Transformers Movie Thread Mk II

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Koshernova
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Except for Star "The Chin" Scream...

Anyway, I saw the film. Good fun, but the TFs needed more screentime, and hell the Decepticons needed BASIC PERSONALITIES beyond grunting about...
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Nagi
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Honestly, I think one of Bay's biggest mistakes with the Decepticons in the movie was giving them a "native language" to speak in. Oh sure, it offered more of that "realism" thing he wanted in his sentient shapeshifting giant robot alien fighting movie ( :roll: ), but at the same time without the Decepticons speaking in a language whose words and intonations we could understand, they just came off as faceless foreign bad guys instead of getting the sort of basic impressions of character that even Jazz and his whopping two lines of dialogue received (of course, given that half the movie is about how AWESOME the US military is, showing the enemy as a dehumanized, voiceless monster probably wasn't so unintentional...).

Also, was it me, or did that Cybertronian native language seem too...organic? Sounded a bit too Orcish or Klingon for my tastes; I always figured a native language for a race of self-aware giant robots would sound a bit more like the way Soundwave speaks, with just straight tones replacing words. Blackout sounded alright in that regard, but the others sounded too organic to me.
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Doven
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I thougth it was one of the best moives I've ever seen the first fight between Bubblebee and Barricade made my jaw drop, and Megan Fox was damn sexy too.
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Dr.G
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I was totally and completly pleased with the job they did. It was funny, serious and freaking action packed. The only gripe I had was that Optimus's mouth cover wasn't always up and I got over that pretty quick.
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mutantshark
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My god. I'm sorry... I just hoped hoped hoped Bay was gonna do something interesting with this. Instead we just get CGI battle-porn that contributes nothing to any meaningful narrative (sabot rounds, A-10s, 105mm-firing gunships - the airforce what? oh the army oh ok sector 7 cool OK...what? go oh ok the hoover dam... so.. yeah what?) , along with depth of characterisation and plot that... well ok there wasn't any. I'm not even a Bay-basher - I actually quite liked Bad Boys - as a fan I just expected more from the film of a cartoon of a toy - was that too much to ask? (I think maybe it was)
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Gadget
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At least it's better than G-Saviour. If I go and see a Micheal Bay movie, I usually leave my brains at the ticket counter. I'll pick it up after the movie finish.

And every newspaper and magazine review said the same thing. If it's Micheal Bay, there'll be lost of explosion, and little sense. We were warned.

Nitpick on some plot.

1.I would not have sent the A-10 to save the special forces. They are too slow. I get the F-16 in.

2. I'll fire the AGM-65 first. Rule of enguagement is that the winner is the one who shoot first. It's pretty risky if I need to do a second pass.

3. Did the Specter Gunship broke the sound barrier? It was kinda fast to get into the combat zone.

4. Using the credit card to place a phone call remines me of Hearbreak Ridge with Clint Eastwood.

My favriote line," Autobots...Hide."
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ok, TF animated. I Will probobly never watch it. Optimus and that motorbike look like crap. Bumblebee and arcee look good. the dinobots, starscream and blackarachnia look ok and the green guy and megatron look decent... But,in my oppinion,they all still suck in design. I was geting happy when energon and cybertron had much better designs that armada. Then the movie came out and I was excited to see what the new series would look like...BIG dissapointment. Why the hell would they change the character designs so drasticly. From big hunky sweet machines to teen titan crapy things. For toys i will only buy starscream because i collect starscream. maby the dinobots..........
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swordoath
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I just went and saw the movie again yesterday. Fun times, that.

In any event, I'm actually surprised with how TFAni looks right now. I originally thought it would be crap, but the more I see of it the better it looks. Plus, Weird Al as Wreck-Gar is instant awesome.
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SNT1
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1.I would not have sent the A-10 to save the special forces. They are too slow. I get the F-16 in.
F-16 just doesn't have the low-speed low-altitude maneuverability and overall toughness of the A-10. I think there's nothing wrong with that part.
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razgriz
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agreed with u there SNT1, i mean the groundpounders love the A-10 more than the air force guys would want to admit
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wing zero alpha
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And it's not like the A-10 has to be a supersonic aircraft to reach its target, especially when considering the size of countries like Qatar.
ParaParaJMo
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By the matrix, I thought this movie was just average. This is probably going to be a rant from a major fan of the classic cartoon. I thought the first 3 episodes alone would have made a perfect movie. Michael Bay's best movie but it doesn't mean too much. The only other movies I enjoyed by him were The Rock and Bad Boys. This movie had nothing ground breaking, original, (positively) controversial or creative as the 1986 animated movie. The 1986 movie pushed the envelope, it was imaginative, it was moving, and it had a great soundtrack to boot. It re-defined American animation. It brought an anime edge to it in terms of story. There were certain moments we could have had Stan Bush or Weird Al instead of Linkin Park. I'm just one of those guys who can't listen to Linkin Park with all those (Naruto) AMVs with Linkin Park songs on them.

