Movie Chronicles

Revenge of the Fallen Standee April 16th, 2009

MTV have the skinny on another Trans­form­ers exclu­sive, this time it’s the first Revenge of the Fallen standee, show­ing Opti­mus Prime and Bum­ble­bee step­ping out of the scene, pre­pared to fight, with Megan and Shia run­ning fran­ti­cally away from a pyra­mid behind them.

There will also be new Trans­form­ers things to shout about next Tues­day. What form that will take is anyone’s guess.

Michael Bay discusses his favorite robots April 16th, 2009

MTV have released the next part of their ongo­ing Michael bay inter­view, this one sees the Trans­form­ers direc­tor talk­ing about his favorite robots, call­ing The Fallen an ulti­mate bad boy and claim­ing that the Dev­as­ta­tor spe­cial effects are ten-fold more com­pli­cated than any­thing Lucas’ com­pany has ever done. I’m still not sold on the Skids/Mudflaps twins.

“The Fallen is the ulti­mate bad boy,” Bay explained of the mys­te­ri­ous evil­doer glimpsed briefly in the trailer for the June 24 film, whose venge­ful mis­sion gives the film’s title its dou­ble mean­ing. “He goes way back in the Trans­former world. He’s one of the first Transformers.”

“The twins are quite fun,” Bay said of the comedy-relief duo, remem­ber­ing his inspi­ra­tion for includ­ing them. “I just kept think­ing, ‘What if we have two dumb Trans­form­ers that are young and dumb?’ … They are just irrev­er­ent, dumb Transformers.”

“[Dev­as­ta­tor is] the most com­pli­cated model that George Lucas’ com­pany has done in 30 years,” Bay mar­veled. “In all the 30 years of [Indus­trial Light and Magic] mak­ing movies, it’s the most com­pli­cated dig­i­tal model — and it’s ten­fold in terms of the most com­pli­cated. It’s taken a long time to do.

“There’s a lot of great new char­ac­ters in this movie — some funny ones, some devi­ous ones, there are some lit­tle teeny ones that are a lit­tle irrev­er­ent,” Bay said of a robot group that includes such new­bies as the four-legged Rav­age, sleek Side­swipe and oth­ers. “You know what is bet­ter in this movie? The act­ing of the robots. It’s just evolved from the last one, and in terms of the ani­ma­tion we are able to put these robots’ [emo­tions] in.”

Such act­ing inno­va­tions have also helped a big break­out robot from the orig­i­nal “Trans­form­ers” film, who Bay insisted remains his favorite Trans­former of the group. “Bum­ble­bee is great in this movie,” he promised.

Green Lantern filming in Sydney, shooting begins in November April 16th, 2009

Update: Ear­lier today we men­tioned the con­firmed Syd­ney film­ing loca­tion for the Green Lantern movie adap­ta­tion. THR have divulged a lit­tle more infor­ma­tion, reveal­ing that the project will have an esti­mated $150m budget.

We’d pre­vi­ously com­mented on the Aus­tralian film­ing loca­tion and scout­ing reports in and around Syd­ney and New South Wales, but today The Aus­tralian con­firms the spe­cific Syd­ney locale. Shoot­ing is expected to begin in Novem­ber and is expected to take six to nine months, this start date is slightly later than the pre­vi­ously reported mid-September. Pre-production shall begin in July.

THE big-budget movie adap­ta­tion of comic super­hero Green Lantern will be filmed in Syd­ney, with pro­duc­tion to begin later this year.

The movie, pro­duced by DC Comics and Warner Broth­ers, will be directed by Mar­tin Camp­bell, the man behind the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale.

It is expected to cre­ate around 500 jobs in NSW with pre-production to start in July and film­ing to begin in Novem­ber at Sydney’s Fox Studios.

The film­ing is expected to take six to nine months.

“Bring­ing Green Lantern to NSW is a major coup,” Pre­mier Nathan Rees said when mak­ing the announce­ment at Fox Stu­dios today.

“Films such as this invest heav­ily in the local econ­omy and the flow-on effects for local ser­vices such as trans­port, con­struc­tion and the hotel industry.”

Transformers 2 Video Game — site live, screenshots, details and concepts April 15th, 2009

The offi­cial Trans­form­ers 2 video game site has launched today, con­tain­ing new screen­shots, the video game trailer we have pre­vi­ously seen and an inter­est­ing set of con­cept art for the game. Mean­while Kotaku have posted some addi­tional screen­shots of the PS3/360Wii and Nin­tendo DS ver­sions of the game.

Video game con­cept art

One area found on the new site that is com­pletely new is a small gallery of con­cept art images. They show an inner city con­struc­tion site being looked upon by Bum­ble­bee and Bum­ble­bee fight­ing the huge two wheeled exca­va­tor con­struc­ti­con in Shang­hai. There is also an inter­est­ing image show­ing a beam of light com­ing down from the sky — the pic­ture is named ‘har­vester’ — per­haps the Sun har­vester men­tioned in Defi­ance #4 and pos­si­bly seen in the kids col­or­ing book.

