With the recent announcement that Transformers: The Last Knight would be hitting theaters two days earlier — moving from Friday, June 23 to Wednesday, June 21 — fans are closer than ever to seeing their favorite Autobots (and humans) throw down against a reluctantly evil Optimus Prime. This is the summer of heel turns by beloved franchise characters; first we saw Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto betray his family in The Fate of the Furious, and now we’re counting down the days until Optimus Prime stabs Bumblebee in the face. Rough summer for heroes, it would seem.
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.
When it comes to making “true story” movies, there’s always a certain sense of pressure on everyone involved to be as true to the real events as the movie allows. That’s what Mark Wahlberg and co. were most concerned with when it came to making Patriots Day, but it appears their attempt to “do it right” still left some people in the dust. Now, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow Katherine Russell says that the movie’s portrayal of her is unjust and “unfair.”
When making a movie about any real historical tragedy, especially if it’s recent, there’s an onus on the people behind the project to be true to the material. No one in Hollywood, save for maybe the Afflecks, loves Boston more than Mark Wahlberg, and he’s said before that his prime concern with making Patriots Day, a drama about the Boston Marathon bombings, is “getting it right.” A new trailer before this week’s release of the film hammers that point home even further, with footage from the movie intercut with statements from the real people who were there that day.