When I saw the early sketches and picks on some of the Transformers the day after the live web conference , I was both thrill and mad !!. Bumblebee's face looks like Skelletor , Starscream looked like Predator trying to be Starscream and Prime had Chicken feet , but in all and all I was somewhat pleased. Prime ,in mechanical desing , looked swell and Blackout was awesome. However the latest Megatron's early sketch and Jazz heigth been smaller to Bumblebee has only for me to say " Bay is playing fire with us ..... sloooooowly "!!! yeh , yeh !! , I know !! Not G1 nor animated and the TF had to look somewhat alien , But we seen people on the net doing their own animations and portraits of TF and are twice as better than what these Hollywood morons are doing. yeh , yeh !! , I know !!! Hollywood has it's own style and way of doing things , and aldo sometimes that way of doing things can make the movies look good. Unfortunatelly , with TF , we have one small problem which can make this movie a hit or bust ; It's based of a tv show and in the past years , movie based on a hit show don't do well at the box-office. Three fair examples : " Dukes of Hazzard " , " Bewitched " and the 80's " Flash Gordon ". Yes , they made a Flash Gordon movie in the 80's. Saw it on cable months ago (can't remember the channel ) and it was HORRIBLE. Yet , Hollywood has done successfull movie-based shows like Hulk , the Spiderman movies and X-men. The difference from this hits to the other flunks is that they maintain their true essence and spirit. So the movie can easily go both ways based on this examples. I really want this movie to be a success. I really want for this movie to feel transformers. But with the much screw-up with the robots in this way can give the movie a hard time for it's debut. Right now we still have 10 months and 7 days for this movie , plenty of time for this folks to fix the characters so hopefully enough when we sit in the theater on the day of the premier we can say it's truely Transformers............................ If not , is on Bay's career as director. The only good thing about this movie ( and as I said once ) it isn't directed by that guy who directed " Lady in the Water ''. Bay can't spoil the TFs movie any more than that ..... I think !!

 

Dude, Flash Gordon was a sweet movie!!!! I don't know what you are talking about.
Albeit that by today's standards, the visual effects and props are a bit archaic... but still.

Have you bothered to watch anything else from the early 80's, or even the G1 Transformers cartoon lately, by any chance? The show was pretty cool when we all were kids, but it didn't age well and certainly is the furthest thing from what i'd call a really great cartoon. Hindsight is often colored a certain shade of Rosy.

I respect that you are concerned about the movie sucking, and that you don't find the designs of the Bots pleasing - But I find it very confusing that you are making arguments against this movie based on "essence and spirit" when all you have seen is images of the robots/vehicles... An analogy of your statement is like saying that a book is going to suck because the book cover looks like complete @ss...

Essence and spirit are things that come thru with Storytelling, Plot, Pacing, Dialogue, and other things that will not become obvious to anyone until the movie is seen. Your opinion of the movies that you listed as "Horrible" adaptations of "Hit TV shows" seems to be based upon the idea that the stories, plot, pacing, and dialogue really weren't done well in these movies - Which has absolutlely nothing to do with the design/look of the characters.

I'm willing to bet that this movie is going to be well done in spite of the characters looking completely different.

 

You mean M. Night Shamalan???? Yeah but that movie was terrible....no good script what so ever. Id have to say that M. need's a new hint at horror, because he isnt good at makeing that genre of film.

But in otherwise I think your right. The face's might be totally diff from mach up to finall product. All we need to do is wait. I say this movie will meet the qualification's of a great summer action flick!!!!

 

So...Spiderman was successful because they did his costume the same as the comics? If that's all it took, then Hulk would have been well-received, and X-Men would have failed miserably because they didn't keep the costumes from the comics. The new Superman film stayed very close to what's come before, and because of that the overall reaction was "meh"; it was not by any means a must-see film. It had a budget of $270 million and has only made $195m in the U.S. thus far (foreign is so far only another $166m). If you're going to make a big budget blockbuster and be successful, you have to make something no one has ever seen before. You can't just update old stuff with today's special effects and expect instant success.

I think the essence and spirit of Transformers will ring heavy in the film, and won't rely on whether or not the character designs are traditional. We've been told the characters will act as we know them. Bumblebee and Spike have a close relationship. There's a battle at a Dam (surely a nod to the MTMTE pilot). There's heavy battles between Autobots and Decepticons, only at a level far beyond anything we've ever seen in a Transformers cartoon, comic, or fan art.

I haven't seen any fan art that's even half as complex as the concept designs we've seen from ILM (no offense to the fan artists). Just because fan work is more traditional to what you expect doesn't make it better. I'm not saying I love all or any of the designs for the real film, but I have respect for the amount of work that went into them. I certainly wouldn't refer to the ILM artists as "Hollywood morons" just because they didn't do the same thing everyone else has been doing for the past 20 years. Their Optimus Prime is the most original take on that character I've ever seen, yet at the same time recognizable as Prime; they just freed him from his box.