The first trailer for Transformers: Dark of the Moon has hit the Internet in advance of its premiere in front of Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader this weekend; you can watch it below or over at Apple.com (opens in new tab). it's the first look that we've gotten at the next installment in Michael Bay's enormous franchise, which spent seemingly all of the last year shooting in Chicago, Washington D.C. and elsewhere. As you'll see in the trailer, though, the focus here is almost entirely on outer space.
Take a look at the first Transformers: Dark of the Moon trailer below or in HD on Apple (opens in new tab) and we'll discuss afterwards.
As you can tell they're going for a bit of a historical bent with this one, starting with the historic moon landing in 1969 in a way that could convince you this a sequel to Apollo 13 instead of a Transformers movie. But wait! What's that they found on the lunar surface? What has Neil Armstrong spied from behind his protective shield? Transformers technology, that's what! For all the ballsy moves Michael Bay has made in the past, connecting his robots in disguise to actual American history may be the craziest of all. Did Neil Armstrong sign off on this? Is Neil Armstrong going to be revealed as having been an Autobot all these years? I admit, these are not questions i expected to be asking when I first clicked on that trailer.
You're probably wondering who the Transformer at the end of the trailer is. He's new, we haven't seen him in any of the movies before. The ship he's in is probably the Ark, the ship which brought the Autobots to Earth and after a crash, held them in suspended animation before reviving them. No one seems entirely sure exactly who the specific bot is at the end. He looks a little like Unicron, but he's too small. Some think he may be Magnus. But the most common theory right now is that he's a transformer named Alpha Trion, one of the original 13 transformers. He's an ancient, ancient bot with a link to Optimus. For now though, it's all guesswork.
We'll update this space as we find more information. Until we know more, here's a side-by-side of the robot from the trailer and Alpha Trion:
Get high-res screencaps from the first Transformers: Dark of the Moon trailer right here.
