Just out of interest, I wondered about the general consensus of the movies as a continuing series.

I could have added more options but I thought I'd keep it simple, although I added one specifically mentioning ROTF as its the real Marmite of the series. (Some love it some hate it.)

Please feel free to explain in more depth.

This is not a loaded thread, although I expect some arguments to erupt so keep it fun!  

 

Hmmm.... It started off well then took a plummet and traumatizing memory with ROTF.

DOTM did a little to undo the trauma but still not enough... Then AOE came along and I'm so torn at the moment. At point, the movies improved with its emphasis on the robots and on the other hand it has decayed for the being same cliched film.

So overall I guess I go with 'Started good, dipped at ROTF, and got steadily better' because nothing kills my optimism that hard.

 

None of these options accurately represent my feelings. The closest and as such, the one I voted for, is that the films started good and steadily got worse. Despite it's many flaws, I still say TF1 is a decent film and depiction of TF. Unfortunately, ROTF is plain bad. DOTM, as a film, is stronger than ROTF but is an even worse representation of TF which I don't enjoy. AOE is a better representation of TF than ROTF and DOTM but is a bad film, although I do enjoy it.

 

Started good, dipped at ROTF and is getting steadily better.

 

I don't like to use good for the first film. It's got it's flaws which keeps me from going I'd like to see that again. But I also cut the first film a lot of slack because starting franchisees isn't always a smooth and easy process. Sometimes film makers need that first movie to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

But from there things just felt like a waste of money every time I made the mistake of paying to see any of the films. Revenge of the Fallen never should have seen the light of day but the studio and production team were pigheaded about getting out a film no matter what. On the technical side of writing a story Dark of the Moon was better but no the big improvement it needed to be. If Dark of the Moon had really finished up the story and then reboot it might be better but as just a third film in an endless series it felt bad. Age of Extinction just felt like a big step backwards.

Even with a writers room I don't feel confident where the films are going so I will wait on Netflix streaming or something rather than paying to see the next film. With no love for any of the characters it will be a nice break from collecting for a while as well.

 

Started good, dipped at ROTF, and got steadily better.

Not saying ROTF is bad I like it but its the most accurate choice to vote for.

TF1- Great
ROTF- Fun guilty pleasure
DOTM- Solid movie with great Transformers moments
AOE- Solid movie with great Transformers moments

 

TF 2007 is a decent enough film, compared to what we can expect from a super-effects laden blockbuster it really isn't doing anything special - it's long been eclipsed in the realistic effects in large scale by films like Pacific Rim and Interstellar (the latter emerging over the first TF films simply because of how awesome TARS and CASE are - and they're usually nothing but walking black file cabinets at a glance!)

But what the first film did right that no film has done since was not having the only major human plot be directly tied into some entirely pointless romance drama. ROTF has the whole "I love you" thing, DOTM makes all of that entirely pointless by changing the love interest, and then AoE brings up some unnecessary drama by making Tessa legally underage in the eyes of most of the States and using that to form the crux of the bickering father/daughter that lasts the entire film.

Additionally, with every successive film, there's been less and less focus on the actual robots, time constantly monopolized by Prime and BB. Furthermore, the one thing that's most important above all else - the fact the robots can turn into perfect visual replicas of human vehicles and hide in plain sight - is almost completely ignored. The only vehicles in all of AoE that wouldn't draw attention for miles around in any given normal setting is both Bumblebee Camaros, Galvatron's Freightliner Argosy (amusingly, the wiki page mentions that model is only available as a "glider" or in other words it's missing the critical drive train needed to even make it move under its own power) and the rusty cab over Prime quickly ditches. All the other characters have cars that would be ridiculously easy to notice as being out of the ordinary: Hound is a giant multi-purpose military vehicle, Prime's "main" form is a bright red-and-blue truck cab that doesn't look like anything on the road today (the wiki outright says it's a concept truck), Drift turns into the fastest model car in the world as a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse (which has a starting base price equivlent to $2.1 million dollars), Crosshairs turns into a bright green aftermarket-modified Corvette the likes of which you'd expect in a Fast-n-Furious film, Stinger is for absolutely no reason modeled on a car only 100 examples of were ever planned to be built (and also a nearly $1.5 price tag), and Lockdown is a Lamborghini Aventador which the base price of is about $400,000 (compared to how Soundwave's Merc. form in DOTM was literally worth half as much and Sam still called bullshit immediately on Dylan just giving a super-expensive car to Carly).

