With a runtime of two and a half hours, a $200 million (or more) budget, and a total of 46 robots (as compared to the 14 in the first film), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a movie that makes no attempt to hide that its primary goal is to make everything from the first bigger, better, and cooler.

As for whether Transformers 2 actually manages to surpass the 2007 crowd-pleaser that came before it, I'm going to have to say, no. Without the novelty of the first, its cheesiness is a bit harder to swallow. Although its beefed-up robot cast does give us a number of visually stunning fights, the film's relatively simple storyline just doesn't merit its overly-long runtime. With characters already set up and the story one we have all heard before, lost is a fair amount of the first's intrigue and connection. But since we still know most of the characters at its center, its story about the human fight for survival can't help but connect with us humans in its audience, and its gigantic robots are just plain cool to watch, it is still a pretty good time.

As I said, the story of Transformers 2 is fairly simple. As the prologue show us, the Autobots and the Decepticons have been at war for a long time. As we learn, central to this war is their method of powering their life-giving "allspark" through the destruction of suns, the Autobots' commitment to never destroying a sun necessary for another life-form's survival, and the Decepticons' decision to defy that rule as it pertains to earth. And when the Decepticons' use the remaining piece of allspark to bring Megatron back to life and determine that Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) holds the key to the completion of their destructive plan, let's just say that Sam, his girlfriend Mikaela (Meagan Fox), his college roommate Leo, his nemesis-turned-ally Agent Simmons (John Turturro), Bumblebee, Optimus, and a handful of new Autobot friends are in for a world-traipsing fight to make sure that, in the end, the good guys are the ones still standing.

But although Transformers 2 is an action movie from beginning to end, what allows for it to potentially be more than just big fights, bigger explosions, and the biggest robots we've ever seen is that what that lies behind its action is relationship, and in most cases, relationship which speaks to not only a fictional world in which humans are not alone, but a real one too.

Framing the entire story are the Decepticons' and the Autobots' differing relationships with the human race. For the Decepticons, the human race is expendable, a tool for their own survival, and a barrier deserving of destruction. Although the Autobots could also gain from human destruction, to them, the human race is instead worth preserving, protecting, and even sacrificing themselves to save. The analogy isn't exact, but with the leader of the Decepticons named The Fallen, and Optimus sacrificing himself for Sam in both the last movie and this one, you could say that the Decepticons pretty much represent the warriors of Satan and the Autobots the army of God. Zoom in on perhaps the creepiest Decepticon to date who takes the form of the hottest girl of Sam's college class, and it's enough to make you take the reality of Satan's ever-present attacks on our souls a bit more seriously. But witness the many times various Autobots put their own lives on the line for Sam, and it's also enough to remind you how blessed we are not to be fighting Satan alone.

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