As you might have surmised from the crazy amount of business the live-action Transformers movie did this summer, there's a sequel in the works.
Yes, Michael Bay is directing it again, so at least the action will be insanely bombastic again.
The two scriptwriters, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, are also returning, but The Hollywood Reporter says that a third scribe is being added, one Ehren Kruger, writer of The Ring.
This means the guys who thought a sound military tactical decision when dealing with giant death robots from space would be "let's run this thing they really want right smack dab into a heavily populated area" are getting writing help from the guy who made many of us feel old because VHS tapes can now be considered creepy and mysteriously old-timey.
Not sure how to take the news, really. On one hand, they've got the fans interests at heart, because if they'd gone the way they'd originally planned, that jittery little weirdo CD-player thing would have been Soundwave, and that just wouldn't have been right, so they changed it to Frenzy. On the other hand, Bumblebee urinated on John Turturro, who had to work really hard at eating the scenery to make his dialog funny. That was very much not right.
Perhaps even more concerning is the reason Kruger is being brought in is because Orci and Kurtzman are too busy writing the screenplay for the all-new, all-young, all-fresh, all funky "Star Trek" movie, in which Matt Damon is said to be considered too old to play Captain James T. Kirk. "Star Trek" is known as being a relatively high-concept (if low-budget) series, so the guys who wrote a robot peeing on John Turturro may not seem like the best fit for lofty philosophical debates. You have to think that Captain Kirk wouldn't steal dilithium crystals from the heavily armed and violent Klingons and then run into a crowded market, right?
This may be a bit unfair, though. Most big sci-fi/comic-book adaptations like this have second chapters that blow away the first, once all of the cumbersome origin exposition is out of the way, so maybe they'll kick it up a few notches. Spider-Man 2 > Spider-Man, X2 > X-Men, etc. We need not get into how the third installments start to stumble. It's possible we'll get a heck of a lot more giant robot action in Transformers 2: Electric Boogaloo, but I think I can speak for most everyone when I plead for a bit more than primer paint on these guys, so we can tell them apart during the big shaky-cam fighty hoe-down at the end.