Compare to the first film, where while the Autobots were still relatively pimping out some of their alt. modes, only Bumblebee's Concept Camaro wasn't an existing production model vehicle at the time. Prime, Jazz, Ratchet, and to some extent even Ironhide's giant Topkick 4x4 truck mode could easily blend into everyday traffic and not draw heads whatsoever, and even Bumblebee's Concept Camaro would only attract as much attention as a typical modern muscle car. That's what transforming should be executed as, not just an excuse to try and pimp out characters by making them all absurdly unique supercars that only insanely rich people would own.

I think it bears mentioning that ROTF was also horribly rushed during the 2009 Writer's Strike. For a film whose only previous frame of reference had a "just okay" script, ROTF really needed to knock it out of the park in order to be considered a step up in any regard.

The toyline, of course, did knock it out of the park for the most part. The script struck out in three swings.

 

LITERALLY
NOT EVEN CLOSE
TO BEING TRUE


​

 

Exhibit B.

 

Started good, dropped of a cliff at ROTF, and then slowly got better.

 

Started great and just got more awesome with each installment.

 

Hate the films, need a reboot in the hands of new writers and director. Reasons:

1) Bay is going for ‘fun and quirky’ with his characters but he’s giving us batshit crazy and getting crazier. Examples (Ha!, examples? More like damn near the entire cast):
- Sam’s mom’s descent from genuinely uncomfortable but likable in ’07 to an utterly unrealistic silly whackjob in the sequels.
- Turturro’s character – do I really need to elaborate?
- F’n Leo – I get having an outgoing, ambitious and arrogant personality, but who the f’ acts like this with people, especially people you’re meeting for the first time?
- Rainn Wilson’s character – Yes, it’s not unrealistic for college professors to have minor god complexes, but jeez, biting an apple, discarding it across the floor to a female student (who’s easily a 9.4 or better), expecting her to gratefully accept it as a gift, AND to actually have her react that way…even by Bay’s Santa Monica reality standards, that’s f’n stupid.
- Twins – do I really need to elaborate?
- Jetfire – I get the crotchety old man stereotype, but damn man. Plus, this brings up the ‘what constitutes old?’ question – I’ll cover that later.
- Wheelie – Overall not as stupidly crazy as the others, but leg-humping, really? F’n A Bay.
- Malkovich character, cheese and rice, he berates an employee to the point of tears over the color of her cup, he has a sycophant little bitch who appears to only be there to add salt to the wound of the employees he berates (I’d ask if he has any fear of H.R.’s involvement, but based on the fact that the company…hell, almost every company on Bay’s Earth, hires only models, I’m guessing there is no H.R. department at this company…or any company on Bay’s Earth). He then forces his way into a new employee’s home to have a wrestling match with a 17’ metal alien in a living room.
- Ken Jeong’s character – Again, f’n crazy for no reason. I don’t care how nervous or desperate you are, you’re not going to attack some stranger that you’re trying to get help from in a bathroom stall, and you sure and hell aren’t going to speak in code to him. Seriously, almost everyone in Bay’s universe is off-kilter and clearly expects everyone else to completely understand their crazyland language. And what’s with Bay’s fetish about having character conflict/interactions in bathroom stalls. Once, OK (well not OK, both scenes were ludicrously terrible, but one appropriate scene in a stall, fine), but two? F’n Bay.
- Francis Mcdormand’s character – OK, not completely crazy, but just not buying her as Director of National Intelligence (which is terrible as she’s an incredible actress – I blame it on the story and direction, otherwise she’d pull it off), and the whole ‘one night of love’ or whatever with Simmons…so pointless.
- Que – It’s one thing to homage Einstein, but to actually make a big robotic Einstein right down to the hair?
- Dutch – Mild compared to the others, but still well beyond the threshold for mere quirkiness.
- Bumblebee (just in AOE) – so he’s sneaking into a high security facility, and decides to pick a fight with a model in the waiting room? Is he a new recruit, or some kid unaware of the stakes or how to act???
- Hound – jeez, just everything out of his mouth was just so f’n stupid.

