“Transformers One” stars Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Keegan-Michael Key, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura and director Josh Cooley (“Toy Story 4”) debuted a new trailer for the first feature-length animated “Transformers” movie in 38 years, along with three extended clips from the film.
As the title implies, the film follows the origin story of Orion Pax, a.k.a. Optimus Prime (voiced by Hemsworth), and D-16, a.k.a. Megatron (voiced by Henry), and their BFFs-to-enemies trajectory on the planet of Cybertron. Key plays B-127, an early version of Bumblebee, and Scarlett Johansson, who couldn’t attend the panel as she’s shooting the next “Jurassic” movie, voices another Transformer named Elita.
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Other cast who weren’t in attendance include: Laurence Fishburne, who voices Alpha Trion, Jon Hamm, who voices Steninel Prime, and the panel also revealed that Steve Buscemi is voicing Starscream.
The Footage: The panel opened with a montage of Optimus Prime and Megatron battling in all the different iterations of Transformers, from the 1980s cartoons to the live-action movies directed by Michael Bay, touting their rivalry as “one of the greatest in history,” before teasing “Transformers One” as a chance to see their relationship as friends before that rivalry began.
A brand new trailer premiered at the end of the panel that included a bunch of new footage from the film— much of which was also revealed in three extended clips from the movie.
The filmmakers then screened an extended clip from early in the film of the Icon 5000, which Cooley described as “basically the Olympics on Cybertron. Because we’re seeing Cybertron when everything’s going great, we want to really show what the society looks like, like, what’s fun on this planet.” The sequence involved Orion and D-16— who cannot transformer and work instead as miners— into joining an extended race of Transformers using jet packs and their wiles to shock everyone watching.
A second clip revealed a new piece of lore in “Transformers One”: the transformation cogs that an entire generation of robots —including Orion and D-16 —are missing. In the clip, one of the old Primes, Alpha Trion (Fishburne), bestows Orion, D-16, B-127 and Elita with the cogs from other fallen Primes, which modify their bodies into the more familiar shapes we’ve come to know for their characters. As they flee the enemies, they all struggle to transform for the first time, hobbled by their bodies changing halfway.
The final clip introduced the predecessors to the Deceptions, the High Guard, lead by Starscream with his lieutenants Soundwave and Shockwave. The main foursome discover the High Guard has fallen from the guardians of Cybertron into a rabble of warriors fixated on, as Starscream says, “the strength of one bot over another.” By the end of the scene, D-16 successfully fights Starscream and takes over leadership of the High Guard.
Adorably, each clip was capped off with an animated tag of the characters welcoming the audience back to the panel, done in the style of the interstitial clips that played after commercial breaks during the original animated series.
What We Learned: All three of the actors played with the Transformers toys as kids. “We did our best to pull them apart and then try and reassemble them, which, which is quite challenging,” Hemsworth said. He mentioned that recently, they’d been given the toys and tasked with trying to transform them. “We all failed, actually. We couldn’t reassemble any of them.”
By way of explaining why he was attracted to the idea of playing the young Megatron, Henry said that when he was a kid, “For some reason, my parents only got me villain toys. And I would always make them a hero.”
Key wasby far the biggest fan among the actors. He led the audience in a sing-along of the theme song from the 1980s animated series, concluding with, “OK, so now we know who’s over 40.” He added that he modified his voice in his performance in the film to evoke the robotic monotone of the character Soundwave from the animated series.
“You’re really going to get to know the robots in a way that nothing has been able to do before,” di Bonaventura said, before mentioning that the movie has no human characters, causing some in the audience to start cheering. He noted that the film is set a whopping 3 billion years before the events of the core storyline.
