Shia LaBeouf won’t be coming back to the Transformers franchise for the fourth installment, so director Michael Bay has had to seek out new human protagonists to interact with blue screens / rigs with dots on them that will later be digitally exchanged with giant robots. Mark Wahlberg has already been cast, and now he will be joined by Nicola Peltz and Brenton Thwaites.
You may or may not recognize Peltz. She was one of the leads in M. Night Shyamalan’s deliriously dumb The Last Airbender. Is coming to this series a step down or merely a lateral move for her? Thwaites is an Australian soap opera actor who’s recently started doing stuff in the US. He was in the Lifetime Channel remake of The Blue Lagoon, and will play a prince in Disney’s Maleficent (he certainly looks bland and white enough for the role).
Really, how good or bad they or Whalberg will be in the movie is immaterial. This is Transformers. The only question that concerns me is this: can any of them run and go “nononononononononNONONONONONONO” the way LaBeouf could? If not, the magic is truly lost.
Trans4mers is set to come out June 27th, 2014. Thanks to Slashfilm, who also provided the image, for the scoop.