Now, these are just the high-profile insane characters. There are also the RA from ROTF, the Egyption border crossing Oompa Loompa from ROTF, the mailroom characters from DOTM, Leo’s d-bag sycophants from ROTF, Thomas Lennon’s ass-kissing…whatever from AEO, etc that I’ll gloss over for now. I mean, it’s as though the plan is for the key protagonists to be an island of sanity surrounded by an ocean of insanity. Sam, Lennox, Epps, Michaela are all normal, they have their issues, but they’re normal. But everyone else if f’n zany, and they have to navigate their way around the zaniness. And every chick is unbelievably hot. I really do think that Bay makes the world this way due to his life in Santa Monica. He walks on the beach and sees nothing but hot chicks and meth heads…of course the planet Earth as he sees it would wind up this way.

2) Dialogue. Terrible, utterly terrible. First film, nothing horrifically bad, but nothing impressive either. All the sequels, cringe worthy. Just so f’n bad on every level.

3) Length. All four movies, no exception, just dragged on way too long. To the point where mid-way through the climactic battle at the end we’re just done, checking our watches, and any interest that may have made it to that point has long since left.

4) Consistency. OK, how old are these robots? First movie, Cube lands on Earth 12K years ago, so at MINIMUM, every TF is at least that old, it’s assumed (possible even implied) that many are much older than that (and that’s minimum - landing on Earth doesn’t mean it wasn’t floating around for a very, VERY long time first). Despite that age (not sure if it’s advanced or not), they all seem to be perfectly healthy (barring Bee’s voice…another stupid thing but whatever). In fact, the impression given by the movie is that while the Cube had been missing for a long time by their standards, it didn’t seem like something that they’d spent their entire lives searching for…or even the majority of their lives…it all still seemed to be a fairly recent development for them – recollections of Cybertron still occupied a huge chunk of their memories, not just some home they knew for 1% of their life. So along comes ROTF, and there are these distant ancients lost to legend that were active on a very large scale…5K years before the Cube landed on Earth. So right off the bat, a species implied by the first film to be extremely long lived and ancient is suddenly far less ancient than we had thought, for something only 40% older than the Cube landing on Earth to have been lost to antiquity…especially for a species that was so technologically advanced – these weren’t hunter-gatherers relying on oral tradition. WTF? Anyway, so we get to DOTM – honestly, I don’t know whether the opening battle sequence occurred prior to or after getting rid of the Cube, so not sure how this impacts the age debate, just that this brilliant plan hatched by Megatron and Sentinel Prime seemed just so poorly thought out and gappy. Anyway, we get to AOE, where we see the apparent creators of the Transformers being the ones responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs 65M years ago. Now, that doesn’t mean the TF’s are that old, BUT the whole Knights Terminus group and Prime’s apparent affiliation with them kind of implies that Prime has been around for a very long time…like, there’s no f’n way he wouldn’t have been around before the Fallen’s big brawl with the other Primes and other ‘lost to the sands of time’ shit. And that’s just the Age portion of the inconsistencies!

5) Humor. First, I like dick and fart humor…when it’s good! I love ‘Idiocracy’, that’s locker room humor done with a 3-digit IQ. Devastator’s balls, the bathroom stall scenes, dog humping dog, robot humping leg, farting parachutes, EVERYTHING done and said by those two f’n twin idiots in ROTF, tightening up of sphincters, etc. Even non ‘locker room’ humor was just stupid.

