one of the storylines of the newest Transformers movie is stranger than the first preview implied

Seems that the young hero woman trope isn't used up yet, and this latest of the Transformers movie is another heroine to inspire young women.

I think it's a bit strange myself to use the Transformers to get the girls of the world enthused to be robot sidekicks, but hey, Star Wars is pretty much going in that direction. Jen and Rey, you know?

So - the story in Entertainment Weekly is:

Anthony Hopkins is portraying Sir Edmund Burton, an astronomer who — with the help of the Transformer Hot Rod — has tracked these long-forgotten connections between the robots and the humans to another scholar, our movie's heroine who has no idea she harbors a genetic secret that could destroy (or save) the world, and Hot Rod has secretly been serving as her father’s 1963 Citroën DS.

It’s a rickety old thing, but she can’t part with it because she adores it,” Haddock says of the vintage vehicle. “This car has actually been put there to watch her and feedback information to Anthony Hopkins’s character about what she’s up to

When the 1986 animated Transformers movie * opened, it shocked young fans by killing off Optimus Prime and nearly every other beloved hero and villain from the series. That cleared the way for a new wave of characters — and Hasbro toys, the real motive for the pop culture crime — but for many kids, it was the end of their fandom.

It was also a bit past the peak of the Transformers popularity, and the toys needed a remake for future sales it was thought. They didn't recover though, not to the early 80s popularity, not even the highly advanced (in comparison to the original)  Transformers Beast Wars cartoon imagery could pull that off.

Hot Rod was one of the newcomers, an Autobot soldier who was granted the Matrix of Leadership to become the new good-guy commander under the title Rodimus Prime.

How'd it all start? The primary concept of the Transformers is that the heroic Optimus Prime, the villainous Megatron, and their finest soldiers crash land on pre-historic Earth in the Ark and the Nemesis before awakening in 1983, Cybertron hurtling through the Neutral zone as an effect of the war. The Marvel comic was originally part of the main Marvel Universe, with appearances from Spider-Man and Nick Fury,

* The Movie also featured guest voices from Leonard Nimoy as Galvatron, Scatman Crothers as Jazz, Casey Kasem as Cliffjumper, Orson Welles as Unicron, Judd Nelson as Hot Rod, and Eric Idle as the leader of the Junkions

http://ew.com/movies/2017/04/21/transformers-last-knight-hot-rod-first-look/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers




Mark Wahlberg returns as Cade Yeager, who gets a visit from Cogman, the robotic butler with anger issues serving Hopkins’ Sir Edmund Burton. Yeager teams up with the English lord and Laura Haddock’s Viviane Wembly, an Oxford professor


http://ew.com/movies/2017/05/17/transformers-the-last-knight-trailer-international/?xid=email-email-ewmovies-20170517PM-tout5