UPDATED – here’s the Transformers trailer. Now available in lots-o-links!

The French English multi-formatted version of the new F***ING AWESOME (©2006, Michael Bay) teaser for next year’s Transformers movie can now be viewed at Yahoo’s French UK MovieBox site. There are tiny and full-screen all kinds of file and format versions to choose from. Click the picture above or here to watch.

(UPDATED: now that the clip is in English, I’d like to ask: does that Army personnel guy actually say “Have your crew step out or we will kill you”? They can’t actually talk like that, right?)

Michael Bay makes very good trailers. Go back and watch The Island trailer if you’d like; it’s pretty cool – and very similar to Transformers in terms of pacing, edits, etc. As a director, Bay absolutely has the skills to blow stuff up very cleverly and this Transformers clip does not disappoint that way. We get good glimpses of the robots transforming and looking scary, etc.

But the action beats in this teaser are edited so as to be pretty much incomprehensible. That’s forgivable for a teaser – but we know that the entire movie is going to look exactly like that. The cuts won’t let up and the swirling camera will never stop. Jeff Wells posted a brief story the other day about how he lied to Jerry Bruckheimer in 1998 about liking Armageddon. Wells quotes Todd McCarthy from Variety who referred to the pace of that movie as being like “a machine gun locked in the firing position.”

That’s not a compliment. Again, it’s okay for teasers to look like this and feel like this – that’s a good thing. When the entire movie is cut like a teaser, that’s not a good thing at all.

And I think that there’s also a good reason that we don’t hear any of the Transformers speak in this clip yet – because the studio really needs to hook the interest of the non-Geekformers before we hear one of them say something as ridiculous as “Perhaps I misjudged you. Proceed…on your way to oblivion.”

(Teaser found via Empire Online)