Twenty years ago, 'Transformers' - the comic book, toys and animated TV series - dominated children's lives. Well, boys at least. Girls had to make do with My Little Pony and Rainbowbrite - sheesh.
The highwater mark for Transformers fans was the 1986 animated movie. As well as traumatising millions of young kids by killing off Autobot leader Optimus Prime, the film also boasted the last ever performance by Orson Welles. Strange that one of the most revered actors and directors in film history should have ended his 50-year career providing the voice for the planet-devouring Unicron.
Not quite in the same league as Welles, but respected in some circles - by those that like their popcorn portions big and their on-screen destruction bigger - is Michael Bay. Bad Boys and Bad Boys II, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, The Island - his films are always big but never clever. So who better to make a rip-roaring action flick about big metal guys hitting each other.
Before we continue, click below for a taste of Michael Bay's Transformers.
Screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci have jazzed up the plot a bit, with a prologue set in the 1800s that sees an explorer in the Arctic falling down a crevasse and finding himself face-to-face with Decepticon head honcho Megatron. What he's doing there, Lord knows, but presumably he doesn't transform himself into anything designed by General Motors.
Megatron, though trapped in the ice, knows the whereabouts of something (or somewhere) called AllSpark, which is basically the robots' version of the afterlife. He laser-etches a map of how to find AllSpark onto the glasses of the explorer, who then escapes. Come 2007, and the spectacles are now owned by the explorer's descendent, our hero Sam Witwicky.
Witwicky is played by Shia LaBeouf, a 20-year old actor who achieved fame in the TV sitcom 'Even Stevens'. Having subsequently played supporting roles in big Hollywood movies like Dumb And Dumberer, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and I, Robot, Transformers represents his chance to - as he put it to 'Ain'tItCool.com' - "do a Lord Of The Rings".
He's also done a lot of work on smaller, indie movies, including Bobby, directed by Emilio Estevez. Going from a small scale film to a Michael Bay action apocalypse was quite a shock. "It's fucking painful," he candidly told 'About.com'. "To go from Emilio Estevez to Michael Bay is like... hanging out drinking Pina Coladas with Jesus and then getting smacked in the face and thrown in the devil's shit-pile and having to make a movie. I swear to God."
Of all the newly revamped Transformers, it's Megatron that's getting robo-geeks and military hardware enthusiasts hot under the collar. In the 1980s, the Decepticon tyrant transformed into a big gun, which was, frankly, a bit crap. In the movie, his disguise is the new F22 jet fighter, known as the Raptor.
A "stealth air superiority fighter" capable of carrying a nuclear payload, its main advantage over its forerunners is its use of VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) technology. Like our own Harrier jump-jet, it can stop in mid flight and hover, meaning it can perform all sorts of aeronautical feats. And don't worry about the sort of dodgy CGI that dogged Stealth. The US government, always happy to help out a gung-ho patriot like Bay (recruitment into the armed forces always goes up after one of his films), loaned him a real one.
"The fact that it's a Raptor, a plane that nobody's seen before, that the military is giving us..." raved LaBeouf, "That nobody has filmed or seen. I mean, 'CNN' has not seen this plane and we're filming it. It's cool. It gives it that edgy shit. People have seen guns before, but to make Megatron something that nobody's ever seen and make it an edgy presence. It modernizes it and makes it dangerous again."
Transformers dangerous? We'd laugh, except the trailer does look kind of cool. On his official website, Bay sets out his stall. "This [trailer] just makes a statement. It's hard edged to show we are not a silly 'toy' movie. We show just hints of robots - and almost none of our epic shots are in this teaser, but the movie just looks big. I had a room full of 20 Transformers adult geeks, and they all applauded at the end."
And if that's not a gauge of good taste, we don't know what is. As the song says, "Transformers - more than meets the eye."
