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.