Now, it’s usually not fair to say that then-groundbreaking CGI didn’t age well. Like duh, it’s been 13 years since 2007, of course some of it will look like trash compared to some CGI today. Like when Nostalgia Critic goes after 2002 Spider-Man’s CGI and thinks it’s something to mock that film for. It’s not a valid criticism if you ask me, unless there was a general sentiment that it was bad back then too. I think 2007 looks perfectly fine today. The biggest thing that stands out to me is Optimus’s lip-syncing... which is pretty non-existent. Like Optimus’s lips look like two coconut halves on each other. ROTF is actually when they started recording Cullen’s mouth when he recorded the voice work and it absolutely shows. His facial animation is still there and good, but you can definitely see a difference between 2007 and beyond. I haven’t rewatched ROTF in a while, I know a lot of people have said the CGI looks unfinished in that one, I’ll have to see. DOTM a few weekends ago on Blu-day still looked stellar.
Eh, sure. It holds up well enough, probably one of the only things about that movie that HAS aged well. Industrial Light & Magic have done impressive work over the years, without a doubt, and even if the overall of the first film still isn't great to look at, it went on to inspire a decent Knight Rider revival and a great Iron Man film.
The CG still holds up incredibly well IMO, especially when you consider the limitations of the era, like the struggle to render matte red hence cutting the color wherever they could. It certainly helps that this movie took pains to integrate the CG with the practical effects.
I think the reason the first movie holds up so well is not just the fidelity of the graphics, but the way they were implemented. People criticize the shakey-cam, and justifiably so, but it really made the TFs feel like they were actually there. The imperfect framing made it feel organic in ways a perfectly framed and rendered CGI shot doesn't. A lot of the later movie shots felt too perfect, like a videogame, because the conditions were just too ideal. Another great thing about the CGI was the lighting. Again, very organic and the true-to-life imperfections of usually being shot at night or at dusk with limited lighting options, compared to perfectly lit daytime shots in later films where everything looks too perfect. The fact that the robots were rarely shown in ideal conditions made them feel less like they were just composited in and more like they were actually there on set, beholden to the natural elements of the scene just as the real actors were.
This is huge, and something the later movies forgot. The 2007 movie grounded the robots in naturalistic lighting that matched the environment they were in. There wasn't much, if any, "plussing" of the visuals that started with ROTF, just a straight up attempt to recreate the lighting/lenses/reflections of the background plates. If you study a still from 2007, it is possible to see that textures may be lower-res than later films, or objects less detailed, or whatever, but at a glance and more importantly in motion the 2007 approach beats the others hands down.
Looking at these two shots of Optimus Prime, I definitely feel like the first movie did a better job with the lighting and implementing the CGI characters into the real world. I still think that the 2007 is the best looking of all the films.
TF '07 could be released this year and it would still look good among other CGI-heavy films. Never liked the Bay designs but I've always been a stalwart for CGI because of what ILM did for Transformers in the first film.
Too me, the 2007 movie is when CGI in live action movies started to look really good, and the characters didn't look out of place.
I'm still bitter about that. As much as I dislike some parts of the Bayverse, the CGI is still one of the best aspects in the series. There's no way these fucking bears should have won over Transformers: It's solid proof the Academy is garbage.
I think it has. I still look at the metal of the Transformers and go... That looks like real metal reflected in sunlight. I mean most of the practical effects like Bonecrusher crashing through the bus still look impressive. But yeah...I can admit there's some odd ones like the Bumblebee lying on the dissection table. See 1:07
Couldn't have put it better myself, @Music! Of course, The Golden Compass also took some of the finest novels in the English language and adapted them as a Narnia clone... Back in 2007, Transformers was groundbreaking in terms of CGI - many have cited it as a highwater mark in visual effects. It's no exaggeration to say that the 2007 film set a new standard for large-scale special effects - indeed, the whole MCU probably wouldn't have existed if it weren't for what Transformers proved could be done with large-scale visual effects. The idea of having the big CGI alien robots be characters, with personalities and voices, was another factor - this was a film where the CGI effects were characters, just as much as the people on screen. This hadn't really been done in film before - Transformers, for visual effects, was the mid-2000s' Jurassic Park. I often say that Transformers was to film what the revival of Doctor Who was to TV - the 2005 revival basically said that you could have Hollywood-standard special effects and screenwriting for a television programme on television budgets. Without the 2005 revival of Doctor Who, we probably wouldn't have Stranger Things or Game of Thrones - that's how influential it was. In the same vein, Transformers showed what you could do with visual effects by bringing these characters to life - visual effects standards had advanced to a point where you could make giant transforming robots look real in CGI and portray them as characters. Remove these two things from history in the mid 2000's and the picture changes significantly. I was ten years old when the first Transformers came out and it blew me away - I'd had an ambition to make films for quite a few years and seeing Transformers was pretty much what catalysed that desire. I remember sitting in my local ODEON, watching the Blackout base attack and thinking "I want to make something like that someday". Transformers is the reason I want to be a filmmaker. Nowadays, we live in an age where we've seen the visual standard TF2007 got praised for done better and more effectively, with other action blockbusters such as the MCU having equally extravagant visual effects as well as much better acting, plotlines and characterization. People are starting to get that top-notch special effects can be paired with a good story - one does not necessarily have to overrule the other. We've also had an increased standard in CGI characterisation in recent years - the acclaim that Rocket Raccoon, Caesar and Iorek Byrnison (in the BBC/HBO His Dark Materials series) got, not just as visual effects, but as actual characters make most of the Bayverse Transformers look rather less impressive by comparison. Yes, it's an accomplishment they made these characters seem realistic and emotive (especially when some of them didn't even have humanoid faces), but we've had CGI characters who are more emotive, more realistic-looking and have significantly better dialogue and characterisation in the thirteen years since. The Bayverse Transformers were cutting-edge for the time, but are ho-hum now. The Bayverse failed because it didn't adapt to changing audience standards or advances in the field that it itself had pioneeted.
Yeah, always felt the Academy didn't want a movie based on toys or a Michael Bay film to have "Oscar-winning" attached to it.
The other reason is that New Line were hoping for The Golden Compass (or His Dark Materials) to be their next big film series, so they made a big awards push. The problem was the film bombed and was shite; watch the BBC/HBO TV series if you want a good idea on what the film SHOULD have been. However, yes, the idea of a Michael Bay film having Oscar-winning attached to it was a contributing factor.
