To all of you who bash TF4's ending and Optimus Prime's jets, do you realize that he got them from the knight upgrade right?

 

This has already been discussed at length.

I love AOE and I do believe this makes sense, but it should have been made more visually clear during his upgrade.

 

The fact that there even was an upgrade was only very, very passingly implied. Blink and you miss it.

 

I actually missed it  

 

It never occurred to me. I only considered it when someone on here suggested it the other day, maybe MnemonicSyntax?

 

Basically, this. I would have included an Iron Man-style panning shot to hint at them. Of course, I would have held off on any upgrade until he got to the knight ship. He would have had a really beat-up version of the Western Star alt mode with a robot mode resembling his Evasion Mode form (to eliminate the obvious mass-shifting that came with his cabover mode) and had his Knight form be the sole upgrade of the movie. Hell, the knight form might not even have an Earth-based alternate form.

 

Same. It took me watching the movie the third time to catch where the change in his appearance actually took place. And even with it in the movie, it isn't like the film is well-connected anyway.

 

Which only makes the ending worse - if he could freakin fly the entire time, wouldn't that have made the final fight so much easier had he actually used the advantage of air superiority?

 

He did fly some times in the final fight (mostly used it to large jumps), but yeah, he should have used it more.

 

I always supposed that his final fight with Lockdown was suppose to mean something. If you remember Prime yells to Cade "THIS IS MY FIGHT!" which indicates this was HIS personal beef with Lockdown. That means the final fight in AOE is more of an Honorable duel (until Prime gets distracted and Lockdown pins him) than a straight "fight to the death" type situation. Also the whole "why didn't he/she just fly around?" argument could be applied to many scenarios in movies. In ROTF during the forest fight, why didn't Megatron, Starscream, and Grindor just hover over Prime and destroy him from the air? How come in Iron Man 2, Stark and Rhodes don't just hover over Whiplash and take turns missile attacking him? How come in Iron Man 1 Tony doesn't just initially tank missile Iron Monger at the start of the fight? How come in Man of steel Superman doesn't hover around Zod and lazer eye him before he gains his ability of flight?

 

He kinda did actually, but they acted more like jump jets. Short bursts for added height, used like once or twice. They only became actual jets at the very end when the movie needed him to get off the planet and I guess it was too much work to show him stealing part of Lockdown's ship again?

 

Ideally, considering Lockdown stole it from them in the first place, I would've liked to see the Knightship reclaimed by the Dinobots and/or Optimus...but I like that its fate remains open-ended too, so w/e.

And I don't really understand how anyone could repeatedly miss Prime's upgrade as it's happening. The sword augmenting his arms as he grabs it is right in the center of the screen with a nifty sound effect and everything, loo.

 

Two things:

1. Everything the TFs do has little moving parts that make nifty noises. I don't blame anyone for missing these ones, especially when the movie's been slogging for like two hours at that point and can't even bother a reaction shot from Optimus as his arms change shape.

2. How does his arms transforming in any way suggest he'd get rocket boots, especially when his legs never changed? There's nothing in the movie that suggests they're part of his knight upgrade (itself a vague and unexplained concept, as he's refered to a knight before that scene but never before this movie) other than they simply don't show up before it.

Rarely are any gimmicks of the TFs in these movies actually explained or properly established. They just show up, waved away as part of the nutty biology of alien machines. There's very, very little internal logic to the various tricks and gizmos they pop out, why should the audience, already suffering a protracted and blurred headache of a third act, be expected to pick up on a detail that's not even explained, but has merely been deduced after the fact? (and even still, there's no hard evidence the rockets are actually part of his knight upgrade. Optimus has flown before, and knights aren't known for rocket shoes)

 

This is what bothers me about these films. The writers choose to show us these bots can transform into any material they desire at any time, but then decide they can't do certain things due to story constrictions.

Sure they can fucking fly! They can turn their body parts into metal, glass, liquid, photons, explosive propellent, complete weapons, etc you name it, the films show us they can do at, at will. Anything at will. But at the same time, they DON'T because it would fuck with the story. Which already sucks I might add, so they might as well just do what ever they want.

God I hate these movies.

 

TBF, this applies to almost any Transformers fiction, even modern day fiction where you think it wouldn't.

Of all the afronts to logic these movies build themselves upon, this is probably the most forgivable, but where the movies don't follow the pattern of preceeding and succeeding fiction is the lack of establishing ground rules. For example, Animated firmly established Autobots can't fly, making the exceptions to that rule very big deals that required explanaion, or at least emphisis. The movies don't do this, meaning whenever an Autobot flies it brings to mind why they couldn't before, which is of course unacknowledged. And even then, ROFT and DOTM at least showed Optimus needing flight packs, which explained why he couldn't fly before at least. But now he can fly under his own power, zero explanation.

So little in the movies goes explained. And I don't mean "we don't get a meticulous run down of events leading to a development." I mean things happen and it goes totally unrecognized by the characters that should recognize it. We don't need to actually know how Optimus got his rockets, we just need to get confirmation from him that he didn't have them before, react to this new development. Saying something is unexplained is more of an explanation than the movies typically give us.

 

It would be nice for a change in Transformers 5.

 

I prefer to think that he had them since the first movie but never told anyone cause he's a dick like that.

 

It does have both the making this stuff up as we go along and things can just happen because we need them to happen so we aren't going to bother to explain.

It's as bad as the period in comic book history when Superman would get a new power just because it happened to be convenient to that month's issue.

Even in a work of fiction you like to feel like there are at least some sort of rules.

 

Negative nancies everywhere. Such a negative environment TFW has become. People here are so unnecessarily aggressive. Why do you guys waste your time with the TF films if you don't like them. ..shit