This post con­tains spoil­ers, beware. The May edi­tion of EW con­tains a Trans­form­ers 2 arti­cle with excerpts from Michael Bay, it’s main focus is on Shia’s hand injury and the trou­bles of incor­po­rat­ing it into the movie.

To sum­marise the piece:

- To build Shia’s injury into the movie the screen­writ­ers added a scene show­ing Sam Witwicky being injured by a “Space Bridge“
– Shia was given a cus­tom made pro­tec­tive and pho­to­genic cast after delay­ing surgery
– The Pyra­mids in Egypt are the set­ting for the final bat­tle
– Bay likes to blow things up, noth­ing has changed: “A fish tank, a heli­copter, con­crete tubes. We blew up a library. This set you’re look­ing at? This will all be gone.“
– Using CGI to cover up Shia’s injury was too expen­sive and “a pain in the neck”.

Space Bridge

The bridge is from the G1 car­toons and was built by the constructicons:

The space bridge appears in sev­eral uni­verses. The exact prop­er­ties of the space bridge vary, but typ­i­cally they serve as a more con­ve­nient means of mov­ing Trans­form­ers from one planet to another than the tra­di­tional means of space travel. [e.g. Cyber­ton to earth]

Scans after the break…
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The final issue of the Defi­ance comic, a pre­quel to the new movie — bridg­ing the gap between the two, has hit Amer­i­can news stands. The issue goes into some depth about the ori­gins of The Fallen, the power of the AllSpark, how to restore that power and the first cybertro­n­i­ans cre­ated using the AllSpark. Con­tinue read­ing if you are open to the plot spoilers…

As sum­marised by Seibertron:

The Fallen and his “broth­ers” were born on a ter­res­trial world where the Allspark was located. They learned that the ener­gies of the Allspark were lim­ited, and could only be restored through the destruc­tion of a sun. In order to help them, the Allspark cre­ated work­ers who would go out and search for suns that would help to fuel the Allspark. These work­ers were the first Cybertro­n­i­ans. (Among which is Jetfire.)

The Fallen decides he wants the power of the Allspark for him­self, but was trapped in his sar­coph­a­gus (the ancient relic dis­cov­ered by the Trans­form­ers in Defi­ance #1), where he is to remain until the sun har­vester is located and reac­ti­vated once more. [We’ve seen Dev­as­ta­tor do some­thing like this in the col­or­ing book]

This story has spoil­ers, if you hadn’t already guessed. Michael Bay has been speak­ing to MTV about Trans­form­ers 2 and reveals a character’s death. Spoiler after the break…

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SPOILERS ARE IN THIS POST. Post­ing scans of kids col­or­ing books doesn’t seem like a suit­able past time, so I don’t intend to do it too often. But today there are some scans of the new Revenge of the Fallen col­or­ing book that have hit the inter­web. Within it there are the usual robots that can be col­ored in but, more inter­est­ingly, a much sim­pli­fied sto­ry­line for the sequel — includ­ing the pre­sumed finale.

Spoil­ers after the break…
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The lat­est Toy­fare mag­a­zine has some juicy gos­sip bits about Trans­form­ers 2, pri­mar­ily that Dev­as­ta­tor will be up to 120 foot tall and that The Fallen is one of the orig­i­nal 13 Trans­form­ers, the one that went bad — play­ing on the apos­tles theology.

Tim For­mas sur­mised the article:

- Images of ROTF toys for Leader class Opti­mus Prime, Pre­view Bum­ble­bee, Pre­view Sound­wave, and the Voy­ager Class Starscream fig­ure.
– Lorenzo believes the time­frame of ROTF is about one year after Movie #1.
– When asked about the chal­lenge of cre­at­ing Dev­as­ta­tor on screen, Lorenzo men­tions that Bay had the chal­lenge in the first movie of hav­ing 30 foot robots. In the sec­ond movie, Bay has the chal­lenge of hav­ing a robot almost four times that. Expect Dev­as­ta­tor to be 100 to 120 feet tall in the movie.
– Archer said he couldn’t give away the plot point, but there’s a rea­son that Sound­wave is designed the way he is for the movie. Has­bro had a more basic toy need. So, the two were blended together.
– Toy launch date con­firmed as May 30th. A few weeks before, Bum­ble­bee and Sound­wave will be released.
– Char­ac­ters men­tioned in the ini­tial wave are “Side­swipe, Side­ways, Bull­dozer, Voy­ager and many oth­ers”. Promise of more off-screen char­ac­ters.
– Robot Heroes will have bet­ter artic­u­la­tion
– Bum­ble­bee hel­met has voice mixer
– Bum­ble­bee con­vert­ing pulse can­non
– Big ticket deluxe item for the year is still “top-secret“
– Grav­ity Bots are geared towards younger kids. Con­vert auto­mat­i­cally when you pick them up.
– A Megan Fox Human Alliance fig­ure is on Archer’s “wish list”.
– The Fallen’s ori­gin con­firmed: He is one of the orig­i­nal 13 Trans­form­ers. Lorenzo said to think of the 13 as “apos­tles”. The Fallen is the one who turns and is the rea­son Trans­form­ers split into Auto­bots and Decepticons.