6) Product Placement and Pandering. This happens in most movies, but AOE took it to ridiculous levels. Loved the huge American flags, then Marky Mark cracking open one of the hundreds of Bud Lights on the ground in the middle of battle – Murica, F’ Yeah! Then the transition to China, where the PRC was taking a break from erasing the existence of dissidents to effectively fight off the Decepticons (seriously, if Bay had any f’n balls, he’d have had a Chinese man standing down a Decepticon tank…but no, can’t piss off the overlords of the vast market he’s trying to tap into). Seriously, this wasn’t a case of Superman throwing Zod into an electronic Coke billboard on Times Square, this was beyond over the top.

Anyway, there’s a lot more, but I have to get back to work. Start over fresh.

 

...the fuck? I was always under the impression that the minimum age of consent was 18 since, y'know, that's the minimum age on every "adults only" rated thing I've ever heard of.

The fact any of this shit is brought up in a thread about a Transformers film, though, is deeply concerning.

 

Oh yeah, totally forgot about that nonsense. OK, not going to debate the merits of the 20YO banging a 17YO in real life (except to say that it being a pre-existing relationship makes it worse in my eyes...so them being a 17YO banging a 14YO justifies it???). My problem is that for whatever reason, Bay decided to not just throw this completely unnecessary and pointless aspect into the film, but then to spend 5 minutes elaborating on it. So stupid.

 

Because the world stops when aliens attack, right? When the aliens decide to use our world as a battle ground, a dad would stop caring about his daughter.

It's our world, the Transformers are just living (or dying) in it.

 

I don't think anyone has a problem with Marky Mark going apeshit that his 17 year old daughter is getting plowed by a 20 year old, the problem is with Bay's decision to not just include this unnecessary aspect, but to devote the time and detail he devoted to that discussion. Plus, the guy having a laminated card with the law on it is very, VERY creepy.

Frankly, it's almost as if Bay's son was doing a neighbor's younger daughter and Bay was trying to make a big, expensive point to defend him or something. Granted, I'm sure that's not the case, but it just seems like a huge spotlight was thrown on the issue for some reason or other.

 

So what your saying is, you're just pissed it's not G1?!

Just kidding!! Lovely tight summary!  

 

Yep,couldn't say it better myself.

 

One thing I want to say, a common defence from the Bay faithful is that the G1ers, which must be a major demographic here, only hate on the movies because they're not G1 enough, silly GeeWunners. You see that pasted around all the place, on replies and signatures and dumb user titles, but I think it's the opposite, at least for me. The reason I put up with all the bullshit, that Peteynorth so succinctly just demonstrated, is because of my admiration for G1. Things like familiar voice actors, scenes and storylines lifted from the G1 anime, Transforming sounds, familiar characters, awesome transformations. I want a G1 faithful movie, sure, but the MovieVerse is all we have, and it's the little nuggets of nostalgia, mixed with occasional all new awesome transformerness that keeps me coming back.

If these movies were the exact same but about a different alien race or gobots or something, I would not give them the time of day. I sure as hell wouldn't feel compelled to wade through threads like these!

That said, the movies don't have to be G1. They can shake it up as much as they want. If the movies were excellent in their own right. Which they aren't, because of all the bullshit.

 

But these issues are true to life issues.

That's my point, life is still going on.

Cade obviously is in a bad place. He almost lost his daughter, his wife is gone, his "best" friend was turned to a statue, his house was blown up. The guy had no income to speak of and while doing what he loved, clearly struggled at it.

So Shane became Cade's whipping boy.

Yes, I know that no one has any issue with Cade tearing Shane a new one. I certainly don't. But the scene transitions into Cade just having more issues dumped on him and in return while angry, there's not a damn thing he can do about it, by law. And yet through *all that* he manages to continue to tell Prime not to give up hope, especially in humans.