I didn't have have much problem with him in the '07 film, but ROTF is where I agree with this due to a single line alone "Give me your face!"

Seriously, this is not the kind of lines I expect from a respected Autobot leader. Prime kills of course, but I don't think he's the type who takes any kind of joy in it. So yes, the Bayverse Prime is definitely not the greatest interpretation of him.

But then again most of the Cybertronians in Bayverse aren't the best interpretation of themselves, Peeing Bumblebee, Testicles Devastator, Leg Humping Wheelie, Worm Pet Shockwave and the list goes on.......oh wait how can I forget Racist Blackface Mudflaps and Skids!

 

It really bugged me how the character was just all over the place. One moment he's the wise old robot attempting to give sage advise to the humans. At some point later in the movies he's a rage monster just as savage and brutal as the Decepticons. Instead of character development the writers just slapped in whatever sort of personality they needed out of Prime in the moment.

Always happy to see a great voice actor get more work, but my goodness he's just too talented for writers to hand him such bad material and hope he can save those bad lines.

 

Except, as other posters have stated, it was not revenge. Optimus had gotten past that in the first half of the movie, through his conversations with Cade.

The killing of Attinger was not a morally ambiguous action; it was, morally, the right thing to do. Firstly, Attinger had pulled a gun on Cade and was ready to kill him; Optimus killed Attinger to save Cade.

Secondly, Attinger was a monster; this was a man who murdered several of Prime's fellow Autobots, flippantly dismissed civilian casualties in Galvatron and Stinger's rampage and was willing to murder innocent people for the crime of getting in his way. And he committed all these hideous atrocities to line his grimy little pockets from, basically, war profiteering.

Basically, Attinger did not deserve mercy or compassion; there was literally nothing to indicate he was anything other than a lying, hypocritical murderer who would kill anyone in his way simply to get the money and fame he craved.

Except what Prime did was not murder. Prime killed an enemy combatant who had flagrantly demonstrated he was beyond redemption in order to protect a comrade. That is not a morally ignoble action.

 

Killing in self defence and to protect people you care for is one thing. A face fetish and body dismemberment are another. Bay films Prime is a disgrace to the character. I'll never buy any toy either the design is ugly as sin.

 

Optimus was restrained... me, I woulda squeezed or stomped on Attinger until he popped like a ketchup packet, for his entire lifetime of misdeeds toward both man and machine. You all heard how he threatened Cade's daughter and it's a safe bet he'd probably DONE worse to other innocents before... s***head had it coming, a close encounter with the wrong end of a woodchipper feetfirst woulda been Well and Truly Earned. Zero tears shed, Zero F's Given, I'd like to shake Optimus's hand and buy him a beer for ridding the world of such walking garbage.

 

You've got it.

People often cite Prime's killing of Attinger as if it was a morally ignoble action, when it was exactly the opposite. It was killing someone who had flagrantly proven himself beyond redemption in service of the greater good.

 

OP over here braver than the marines for posting this in the movie forum.

I always thought that a lot of Optimus's (the character concept in general) ideology, particularly the "we don't harm humans" bit, came from a feeling of responsibility that he felt his race had, being inherently more powerful and more advanced than humanity. The idea is that it would be immoral to use that superiority against a race of much, much weaker sentient beings who could never defend themselves as equals. It's sort of like how you don't drop-kick an angry toddler, or why most states have laws about the limits of firearm usage in self-defense.

With this as his ideological basis, the problem and moral conflict comes when humanity becomes capable of harming and killing Cybertronians. This is the dilemma that Age of Extinction should have addressed with its (extremely halfhearted) focus on Optimus's anger and betrayal against humanity. However, the movie continuity shot itself in the foot by immediately establishing humanity as capable to killing Cybertronians with little-to-no assistance, yet Optimus continues pontificating about not harming humans, with his personal reasoning for it pretty much being "just cuz." So when Cemetery Wind is out there killing Autobots (which is apparently more of a moral dilemma than humans killing Decepticons, but that's a whole other debate), Optimus suddenly wrestling with his own moral code makes very little sense - it's something he should have faced immediately after humans almost single-handedly killed two Decepticons in the first movie.