To show the size of Dev­as­ta­tor to scale against Opti­mus (28ft tall) and humans Gauge001 cre­ated this:

EDIT: Images removed at the request of Para­mount Pictures

In a post to the LS2 forums, mem­ber -=boM=- spoke about his expe­ri­ences as an extra at White Sands, New Mex­ico in Trans­form­ers 2. To prove he was there he has also pro­vided a large col­lec­tion of set images that show Side­swipe, Skids, Bum­ble­bee, Iron­hide, Opti­mus, Jolt, Ratchet, Shia and Megan Fox on set, tanks, sol­diers, build­ing ruins, a camel, anti air­craft mis­sile vehi­cles, etc. — I have included these after the break and they come via TForm­ers, the report comes via TLAMB.

The fol­low­ing report con­tains spoil­ers, be warned:

“Can’t wait…i’m in it as an extra. I am a Navy Seal doing a bat­tle scene against the Decep­ti­cons. I filmed out at White Sands and on Hol­lo­mans flight line. Filmed for 4 days and had a blast. Tons of pics on my Facebook.”

[…]

I had to chase a bunch of vil­lagers out of the area because the Decep­ti­cons were attack­ing, then had to pro­tect Opti­mus Prime’s body. There were a shit­load of us out there.

The food and cater­ing was awe­some. A lot of down­time. Just like a deployment.

I did an inter­view for the DVD. We will see if that is on it too. The asked me a bunch of ques­tions about the mil­i­tary. The auto­bots are behind me on top of a sand dune. I did a GM plug. They liked that.

Micheal Bay loves the mil­i­tary. I got to speak with him very briefly. He gets so angry on set at the actors but doesn’t dare yell or demean the mil­i­tary. It was a trip. He said some­thing to me like do you want a job as a DA (Direc­tors Assis­tant), I said hell yeah. He was get­ting pissed at his DA. His DA was like trust me you dont want this job.

I have two closeup shots if they do decide to put them in the movie. One was walk­ing with the cam­era on the tracks going along with me but at a slower pace. The cam­era was right on the side of my face fol­low­ing me but at a slower rate. There were two oth­ers behind me. The other close up was while I was defend­ing from a cor­ner of a build­ing on one knee. The boom cam­era went from the ground to over head of us all. I was up front in the scene. The cam­era came up to my face then began to ascend over the area. It was pretty cool.

Another scene was Opti­mus get­ting dropped off by a chi­nook. I had to run up to the area then stop as Opti­mus was get­ting dropped.

Another was with Josh and Tyrese when they argue with The Pres­i­dent on the flight­line. I am in the background.

As much time as I spent film­ing (9–10 hours a day for 4 days) I hope I am seen at least once. Hell I’ll be happy to be on teh DVD.

One of the images also reveals Megan Fox and pos­si­bly Josh Duhamel sit­ting next to a fallen man in a pool of blood, he’s not in mil­i­tary dress and in other images looks like Shia.
TLAMB enter­tain the idea that Revenge of ‘The Fallen’ may per­tain to the fallen Opti­mus Prime, Re: ‘pro­tect Opti­mus Prime’s body’, although they con­clude that this is unlikely, ‘Revenge’ is not very Opti­mus like.

TFW2005 forum mem­ber streetfield1 was at the open­ing of the Trans­form­ers UK Toy Fair and has reported back with some juicy gos­sip. Beward, MOVIE SPOILERS below:

– Dev­as­ta­tor will be around about 2 feet tall and built like a gorilla.
– The Human Alliance Bum­ble­bee that we have been see­ing recently will be the first release in his range.
– No toys of the Fallen at present.
– There will be new Robot Repli­cas of Iron­hide, Ratchet and Starscream.
– More infor­ma­tion on the RPM — Robot Pow­ered Machines — line. The cars are “Hot Wheels style” and are mainly Auto­bots, with their robot modes embossed on the bot­tom. The race­track has tracks all over the place, and instead of the cen­tral “moun­tain” you some­times see on these tracks, you’ve got Dev­as­ta­tor!
– There will be a radio con­trolled Opti­mus Prime truck with Peter Cullen sound­clips.
– The tank mode Mega­tron toy (which ver­sion is not spec­i­fied) was on dis­play, although nobody was avail­able to com­ment on whether or not he is in the film.

Some footage, fea­tur­ing ani­mat­ics, was also shown. If you do not want to be spoiled, look away now!

