Yeah, it's really refreshing to have new faces talking about Transformers movies for a change   Nonetheless, they do sound like they are really invested in the movie. Maybe, because it's almost like their first big thing and they want to show their A-game. It sets a very hopeful tone  

 

Oh neat! Didn't know the writer was a women, wishing her the best!

 

Nothing about it is behind the scenes. For some reason some people assume whenever it has women involved that it is. Which honestly says more about them than it does the movie itself.
But the Franchise/Brand itself when you boil it down is about political ideologies. The might makes right of Megatron and his fear led propaganda, and the freedom, respect for life, and protecting of Optimus Prime's autobots that don't want to live under tyranny, fighting each other with the kickoff being from fighting to get out from under elitism that the council imposes. As well as the nature of war, and what it does to soldiers, and elements that involve that. So by the very nature of the lore, Transformers does deal in politics.

The film itself on the behind the scenes side really isn't. For some reason people call anything with POC or women leads, or heavy behind the scenes political. When really it's more about best talents for the job and the type of story wanting to be told. This is more Hasbro/Paramount saw a niche that hadn't been used, and went for it for best effect because they had a good story that needed the kind of feels that niche could yield to best effect for their story. This more about story techniques and on screen image play, and other cinema techniques than it is about politics. This is normal film/business stuff about creative choices and finding the best talents to do that and trying to find the best box office results from making a great movie.

It is a sad day when even a dictionary definition is considered offensive and political. But that's sadly not surprising with geek culture. Which proves the point again why a movie like this is needed and why the niche it's aiming for exists in untapped audience potential.

 

We've had 5 movies with a male lead, but 1 movie with a female lead is "political" to some people? Haha Jesus...

 

Exactly. And the sad part is that's mostly American and some isolated Europe views. Other countries and it's not even a question. It's more common in Japan, South Korea, China, and other markets, even Australia. Not so much with Hollywood though, and it's such an untapped market in America because of that, when really it's shown when used right that it increases box offices almost exponentially.

In Japan, South Korea, and China, it's often viewed as a smart marketing move because it pulls all into the viewership/audience. Women who can relate, and men curious about women views and experiences because they aren't women. That men would prefer to watch a movie with a woman in it than a man because of various factors. So marketing-wise and artistically, it's usually a better choice to create quicker longer lasting sympathy to a lead too.

Kind of a commentary on American perceptions when you really dig into the reasons why in other parts of the world it's normally intrinsic to the arts and emotional play for the audience, but in America, that's 'vocally' backwards. But that's a much deeper topic to get into that's not exactly fit for here.

 

Another reason to pass on this movie. Why are they also still claiming this is a prequel?

 

I'm not living in those mentioned country, but where I live is still part of Asia. I can confirm that your statement is right.

 

Yup. It's really only an in America thing and a few other random isolated spots. It was a trend I noticed when I was researching films from abroad. The Directors/Writers of Whispering Corridors seemed to explain it best. But it's usually a commonality to the arts in general when you want to create a character that acts as a lead and you need to hasten emotional investment into them.

Though I do also appreciate how american media has experimented with that notion with Big Hero 6 and Spectrum alongside other works, but American media rarely full dabbles into it on allowing women to provide that same artistic metaphor that they do abroad. Instead they are typically only given support roles, like Star Kid, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Warriors of Virtue, TMNT, and on and on and on. As opposed to wider world media where they have a more active role and position in adventures that are co-starring. Really in comparison, only Star wars, Hunger Games, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Ghostbusters, and the 80s Supergirl have given them that spotlight, and now we can add Bumblebee to that list. And besides Star Wars and Supergirl, though Star Wars also has many more recent entries that continue that trend too, most of that has only been within the last less than 20 years and is still relatively recent and playing catch up as a whole. Even Hermione in Harry Potter is still relatively recent. (Again, skipping R rated movies, only counting PG-13 and below. And Disney is an obvious that's been using it as intrinsic to the arts for its entire career. But even in disney terms, it's really only become more apparent since about Mulan. So even on their end it's been a bit lacking as a whole.)

 

I think James Cameroon would disagree with you on the whole "you need actual humans" Avatar is a pure CG movie.
Plenty of kids movies blur the line between CG and animation (my nephew loves the Polar Express)
And the reality is that when you get to that intense a level of CG, trying to properly portray human characters is actually detrimental to the look. The whole uncanny valley and all that. Animated CG robot's and special effects look stunningly real while CG humans still look terrible. A well animated CG robots movie would look fine without needing humans. Did anyone watch Pacific Rim for the human stories? The blue aliens and crazy animals in Avatar were far more beleivable than the CG humans.
I see no real barriers to doing a mostly animated/CG transformers movie - except of course the cost. Hollywood needs to get away from the idea that animatied movies aren't "real" movies.
And the idea that you need humans in it to somehow relate to the story and characters is naive - frankly the Transformers characters from G1 were far more relatable than most of the human characters from Bayformers. I have no problem relating to an alien, a robot or a talking fish, if it has a beleivable and engaging personality.
As for scale, what does that matter? If it's set on Earth or another planet, the environment gives it scale. If it's like IDW's More Than Meets The Eye, the scale is inherent to itself and it doesn't matter how large or small things are.

It's not going to happen of course. Hasbro seems to firmly seperate their animated properties from their big budget movie properties. One is a kids show, the other is a hollywood extravaganza.
Me? I'd so much rather see Rodimus Prime and Autobot Megatron captaining the Lost Light in high grade CGI on the big screen than yet another michael bay influenced mess full of explosions, shakey cams and wooden acting from human actors who end up upstaging the actual namesakes of the franchise.
I think this Bumblebee movie will be better, but it's still a long way from what Transformers has always meant to me.

