The script opens 1 million years before the dawn of man with the energon cube hurtling through space on it’s path towards Earth. A narrator tells us that the ravages of war destroyed Cybertron, a war raged between the legions who worship chaos and those who follow freedom. They battled for a supreme power, the Energon Cube. It’s origin unknown yet it bears the life-force that created the transformer race. They fought until their world was awash in death until the very ground swallowed whole their once mighty cities and the cube was lost to the limitless stars. Then by fortune or fate, its course was altered, drawn to a planet called Earth. They have searched for the cube across desserts of time, hoping to find it before the dark legions, but as fate would have it, they were already too late.
We are then in the artic circle in 1897 on a national Antarctic expedition and focus on a derelict sailing vessel trapped in ice. The crew works desperately to free the ship. The dogs bark, there is something in the ice. The captain, two men and the dogs go out over the artic shelf and look at whatever is buried under the ice. A huge rift opens, one of the dogs and the captain falls into a 30ft fissure. We pull back and see the captain standing on the palm of a giant steel hand, half in and half out of the ice. A mechanized face is embedded within the ice wall, expression frozen in a scream. The Captain wipes away ice to reveal symbol on the mechanoid – the Decepticon emblem. The captain takes a pick axe and stars chopping away at the ice to take a better look, activates something on the robot’s chasis and something happens.
Next we are in present day Qatar, the Middle East as two air force cv-22 ospreys skim the dunes. Piloting the two planes, we meet SERGEANT WILLIAM LENNOX US AIR FORCE COMBAT CONTROLLER, and ARMY CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER JORGE FIGUEROA “FIG”, Lennox and Fig arrive back at Soccent Operations Center and we meet the rest of the Army team there on the tarmac – SARGEANT FIRST CLASS DONNELLY (Irish-American), and STAFF SARGEANT EPPS (the Tyrese Gibson character). We also meet an Arab boy MAHFOUZ.
Inside the operations center, a bogey appears on radar. Two f-22’s go and intercept the bogey. The bogey, a massive MH-53 helicopter appears over the dunes. The f-22 gives the bogey a warning and then escorts it back to base. There seems to be a mistake because that chopper was shot down 3 months ago. Something is not right with the Soccent Watch Commander. There has got to be a mistake. At the loading bay, the bogey lets out a loud shriek, disables all the radar and computers, transforms into the Decepticon VORTEX and attacks the base! It vaporizes a row of c-17 cargo planes! All the planes hangars are destroyed in the blast! Vortex rips the roof off of the JOC JOINT OPERATIONS CENTER and attempts to hack into the cray computers and tries to download a file:
PROJECT: ICE MAN: ABOVE TOP SECRET: SECTION SEVEN ACCESS ONLY. We see the alien transformer code. A techie takes an axe and cuts the hard line; the cable explodes, cutting off Vortex’s connection. Pissed off Vortex obliterates everyone. The op-center explodes in a thousand directions. Vortex stomps down and crushes a vehicle King Kong style! Complete chaos at the base. Skorponok disengages from Vortex’s back and goes on the hunt for Lennox, Epps, Fig, Donnelly and the other soldiers!
And that is just the 1st 10 pages folks! Action packed! The rest of the script is just as tight. The 3rd act is wall to wall action! A Transformer fan’s dream!
Some other 1st act story details:
- After the blockbuster opening we meet SAM WITWICKY at Tranquility high school, the unfortunate yet adorable dork that he is, his love interest MIKALELA BARNES, her asshole boyfriend TRENT DEMARCO. We also meet Sam’s Chihuahua MOJO.
- Sam’s father RON picks him up after school and they meet up with a shady car dealer BOBBY BOLIVIA. Since Ron got 3 A’s, his dad got four grand to buy Sam a car. Sam ends up buying a 75 Camaro, which we by now all know is BUMBLEBEE. The Autobot emblem is on the steering wheel.
- Later we meet MAGGIE MARCONI, 28 and GLEN WHITTMAN (Michael Clarke Duncan) who work at a Washington think tank the Rand Corporation. Glen’s character is funny as **** in this.
- Maggie gets taken to the Pentagon by agents and gets recruited by JOHN KELLER, the secretary of defense (John Voight), since she is a signal analyst to make sense of the signal and shriek that hit Qatar.
- And in a super cool sequence towards the end of Act 1, SOUNDWAVE is aboard AIR FORCE ONE! A Decepticon aboard the same plane as the President!
For now that is all I’m gonna say. The script is definitely MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE.
