COURTESY OF Jaimie Trueblood
Shia LaBeouf has starred in all three "Transformers" movies.
Some conspiracy theorists say the 1969 moon landing was staged on one of Walt Disney's movie sets. And even if it really happened, other doubters say, the climactic moment of the space race was intended to 1) score Cold War propaganda points, 2) maintain funding for NASA or 3) distract from the Vietnam War.
But they couldn't possibly have known the real motive behind the flight of Apollo 11: that Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin were actually sent to investigate the 1961 moon crash of a Cybertronian spaceship, which was carrying technology crucial to the survival of the Autobots, who were then on the verge of losing their war against the Decepticons.
The whole thing will no doubt become crystal clear when "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" opens today. (Opening at 3-D and IMAX locations at 9 p.m.). The "Transformers" series so far has been close to a parody of what makes summer movies so silly - noisy, violent, based on a toy, and with machines that have had more pizzazz than the people - that putting a faux-historical spin on the narrative isn't the worst idea. Or at least the most absurd idea.
Despite the cold clang of the robots - which has meant the warm sound of ka-ching! for DreamWorks (unless something goes horribly wrong, "Dark of the Moon" will take the franchise well across the billion-dollar mark) - the project has offered no shortage of human drama. Shia LaBeouf, who has played Sam Witwicky since the series premiered in 2007, says he won't be back for a fourth go-round. Neither will director Michael Bay. And Megan Fox, who played LaBeouf's love interest, Mikaela, in 1 and 2, didn't even make it to No. 3: Her public comments about Bay acting like "Hitler" on the set of 2009's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" prompted executive producer Steven Spielberg to have her promptly fired.
Which would seem to put no end of pressure on Fox's replacement, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the English-born Victoria's Secret model, who has never made a movie.
Nervous? "Yeah!" she said, with a tone appropriate to a ridiculous question. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel under scrutiny or under pressure. But I think it comes when you accept something like this. I think everybody's waiting to see who the new girl on the block is, and 'Are you going to like me?' Some people will and some people won't, and there's really not much you can do about that. I've spent the last year trying to get my head around things, but as long as the people involved are happy with it, and I'm happy with it, that's good."
It's daunting for a 24-year-old newcomer like Huntington-Whiteley to step into a phenomenon like "Transformers." But it isn't all that much easier for a hardened vet like John Turturro, who returns for his third "Trannie" as the alien expert Agent Simmons, and who had a short explanation for his presence in the new film: "I did the other two."
"It's probably the last one I'll do," he added. "But I got to work with Fran (Frances McDormand) and (John) Malkovich, who are friends, so that was good. I had a bigger role in the second one. Now it's become something a little bit more than I thought it would be.
"Meaning it's like a whole other kind of movie," said Turturro, who is far better known for his own and others' independent films. "I just imagine, when I have to do the stuff with robots, that I'm playing with my kids.
"Other times," he said with a laugh, "I'm thinking about the adults who have to watch it, and try to put in a little something for them."
