Things Blow Up Real Good in ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ Super Bowl Spot
Transformers and the Super Bowl are a match made in heaven. Is the NFL’s biggest night not, in its own way, the Michael Bay of televised sporting events? Massive budget, fetish for pyrotechnics, close-up shots of muscle-bound men glistening with hard-earned sweat, oodles of American patriotism, very few women, an overall roiling undercurrent of homoerotic tension — when the new TV spot for Transformers: The Last Knight runs on Sunday night during the big game, it’ll be difficult to tell where the football ends and the gigantic alien robot battles begin.
Paramount wanted to get a little jump on the publicity, and gassed audiences up for the next chapter in the ongoing saga of Optimus Prime and Bumblebee by debuting their Super Bowl spot this morning. The thirty-second clip (the airtime for which almost definitely cost more than your car and house combined) has lots of great ‘splosions: a mechanized mass blows up a road, a battle copter crashes to the ground in a fiery wreck, synchronized detonations send bodies sky-high in slow motion. In terms of plot (or ‘plot’), Optimus Prime appears to have betrayed his robot-in-disguise brethren, as he grabs the comparatively small Bumblebee and mashes his face into the hull of an alien spacecraft.
The subhead The Last Knight implies a few things. One, that there should be medieval-style swordplay at some point. Two, that this film should have some sense of finality, though it’s already been confirmed that we can look forward to plenty more Transformers sequels in the near future. And three, that Michael Bay wants us to be reminded of The Dark Knight when we decide which movie to buy tickets to on June 23.