The first had more soul, the second less so, but it was bigger and shinier. Excellent 1st 35 mins, then it was back to usual "Dumber Faster more intense" direction mantra.
Yeah I thought the 1st one seemed great and the second one seemed to be more of...wanting to show off some cool effects and explosions and what not. I'd take a good storyline over a movie with great effects and explosions any day.
I actually don't like most origin stories if I know where the character/s originate from. It's weird, I loved the first one, but I felt like I wanted the movie to hurry up and establish the 'Bot and 'Cons. The second already had everything establish, so no beating around the bush was done, and we were given giant robot fighting.
I like the new one; follows a lot of the sequel rules for being bigger and such. But I LOVED the first one - if they had charged twice as much for admission, I still felt it would have been worth it. It had more wonder, with the nods to past Spielberg pics like E.T. & Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
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"I'm not smart so much as I am not dumb." - Harlan Ellison
The 2nd felt dumber. I didn't like the moronic twins. The nutsack shot wasn't needed. The story was...wait...was there any story? The autobots from the original got almost 0 screen time which kind of sucked...the only thing I liked was Optimus kicking ass.