(This is without even bringing up the bit in Dark of the Moon where it's straight-up presenting Optimus and the Autobots conducting military operations for the U.S. government against other nations/human groups, which presents a far greater moral dilemma for Optimus than killing one particularly bad human, and honestly just raises even more troubling questions about Optimus's motivations and how much any larger sense of morality plays into his actions.)

This line of thinking is why we have concepts like due process and civil rights in general, and why vigilantism is pretty much always a Bad Thing.

 

As opposed to Attinger not getting the 'get out of jail free' card by simply being killed? Everything he built was now in ashes, he'd helped an alien threat try to basically destroy humanity because he was a fucking dumbass, and he'd lied to the entire US government by basically depriving them of a critical military asset that outranks nuclear ICBMs.

The better way to have dealt with Attinger was to make him actually pay for his crimes. Him getting offed by the one guy who under no circumstances should have basically proven to be a hypocrite is just another example of AoE's shit-tacular writing of being entirely style over substance, with the added irony of proving him right in the end. What better way to throw it all back in Attinger's face by having the face of the Cybertronians, the ones Attinger was convinced were murderous scum (And yet decided building MORE of them was somehow a good idea), find a way to make his ass pay for basically sanctioned alien genocide without doing the one thing Attinger thought they were only good for?

Eye for an Eye is not what the Autobots should stand for. Even if Cade was about to be killed (and he absolutely should have because he's a shit character in his own right), Optimus could have resolved that little issue without having to resort to, again, proving Attinger right all along.

 

As far as I'm concerned Prime didn't murder Attinger; he saved Cade's life.

Now, if someone wants to call that murder then so be it. I'll just think different of them.
But if it IS in fact murder then Cops murder bad guys when trying to save others (normally these cops are called 'heroes'); or if anyone ends up fatally stopping party A in order to prevent them from killing party B for that matter.

If people desire to consider these actions as murder... then I'll have no other recourse but to consider some forms of murder as good.

Lets recall the scene: knowing that cybertronian weapons vaporize (or in the Bee movie, liquify) humans, Attinger wasn't vaporized; Prime shot the ground in front of Attinger and the concussion killed him.

And for the record, if Prim HAD of shot Attinger directly and vaped him I would have been ok with it.

 

I just got off my flight and checked this thread holy shit what have my careless hands wrought

 

Attinger's connections would have ensured he walked to commit further Rape-Pillage-Mass Murder. Better woulda been Cade giving him two in the nutsack then one in the brainstem ("you police yours, we police ours"), but...

As a licensed concealed-weapons carrier and former Executive Protection agent who's had a sidearm strapped on for most of my life, if I see someone using deadly force against an innocent third party I do have a legal right to engage with equal deadly force in that person's defense.

 

True-and even the fact that Peter Cullen had to audition for a role he had played well for 30 years prior. . .

 

That's bullshit because his connections would drop him faster than a sack of bricks - his entire fucking operation was in ruins. No more magic bullshitonium, no more bounty hunter to do the heavy lifting, no KSI, no nothing. Why would his 'connections' pull strings for his benefit when he himself had nothing in return to give them anymore? If anything, his 'connections' stood to gain more by exposing him in that situation because then those in governing power would probably be more inclined to 'look the other way' into their own affairs.

Yes, but Prime isn't Cade's personal bodyguard detail - he's supposed to be a larger than life hero who actually can get away with doing the right thing. It makes no sense for the film makers to continuously say shit like human viewpoints are necessary to understand the robots, when the robots act like humans anyway.

 

AMEN!! And in killing Attinger, he also proved Stanley Tucci's character right.

 

Hearing bloodthirsty Optimus Prime in Dark of the Moon saying, "We will kill them all," was horrendous. It's not something Optimus would ever say. It's hot garbage. I have no disrespect at all for Peter Cullen. He's a good dude and he's doing what he's asked and paid to do. He's doing his job. My malice is directed at the writers and Michael Bay.

Michael Bay never understood Transformers or these characters. His depiction of Optimus Prime is proof of that.

 

Agreed- and in an alternate universe, Bay would come out and admit that his take was a huge satire of the source material, hence why the designs and characterizations were created in the manner they were. . .

