the lead. And I thought it was great that she had a jail-bird father and had a rap sheet herself *and* she was the one who hot-wired the tow truck! The use of particular music in parts had us laughing hysterically. But is someone of Sam's age even going to know "Drive" by The Cars, much less "Baby Come Back" by Player?

Josh Duhamel was terrific in this film, and it's been interesting to watch his leap from soap operas to network television to feature films. He's been in a few other movies, but this is the one that I think will really put him on the map. He wasn't just playing the pretty boy and had a lot to do. I'm looking forward to watching his career continue to blossom.

I might see this film in the theatres again since I was distracted for parts of it and I didn't actually see the entire film. We saw the film at the DTD Anaheim AMC theatres, which we go to often and love. It must have been Twilight Zone day though. There was apparently a convention of the Paris Hilton/Jacob Marley fan club, and they all decided to see this film at the same time we did. The only saving grace was that their entire group sat in the very front section of the theatre, but their constant "getting out of their seats and coming back" were fairly distracting, as were their clanging, which I still haven't been able to figure out. And then to top it off, as we're watching the credits, at the point where they're doing the credits to the various car manufacturers, they turned the projector off. I was mad enough that I stood in line to talk to the guest services person, who seemed pretty frazzled anyway and told me about this and that and the other. He offered to make up for what happened, but I told him I didn't want any money - I just wanted them to fix the system.

So, while I know there there were scenes interspersed at the beginning of the credits, and they seemed to have stopped by the time they were doing the regular crawl, for anyone who's actually seen the entire movie, was there anything else after the credits that we missed? Thanks.