- Dev­as­ta­tor is… dev­as­tat­ing! The mix­ing drum in his chest becomes a mas­sive tur­bine grinder. It cre­ates a tur­bine effect, suck­ing every­thing in Devastator’s path up, and spit­ting it out of his back.
– Wheelie is effec­tively con­firmed as a remote con­trolled car, in line with other rumors we have heard recently.
– Legions of Decep­ti­con drones, resem­bling Frenzy, will cause car­nage in the Witwicky house­hold.
– Sam fights for his life on top of a car against Pre­tender Alice.
– Cap­tain Lennox also gets to see some seri­ous action against the Decep­ti­cons, with full heli­copter backup.

As hinted by Nel­son on Michael Bay’s Shoot for the Edit blog, Empire and USA Today do indeed have the first offi­cial pic­tures from Trans­form­ers 2 along with some juicy scoops and rumor con­fir­ma­tions — SPOILERS herein: Dev­as­ta­tor con­firmed. Dev­as­ta­tor made up of mul­ti­ple robots con­firmed. Sound­wave con­firmed. Jet­fire crossover confirmed.

USA Today

Arti­cle 1: LaBoeuf, Fox Really under fire in Trans­form­ers 2

Juicy spoil­ers and plot synopsis…

This time, the story finds Sam and Mikaela under attack by the evil Decep­ti­cons because of some­thing Sam has learned about the ori­gins of the Trans­form­ers and their ancient his­tory on Earth.

To acquire this knowl­edge, the invad­ing Decep­ti­cons need to cap­ture Sam instead of kill him. Mean­while, the U.S. mil­i­tary and an inter­na­tional coali­tion has united with the good-guy Auto­bots to fight back the vil­lains’ attack.

Some of the most impor­tant new­com­ers are in the robot cast: Decep­ti­cons Sound­wave, a fear­some com­mu­ni­ca­tions expert, and Dev­as­ta­tor, whose arms and legs are built out of other Trans­form­ers. And on the Auto­bots’ side is Jet­fire, a vil­lain whose age and broken-down phys­i­cal­ity leads him to help the Auto­bots [see scratched out decep­ti­con logo on Jet­fire].

Arti­cle 2: ‘Trans­form­ers’ breaks out the big guns for sequel

The U.S. Depart­ment of Defense gave its offi­cial stamp of approval to the Michael Bay-directed film, not only allow­ing pro­duc­tion amid the pris­tine dunes of the Army’s New Mex­ico mis­sile range, but also let­ting film­mak­ers fol­low jets and fighter planes through the sky from nearby Hol­lo­man Air Force Base. More scenes were shot on the Navy’s air­craft car­rier USS John C. Sten­nis, and Marines fill the ranks of the strike team bat­tling the invad­ing Transformers.

Among the equip­ment the movie is using in this desert sequence alone: two A-10 Thun­der­bolt II “Warthog” tank-killing jets; six F-16 Fight­ing Fal­cons; 10 armored Humvees; the Army’s Golden Knights para­chute team; two Abrams tanks; two Bradley tanks; two missile-launcher vehi­cles; two armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers; and a quarter-mile of the mis­sile test­ing range, cleared of unex­ploded ord­nance and built into an Egypt­ian town and tem­ple. (Signs warn not to cross a perime­ter just over the gyp­sum dunes, because live bombs could be hid­den in the sand.)

The final bat­tle the mil­i­tary is help­ing Bay cre­ate is sup­posed to be an enor­mous fire­fight in Egypt, but much of it is being shot in the White Sands dunes in a town built over the roughly quarter-mile cleared span.

Empire

Spoil­ers from the Empire arti­cle pro­vided cour­tesy of Alien­bot:

- Bay and LaBeouf con­firm the Fallen is a sep­a­rate char­ac­ter.
– Egypt­ian hiero­glyph­ics …turn out to be depic­tions of Trans­form­ers who vis­ited Earth.
– Bay claims Mega­tron is not com­ing back and the tank is just a new toy.
– Around 40 robots.
– Bud­get is $200 mil­lion.
– Ramon Rodriguez is the one hold­ing on for dear life to a pole while cars are flung.
– Dev­as­ta­tor appears at the pyra­mid, he’s prob­a­bly 50 feet tall because that’s the height of the cam­era crane they used on location.

Note the hand injury in this image — prov­ing it has been worked into the movie.

Pos­si­ble Fallen images

With Fallen now cited as a sep­a­rate char­ac­ter in ‘Revenge of the Fallen’, it’s a good time to point out some mys­te­ri­ous shots found on Lin­ing up TV, which claims to have on set images of The Fallen. Behind an old pic­ture? Doesn’t seem to fit inline with the Egypt­ian plot arc we are see­ing, I’ll clas­sify as fake for now.