 

Avatar is live action because it has live actors in it. The earth military side is live action/real actors and actresses. And polar express is an animated movie. You're not really refuting anything I've said.

For it to be a live action movie, it has to have live people(or other real life living things of a substantial nature) in it. Otherwise it's an animated movie. That's not even up for debate. That's fact.

A CGI animated movie is a type of animated movie period. Even James Cameron would agree on that and would face palm over your statement(in fact, you might want to look up his quotes on Avatar during production/filming/marketing, he literally states the same as I did when asked about why not make the whole thing animated). There's not a single capable person in film across the world that would agree with your statement or would even understand what you're trying to argue here. And Mo-cap does not count as live action. That's only a technique for capturing motion.

For it to be a live action transformers movie, it needs to have real people(or other real life living creatures of a substantial nature and role) in it. Otherwise it's simply Final Fantasy the Spirits within with robots and would be an animated movie.

Like the upcoming (if still scheduled) ANIMATED origins prequel movie. That'll have no humans in it. But it's also not a live action movie because the entire thing is animated since it has no humans in it.

Now that's not saying the limits of animated/live action can't be pushed, but short of doing a Thundercracker and Buster the dog movie using a real dog, and not having it take place on earth and not having a flashback to explain where Buster came from or having Thundercracker interact with people at all. You're not going to get a live action transformers movie without real live actors on screen. Otherwise it's an animated movie. (Nor would it make sense because you wouldn't explain where Buster came from or anything surrounding him. Though now I kind of want to see that movie. xD Flight of the Navigator to alien worlds with a puppy actually sounds fun. I kind of really like the idea now of a Puppy POV movie of a solo transformers story. There's definitely some interesting potential there and sub-commentary.)

So as I said, it is impossible to do a live action transformers movie without humans(or similar real life living creature of a substantial nature) onscreen, because otherwise it wouldn't be live action. It'd be an animated movie. Which isn't a bad thing. But it would mean it's not a live action transformers movie. And no, editing in a quick cut and montage of real earth fauna and wildlife does not count either.

 

I don't think I'd be very interested in a film that was *only* Transformers. The whole point of Transformers - and the whole reason I loved them as a kid - is that they are robots *in disguise*. Yes, they're disguised from each other, but a huge part of their appeal is that any vehicle or electronic item around you (in your imagination as a kid) could in fact be an alien robot. A good Transformers movie, for me, has to capture that - the wonder of common things around you being something other than they seem (more than meets the eye, you might even say   ). That's what I disliked about the later seasons of the cartoons and also the later Bay movies - everyone on Earth knows about Transformers, so the whole disguise thing becomes mostly pointless and the wonder is gone. I always loved the very first Transformers comics (and Bumblebee) because they had Buster experience a strange battle at a drive-in and then take home a Beetle that then transforms in front of him and his dad. And this film seems to use those very beats - teenager finds battered Beetle/wounded Bumblebee, takes it back to garage only to find out it's an alien robot. That's exactly the Transformers film I've always wanted to see, so I'm rooting for it. (I recommend some people on here don't Google Christina Hodson, though, or they might actually explode with apoplexy when they see that she has been involved in creating gender bias detection algorithms for screenwriting software.   Kudos to her, I say.)

 

It’s all good mate. You completely missed my point though. My original statements weren’t about “live action”. Others started throwing that term around and you kind of latched onto the idea. I never used the term “live action”. I was talking “big budget Hollywood
Movie”. You don’t really need human actors in a big budget Hollywood transformers movie. Pretty much your entire argument got caught up in defining “live action”. I don’t care about live action vs CG. A lot of folks seem to fall in to the same trap of associating “animated” with “small scale” or dare I say it “bad” or at least “lower quality”.
My point with Avatar was that it used extensive mo-cap (I think 60% of the movie was CGI if you believe Wikipedia) hence my statement that it was effectively an animated movie. Huge swathes of that movie, including scenes with human actors, was CGI.

But more importantly we’ve once again kind of strayed off my real intention here. That’s almost certainly my fault as I was probably using hyperbole and got carried away.

I’m not trying to say you don’t necessarily need ANY humans in it (though I still maintain you could make a perfectly good Transformers movie with minimal or even no human characters). My main point is there is minimal need for human characters. In G1 we basically had two humans, Spike and Sparkplug, along with a bunch of random one or two episode players. And no one can seriously suggest that spike or sparkplug were anything other than bit players. Even in an episode like “Autobot Spike” where one of them was a “main character” he was in a robot body. Daniel spent most of the 86 movie in an exo-suit pretending to be a robot. Yet Bayformers insists on centering the plot around humans and sidelining the robots.
Humans are a minimal part of Transformers lore and almost always have been up until the bayformer stuff. Go back to that. Sure, throw in a few random bystanders or an odd “side character” if you must.
If folks can put aside the idea that “animated is bad” (and the way you keep throwing out Final Fantasy suggests you think that) I have yet to see a solid argument as to why you couldn’t use mo- cap, a combination of real world and digital sets and good CGI to make a block buster version of IDW’s MTMtE Lost Light stories?
Step back from the whole “live action” vs animated thing and look at the core idea - a big budget Hollywood movie that focuses on giant robots to tell a story and doesn’t rely on big name Hollywood faces to steal the limelight.
But like I said, it won’t happen and your post is almost a perfect example as to why. Execs see CGI and “animated” and think of kids movies, direct to DVD or past flops. Expecting studios to do something new and different isn’t gonna happen.
And also, sorry if anything I say comes of as aggressive, offensive or insulting. Not my intention. Just want to get that out there. I enjoy these kinds of discussions.