The commercials gave us our first look at the action in not one, but two, nerd-friendly summer blockbusters.
Paramount put ads for Transformers: Dark of the Moon Trailer and Captain America: The First Avenger in front of the millions of people watching the Super Bowl this weekend, likely spending a very significant amount of marketing cash in the process.
The Transformers looks very much like you might expect: explosions, giant robots with incredibly busy designs, and Shia LaBoeuf. In the thirty-second commercial, two Transformers – don’t ask me who – collide head-on and then transform in mid-air, giant metal tentacles tear up a city street, and a robot bird flies over some ruined buildings. There’s also a section where Optimus Prime beats up some Decepti-creeps, but that’s pretty much par for the course now.
The Captain America ad is a little easier to make out, and showed the first, faltering steps of the titular hero. In a story that will be familiar to most comic book nerds – myself included – the weedy Steve Rogers undergoes an experimental procedure to transform himself into a super-soldier. There’s also the very first test of the iconic shield, and a tantalizing, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull, pulling off a fake face to reveal his more sinister visage.
It’s hard to say much about the movies based on thirty seconds of footage, but the Transformers ad does make it look like it’s just going to be more of what we got from the previous films. That could be a good or bad thing, depending on how much you liked the first two movies. The Captain America movie is a bit more of an unknown quantity, but if nothing else, it will probably be worth watching just to see Hugo Weaving’s performance as a skull-faced Nazi megalomaniac.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon hits theaters on July 1st, and Captain America: The First Avenger follows up a few weeks later on July 22nd.
Source: Coming Soon and Bleeding Cool