This movie sort of gave the idea of the theme about how the Transformers despite being robots were still sentient beings with free wills and then some where along the line, that mesage was lost.

To start off, I thought the ending battle was anti-climatic. The cinematography on the battles in general stunk. I just didn't like how it ended. The fight with Megatron and Optimus doesn't compare to any of their fights in the TV series. Most of the time while they are fighting, you see the USAF fighting Blackout. Which I really didn't care about. Then they concentrated more on Spike and Carly running away from Frenzy that Bumblebee kicking the crap out of Barricade. I wanted to see that fight instead. Not Spike getting his pants pulled off.

Most of the humor was out of place and I just couldn't laugh at a majority of the jokes. It was too much of a teenage comedy at times. Most of the characters like the Aussie girl was meant for eye candy and the hacker black guy was just mean to be a stereotypical token black guy. Why not make Sparkplug or whatever his name in the movie was a more useful character than a ditzy father you see in a teenager sitcom? I thought the actor looked like him, but they did nothing with him. They could have used Chip in the movie, but they didn't. Megan Fox's character was somewhat similar to Carly in the cartoon with her mechanics knowledge.

I was very pleased with how they got Peter Cullen back to play Optimus Prime. He still does it perfectly. But I blame crappy writing and voice direction that he no presence/charisma/aura as a leader. I just didn't like the more colloquial sounding Prime. Hugo Weaving as Megatron was good, but none of the Transformers voice actors are getting the same media whore out attention of Shia LaBuff or Megan Fox. I have never seen an interview by USA Today or Time magazine with Peter Cullen or Hugo Weaving and yet LaBuff and Fox do. To me, they should be the stars of Transformers not them. I came to see a movie about Transformers, not two actors I don't give a crap about and the Transformers are more like guest stars. Jazz, Ratchet, and Ironhide had like 2 lines. Plus, Jazz was played by Eddie from Family Matters!!! I also saw some recent interviews with Cullen and he can still do Ironhide too.

If an actor as big as Weaving wasn't going to get any attention or interviews from Entertainment Weekly or any big magazine or entertainment show that he played Megatron of all people, might as well kept the role to Frank Welker who was very upset that he was rejected. But then again, to Welker and to Cullen, it was never about the money or attention though they probably deserve to be the stars of the show. Cullen and Welker just wanted to do it again because it was their roles and that it was fun for them.

Blackout and Barricade were almost non-existant in the old TV series and yet they get the most screen time out of the Decepticons. Blackout's screen time could have gone to Starscream while Barricade's screen time could have gone to a more useful and famous Decepticon like Soundwave or Sky Warp or Thundercracker. Heck, maybe it could have been a Stunticon instead.

Plus, I didn't like how this movie was human centric. Spike/Sam was an important character but he wasn't the main character, and his character wasn't used right.

In addition, this movie has plot holes and continuity errors. Like
Spoiler
the all spark gives Frenzy his body back, but it doesn't give Bumblebee his legs back. And there is no explanation on why the transformers the all spark creates are hostile are default decepticons. Plus, Optimus abandoning Bumblebee was out of character for him. He'd NEVER abandon any of his autobots regardless of his mission or the significance of it. He was a leader like Shiro Amada. His rule was everybody comes back alive. And I don't like how they brush off Jazz's death like it was nothing. They could have killed Ironhide or Ratchet instead. Ratchet's true functions are not really utilized.
I say kill that stupid All Spark story and just kept Vector Sigma instead.

Last, I just didn't like how they portrayed the rest of the Decepticons as random thugs and that they came out of no where. Kind of weird Frenzy was more of a tribute to a Gremlin.
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Nagi
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ParaParaJMo wrote:The 1986 movie pushed the envelope, it was imaginative, it was moving, and it had a great soundtrack to boot. It re-defined American animation.
To say the 1986 Transformers movie "redefined American animation" is SEVERELY overstating its impact. It was a niche movie that only reached a specific child market when it was released, and is now only really known to old, passionate fans who grew up with it, a few newcomers who were introduced to Transformers through the comics or anime versions, or scene kiddies who like to fake nostalgia. It's a reasonably well liked movie, but it didn't serve as any sort of major benchmark in how animation was produced or written for, so it's going too far to say it really "redefined" anything.