 

Yeah i heard even Peter Cullen, was disappointed on what direction Prime was taking.

 

The inherent difficulty in debating what-ifs like "would Attinger still be as much of a threat if Optimus hadn't executed him" with a movie franchise like this is that there's really nothing concrete to use as an argument. The movies give no substantial information about how well-connected Attinger is, who exactly is funding them, exactly what CW's relation to the United States government is, how the Chinese government (or in fact any other sovereign nations) feels about the situation, how the presence of Cybertronians has changed the geopolitical landscape in general, to what extent they are even recognized as right-bearing individuals under international and domestic law, and so on.

On top of this, the films themselves conform to no internal logic or consistent continuity, which means that even if any of the above questions were even hinted at in one movie, it's impossible to draw conclusions regarding the setting because the next movie ignored it and introduced something contradictory. (We can't even use real-world logic because the films have a tendency to throw that out the window before anything else.)

--

In thinking about all this, I just realized that the IDW comics under Mike Costa's run (in what is universally considered the worst part of the continuity) tackled the exact issues that Age of Extinction ignored. Not only did it at least attempt to portray Optimus wrestling with his own personal moral code regarding the protection of humans when the military was actively hunting Cybertronians, but it also showed how Cybertronians were seen on a global scale, with the Combaticons and Predacons even selling their services out to North Korea and China, respectively, which presented a direct challenge to the Autobot-military relationship that was common in the movies.

Not only that, but it built up to a climax in which Jazz killed a human who may or may not have been about to kill Bumblebee. In the comics, this is treated as an appropriately huge deal and ultimately leads to the Autobots severing their ties with Earth for years, with Jazz (and Optimus) still being haunted by it until the end of the continuity. In the movie, it's just something Optimus does, without any real narrative buildup, that neither he nor anyone else has any sort of issue with.

(Another point: hell, even the act of killing Attinger can't be construed as a moment of climax for Optimus's supposed character journey, as he already proclaimed, without a trace of uncertainty, that he was going to kill him, like, halfway through the movie, and it was never challenged.)

 

Every time I hear this argument brought up, it reminds me of Superman fans who say the same sort of thing. I am absolutely a Superman fan- rather, a fan of the idea of the character rather than what's been done with him in the past 20 years. But it seems fans prefer this caricature on a pedestal who can save every day without difficulty rather than actually have to deal with real evil and real solutions to that evil that are hard. The real struggle for a hero on the side of good is the wisdom to know where moral law and principle are at rule and the extraordinarily subtle nuances of discerning them in real time, without the aid of armchair critics. And what defines real leaders is the ability to deal with problems when there are no easy answers and those solutions are going to be second-guessed no matter what. Amplify that difficulty tenfold with war, with the understanding that evil-- uncompromising evil-- must be dealt with swiftly and decisively.

In short, comments like this remind me why so many fans of heroes like Optimus, Superman, and these moral vanguard archetypes are, generally speaking, kinda whiny sanctimonious pansies (at least from my generation). But maybe it's just another case of my love for a property but irritation with the fans of said property.

 

*brushes off glass shards*

You're not wrong, but I do think he had more character in G1 than he did in Bayverse. It felt like there were more aspects to his personality, at least in my opinion.

He had a better blend of traits and we saw them expressed through action and dialogue: we saw as many instances of him being light-hearted and jovial as we did serious and stoic and although his backstory with Megatron was probably mostly an excuse for an aesop, it was a bit of an interesting addition that provided not just a reason for why he sided against Megatron but also a reason for why his ideology differs from his.

Bay Prime always felt shallower in comparison; less like a character and more like an archetype or, as you put it, "a vessel for Bay and the filmmakers to have cool action scenes with." I never got the impression that the filmmakers. or at least Bay, intended for the audience to put much thought into the characters or anything in the movie(s) really, especially since the seams start to show if you try. They seem intended as "surface-level" entertainment.

That's not knocking on anyone that likes these movies or Bay Prime, of course. I loathe these movies entirely and I don't consider even consider them to be decent action flicks but that doesn't mean I think others can't still enjoy them or shouldn't be allowed to. I'm judging the movies and sometimes their creators but not you.