Check out the trailer for Transformers in Premiere's Trailer Stash.

After blowing up everything from a Miami freeway to a meteorite, Bay is turning his explosive energies to a popular 1980s Hasbro toy. "You look at some of the highest-grossing movies, aliens are so popular," the director says of this $100 million­plus production about robots from the planet Cybertron that shape-shift into vehicles, aircraft, and the like. "We all like to believe there's something else out there." LaBeouf stars as a teen who buys his first car, a Camaro, only to learn that it's a Transformer named Bumblebee. This plunges him into the center of a war between the good Autobots and the evil Decepticons, who are battling to gain control of the life source All-Spark. The baffled U.S. military (including commanders Duhamel and Gibson) get out the big guns to defend against the space invaders. Peter Cullen, who voiced Autobot leader Optimus Prime in the original cartoon, will reprise his role, and ILM is addressing the bulk of the transformations with its state-of-the-art CGI. But that doesn't mean that LaBeouf never saw real robots. "Before we started, I went to [NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory]," he says. "I wanted to see for real what they looked like and if I connected."