It'll be Jane Eyre with robots. Well, maybe not that human...

Of all the sci-fi/fantasy franchises currently in play, the one where the 'human element' is pretty much the last thing on the mind of its core audience, must be Michael Bay's Transformers movies.

Yet, whilst promoting Wall Street sequel Money Never Sleeps at Canne, franchise mainstay Shia LaBeouf - due on the set of Transformers 3 next week - has promised a return to the human element in the third instalment of the robot-on-robot action fests.

Speaking of Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen (2008), the actor said: "We got lost. We tried to get bigger. It’s what happens to sequels. It’s like, how do you top the first one? You’ve got to go bigger. [Michael Bay] went so big that it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie… You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a bunch of robots fighting each other."

And...?

The actor also promised more human death in the second sequel: "This time, they’re targeting humans...It’s going to be the craziest action movie ever made, or we failed.”

It's a tough proposition - a bid to cut the VFX budget? A Hollywood requirement to 'go dark/er'? The entire franchise sprang from millions of kids splatting the shape-shifting robots into each other on their bedroom floors in the 1980s, and the less-than-cerebral cartoons that followed, so quite what potential Transformers 3 has to tug the heartstrings remains to be seen. It's certainly not what Bay is known for.

Filmonic

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