And personally, though the Prime/Megatron fight was nifty, I thought it wasn't that great. They off every half-decent character except Starscream and Grimlock within the first twenty minutes (then off Starscream fifteen minutes later or so), reduce Grimlock to a bumbling fool (meaning we now have...no decent characters), and leave us with such truly pathetic replacements as Hot Rod and Wheelie, all because Hasbro couldn't think of a better way to promote the new series of toys. I frankly thought it was insulting having favorites like Ironhide and Soundwave yanked off screen and idiotic creations like Blurr and Cyclonus unceremoniously forced on me for sixty minutes with some sort of insistence that it's supposed to be an "improvement."

To me, the 1986 Transformers movie was basically like having Hasbro swap out the Transformers with Go-Bots and hoping nobody noticed. And that effectively ruined the rest of the movie for me easily. The conclusion to Prime and Megatron's rivalry was nicely done, but the rest of the movie pretty much stank out loud, in my view.

I agree with you completely about the live-action movie, though. While I liked it overall, I didn't quite appreciate going to a movie called Transformers and getting G.I. Joe instead.
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parapara wrote
Spike/Sam was an important character but he wasn't the main character, and his character wasn't used right.
if sam wasn't the main character who was???


parapara wrote
In addition, this movie has plot holes and continuity errors. Like
Spoiler
the all spark gives Frenzy his body back, but it doesn't give Bumblebee his legs back.
The reason for this is that when bumblebee losses his legs he either doesn't have it, ordoesn't careabout his legs and just gives itto sam.


forthe most part I agree with you parapara, their is stuff i would change in the movie. I wish we could see starscream more, he is in comandwhile megatron is out of comission yet it seems as blackout is. The opening scene could have been better, with less of blackout's sonic boom thing and more of the army fighting back.
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ParaParaJMo
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I wasn't too fond of some of the new characters either like Blurr, but I couldn't resist how the host of Unsolved Mysteries, one of my favorite non-cartoon shows was the voice of Ultra Magnus in the movie. Hot Rod is still my 3rd favorite character. Though Starscream is my favorite character, they had to settle the feud between Megatron and Starscream permanently somehow at sometime. Then Starscream would come back in season 3 and in Beast Wars via his Spark Ghost.

The Dinobots had little screen time in the 2nd half of season 2 so it was nice to see them again in the movie with a significant role. In general, they always acted dumb to begin with. They were meant to, but Grimlock saved the day in the last episode of season 3.

I just liked how the movie got away with some things that you can't do on cartoons. At the time, I found it shocking that they used two swear words. Especially one certain word Spike uses. Until the DVD came out, I never heard it and most people thought it was a myth.

I thought the action was top notch. Rather than anime, nobody can never find any excellently choreographed battles like that in most American cartoons. It was above what I saw on the television series. I loved the animation. It was something magical to me and still is. I'll admit that I cried when I first saw Optimus Prime died. It was something very rare to do. I never thought you could kill him or anybody in cartoons sometimes (never mind killing monsters in Voltron), but they managed to do it (though they did bring him back). To me, I got a real war story with this.

Did I go too far with saying it was something revolutionary? I don't know, but I do find it to be beyond imaginary. Compared to a lot of cartoons, I find that it is revolutionary though it was a failure at the box office due to bad advertising. Hey, I also happened to love the soundtrack. I have the record and tape of it. Because Rocky IV's composer was doing it, I liked how the movie was soundtrack based. Plus, I'm a big fan of Weird Al and Stan Bush. I love Bush's music in Kickboxer and Bloodsport as well.

And I find it lame that they didn't even remix the old theme song. I would settle for it even if Linkin Park did it and then reduced to being a redundant AMV song. I heard Stan Bush wanted to do a song for the soundtrack. Underdog got the song remixed 3 times in its own movie and it was awesome.

One more thing that pisses me off about the live action

They managed to keep Prime's line of "One must stand and one must fall," but they don't keep the universal greeting!!??
if sam wasn't the main character who was???
To me, it should have been Optimus Prime and his autobots from the start. They should have shown them going to earth and then they meet Sam. There is a cartoon of vgcatz that sums it up.

As for Bumblebee and his legs, there is a scene where he is being towed and still holding the all spark before he gives it to Spike.
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Aegis
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Meh, I could care less about the universal greeting, especially since the likes of Kup, Hot Rod, and Wreck Garr weren't around to use it. It's nostalgic enough hearing Prime use the 'One shall stand, one shall fall' line along with the 'freedom is a right of all sentient beings'.

