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Transformers are back for revenge
Published online on Monday, Jun. 22, 2009
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BEVERLY HILLS - Creating a sequel to the hit-movie "Transformers" was challenging for director Michael Bay, whose "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" opens Wednesday.
The main problem was how to lure back the moviegoers who made the first film a $700 million international hit.
The original "Transformers" movie had a natural lure: the discovery of seeing the cartoon characters brought to life in a live-action production. With that gone, Bay and the writers needed to come up with a way to make the sequel equally, or more, entertaining for the fans who saw the first mega battles between the Autobots and the Decepticons.
"Transformers" writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the guys who penned the "Star Trek" script, returned to tackle the sequel script.
Kurtzman says the key was to go back to the history of the Transformers.
"Looking back at the comics and cartoons, we see that they have been on Earth for a long time," Kurtzman says. The movie goes to 17,000 B.C. to establish the threat that faces the current-day humans and robots.
That story line led to the problem of which Transformers to include. Optimus Prime and the ancient Decepticon known as The Fallen are surrounded by crowds of robots. But even that number only scratches the surface of the Autobots and Decepticons.
"The problem is there are so many fans and so many different characters they want," says producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. The best option was to add more Transformers and hope they appease most of the loyal fans.
Additional Transformers multiplied the technology problems for the people at Industrial Light and Magic who created the Autobots and Decepticons through banks of computers.
Each Transformer has thousands of moving parts. Optimus Prime has as many as 10,000 moving pieces while Devastator features 80,000 pieces that shift and move with each transformation. There's one sequence on top of a pyramid that is the largest simulation the company has ever done.
ILM visual effects supervisor Scott Farrer explains there was so much computer work going on at one point, the system exploded. "There were about 40-plus new characters and part of the film is in IMAX, which means higher resolution, bigger movie, higher complexity on every level," Farrer says. "This movie was like upping the game on every level."
The hurdles didn't end there for Bay.
Star Shia LaBeouf crashed his truck in the middle of filming. He injured his hand so much that surgery was required.
"We were very lucky because we had shot a lot of the movie," Bay says.
For a few days, Bay filmed scenes that did not include LaBeouf. When his star finally returned to work, Bay had a cast made out of Kevlar, the material often used in bulletproof vests, to protect LaBeouf's fingers.
The injury ended up being a minor inconvenience - especially compared to the huge task that Bay and company faced before filming started.
TV and movie critic Rick Bentley can be reached at rbentley@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6355. Read his blog at fresnobeehive.com.
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