Details about the game

Kotaku go into some depth about the game’s fea­tures, which I have surmised:

- Closely fol­lows plot of movie
– No lin­ear story, cen­tral hub from there you select mis­sions to play
– Can play as Auto­bot or Decep­ti­con and can choose your Trans­former
– Mis­sions are timed and com­plet­ing them quickly can earn you Trans­former upgrades
– You can climb up the sides of build­ings
– The demo showed that Side­ways (Audi R8) is a sniper robot, com­plete with rifle
– One but­ton quick trans­for­ma­tions are still in
– Each Trans­former has a spe­cial abil­ity when trans­formed
– Can attack an enemy by div­ing at them and trans­form­ing next to them
– Starscream has a hover abil­ity
– Lame chauf­feur­ing Shia mission

Video Game Screenshots

A selec­tion of the more inter­est­ing screen­shots as posted on Kotaku. Show­ing Starscream in fly­ing bat­tle above an air­craft car­rier, Bum­ble­bee attack­ing a pur­ple char­ac­ter and Opti­mus Prime doing bat­tle on the Wii:

Wall­pa­pers

1600x1280 res­o­lu­tion wall­pa­per downloads:

Screen­shots of the site

Read the rest of this entry »

New Trailer with Wolverine (May 1st), Bay says Spielberg says TF2 is awesome April 15th, 2009

Michael Bay recently screened his cut of Trans­form­ers 2, “Revenge of the Fallen” to exec­u­tive pro­ducer Steven Spiel­berg in an empty Sony the­ater. He has reported back via his Shoot for the Edit forums stat­ing that Speil­berg called it “Awe­some” and pos­si­bly Bay’s best. Work on a new trailer has just fin­ished and it is set to appear before the new Wolver­ine movie, due for release on May 1st in the US.

Steven Spiel­berg sat next to me in a big 100 per­son the­ater at Sony today. There were 98 empty seats. The lights came up after we just watched my cut of Revenge of the Fallen. He turned to me and said “It’s awe­some”. He felt this movie was bet­ter than the first — and prob­a­bly my best, who knows — at this point in a movie you start to lose your objec­tiv­ity. I just hope the fans like it. I’m going to start putting it in front of audi­ences in a few weeks — no you are not invited, yet.

We have 60 days left. Let me tell you it will be a race to fin­ish. It’s 12 at night and we are still work­ing here in the edit room. Every­one at ILM and DD are killing them­selves right now, they are doing a stel­lar job on the effects. We also just fin­ished our trailer which is com­ing out with Wolver­ine. Talk to you soon.

Michael

Transformers 2 Adaptation comics, May 20th April 15th, 2009

An adap­ta­tion of Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen is being cre­ated in comic for­mat, with issues released weekly. The first of four is set to appear on May 20th for ~$3.99. Things from Another World have the comic avail­able for pre-order and offers up some details and art­work from the comic (pos­si­bly one of the cov­ers). The comics shall pre­sum­ably delve into the movie’s sto­ry­line, no doubt spoil­ing the entire plot before the movie is released.

By: Simon Fur­man, Jon-Davis Hunt, Josh Nizzi, Photo
Type: Comics
Gen­res: Science-Fiction
Pub­lisher: IDW Pub­lish­ing
Pub. Date: May 20, 2009
Avail­abil­ity: Pre-Order
UPC: 82771400064100111

The offi­cial adap­ta­tion of Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen picks up directly where the Des­tiny movie pre­quels leave off with this weekly series-the TRANSFORMERS’ bru­tal war con­tin­ues on Earth as the noble AUTOBOTS work with their human allies to end the threat of the treach­er­ous DECEPTICONS.

Transformers 2 clocks in at 147 mins April 13th, 2009

Early in Feb­ru­ary Michael Bay reported that his cur­rent Revenge of the Fallen edit sat some­where over the two hour mark. Bay has since updated this fig­ure, stat­ing that the new movie shall be four min­utes longer than the orig­i­nal and that this run time will not be changed. The orig­i­nal lasts 143 min­utes which puts Trans­form­ers 2 at 147 min­utes in total:

“It’s four min­utes longer than the last one. […] So, go fig­ure it out.”

Bay goes on to elaborate,

“I don’t ever talk (to exec­u­tives) about run times. […] Stu­dios always ask, ‘What’s the run time?’ And I’m like ‘If you enjoy the movie, do you care?’”

Mixmaster Toy pictures in robot mode April 13th, 2009

We’ve pre­vi­ously seen the new Mix­mas­ter in Alt Mode and very small in Robot Mode. Now we have the final piece of the puz­zle — Mix­mas­ter in his glo­ri­ous robot mode cour­tesy of TF08:

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