In all honesty, I never really got into the whole battle of Autobot City all that much, especially having rewatched it most recently because of the sense of scale. You have a big massive city, a group of Autobots, and what looks like a tiny group of Decepticons in comparison, and somehow they flat out kill off the Autobots altogether. All I thought in my mind was how wimpy those Autobots looked. I also have to say that, while the death of Prime was certainly a shock in its own right, it was Prowl's death that got to me alot more for how ghastly it looked even until this day.

And thanks for pointing out a flaw in the Bay movie that I can't believe I missed. Indeed, why didn't Bumblebee get his legs back? It's as ridiculous as Prime begging Sam to put the All Spark in his chest, even though Megs was very much down (and apparently had his arm and leg sliced off at that point, too).
Gadget
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If they ever make Transformers Beastwars, I'll think I'll be a vegetarian. Micheal Bay did say that he is not make the old cartoon. But using the old cartoon as a base for the movie. That is why he was very liberial with the plot and charater change.

Anyone missed Soundwave? I wonder how would he be? An iPod instead of a Walkman?

Other things I missed is Starscream back stabbing. And his screeching cry, "Deeceptacoonns!!! Retreat!!."

I think there is a prequeal to the movie. It seems there ar 'protoform Optimus' and 'protoform Starscream' in the toys areas.
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Nagi
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There's a comic book and a novel that both act as prequels to the movie. As for Soundwave, at first he was going to be a helicopter, but because fans complained that helicopter became Incinerator, and later Blackout (notice how Blackout ejected Scorponok like a tape, served as an intelligence gatherer, and spoke in computer tones, all similar to Soundwave). Then they were going to make him into a CD player, but because of Bay and Spielberg's objections to "mass shifting" and not wanting a CD player to become a towering robot, it would've been too far removed from the original Soundwave and thus became Frenzy.

Word now is that Soundwave is at the top of the list for new Transformers to include in the sequel. Personally, I would've been fine with the helicopter, but I also think this one DeviantArt guy's idea of making him into a military surveillance truck would also be great (have Ravage, Rumble, and Lazerbeak as the various surveillance computers inside the truck).
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razgriz
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lol back to the soundwave debate, just shows how beloved that techno-voiced purple christian decepticon really is. i dunno if anyone will be satisfied with whatever his movie form will end up being sorta like there r those who cant get used to megs being a cybertronian jet. but it will be nice to see SW in all his big cgi glory
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ParaParaJMo
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Soundwave as a helicopter would not float by me. Just wouldn't be natural. Just like how Blackout and Barricade were the most featured Decepticons, it just wasn't right to me. But would Frank Welker still be allowed to play Soundwave?

It would be cool if they got Blaster and he still does some rhymes. But too bad he may have only 2 lines in the next movie :lol: if he's lucky.

It'd be cool if Jazz used his stereo/sound power still. That was one of my favorite traits about him. I hope they do that with Blaster if they bring him in, he's also one of my top favorites.

I guess we can count out that there will be no female autobots like Arcee or Elita-One. I hope they bring in the Matrix in the next story and they also bring in Omega Supreme. Michael Bay suggested using Tidal Wave, an aircraft carrier. Or maybe use a story with the Quintessons. Wheel Jack is a definite must have in the sequels.

Or hell, maybe Hot Rod. I wonder if Judd Nelson can still do the role =P.

I also wish they make Sparkplug more useful. I just hated how he was reduced to horrible comic relief. I'd also like to see Chip in the next movie. He'd been perfect for the first one but nooooooooooooo we had to have an Australian girl and a token black guy but they forget a guy in a wheel chair.

I hope they stop all the stupid jokes. They had to use 2 urination jokes!!!

One of my favorite Optimus quotes that was pretty funny in the old cartoon is

"A boobie trip that catches boobies."

And I believe it was the first time Peter Cullen used the quote about freedom being a right of sentient beings. I knew Optimus Primal used it a few times and so did Gary Chalk's interpretation of the Optimus Prime character.

And there is also an episode where Megatron and the Decepticons get "drunk" off Energon. Now that's creative humor. Megatron always makes funny suggestions at Starscream to use as a guenia pig and Starscream is scared out of his mind and hesitant.

And I want Stan Bush music darn it!!!! And same with Weird Al making fun of a Linkin Park song!! That would make my day!!! Get the composer who did the 1986 movie!
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