There's a lot to dislike about the Bay movies, don't think there's much denying that. However, certain things annoy one person more than the other. So, what was the thing you disliked the most about these movies? That one thing that broke the camels back.

I'd say for me it's the lack of respect the actual Transformers got. I think in total there's like 3 interesting characters (Sentinel Prime, Lockdown, Crosshairs), a few more that have a hint of personality but just kinda suck (Optimus), stereotypes, mostly but not exclusively racial ones that don't make any sense for alien robots to have (Dino, Drift, Hound, Que, The Twins, Jazz, etc) or just literal nothing characters who don't even have one personality trait (Ratchet, Sideswipe, pretty much every Decepticon.)
I'm not expecting a super deep character study, but at the very least I want something, anything to be invested in when it comes to these characters.
I think the fact that a low budget rushed tie in DS game has better written characters than a mulit million dollar budget movie says a lot.

 

Yeah, I think the worst aspect is the characters. Both their personalities, or the lack thereof, and their designs. Seriously, most of the designs are god awful. Just gray blobs flying across the screen, and when you get two seconds to look at them, it's still a gray blob. But that's most of them, some have color, or unique designs, but those are far and few between. Some examples of gray and black designs that do nothing to stand out in the mind of the viewer are the following: sideswipe, jazz, ironhide (I guess he's kinda recognisable, but not really to me), black out, grindor (another irritating thing, how much the movies reuse same designs), a few different constructicons are nearly indistinguishable. Those are my best examples, but yeah. These uninspired pieces of trash designs are so annoying, and they just don't do it for me.

 

Mark Wahlberg

 

The constant, unfunny "humor." DOTM was my favorite of the original three movies largely because they dialed way, way back on that.

 

The only way the films could ever think of making the bad guys an actual threat was to plant some ancient crap in/on/around Earth for the convenience of the bad guys, as opposed to them being an actual threat in the present day, and past the first film this old shit had to be inserted into human history (or in the case of AoE, before the dawn of human civilization itself) to try and justify its existence for the bad guys to have any kind of teeth and also why the Transformers were even still around.

Which of course simply leads to contradicting objectives on Megatron's part, since he goes from wanting to kill humans (TF07, ROTF) to suddenly always wanting to use them as a slave labor force (DOTM), to suddenly now wanting them dead or whatever to make more plotdeviceonium (AoE), to does anybody even really know what he was doing in TLK?

Man, even G1 Megatron at least knew how to be proactive in the present day given his objective usually was dedicated to energy harvesting or attacking the Autobots and not some grandiose bullshit 5-million-year-plan that happened to revolve damn near entirely around the involvement of the human species.

 

Probably vibing in a corner somewhere with Barricade

 

John Turturro in ROTF

 

Hm. There's a lot to pick from, and I guess what you consider the worst may depend on what you consider more important.

I guess I'd say probably one of the worst aspects of the Bay movies is the absolutely abysmal utilization of characters and source material, it's like they just didn't care to do it right. Most of the characters (both Robot and human) are very shallow with little to no depth and very little personality. Like they came up with a sentence or two for each character (at most) and left it at that.

 

I'd say the worst aspects for me are the crude/dumb humor, the excessive runtimes, and the poor balance of robot/human screentime.

The humor sort of speaks for itself. I guess some people like it (and I like some jokes), but overall I generally find it unfunny and annoying. And usually completely inappropriate for sci-fi movies based on a children's brand about cartoon space robots.

If the runtimes were shorter, I think I'd like these movies a lot better. I'm actually the sort of person who can give a pass to a dumb mindless movie like Pacific Rim: Uprising if it's concise and doesn't waste my time. But one thing I find hard to forgive is a mediocre movie with a long runtime. If your movie is going to exceed two hours, it better be a really solid movie that justifies its runtime. And I just don't think the Transformers movies need to be nearly as long as they are. They don't have much to say, and the plots aren't really that great or complex. They could've cut each movie down to an hour and 45 minutes.

The movies have way too many (lengthy) scenes of only humans interacting with each other. I should make it clear...I like human presence in Transformers stories. But I don't need scenes of Sam looking for a job or Cade and Vivian dating in a submarine. These movies work best when the humans are interacting with the robots. Obviously some human-only scenes might be needed for the plot. But as they are, the human-only scenes in the Bay movies could have stood to have been really cut down.

 

My thoughts exactly. I thought AoE was also trending in the right direction, but then TLK was the worst of all. I'd love to watch the movies with all the bad humor cut out.

 

The humor

 

Yeah, the editing in the films really didn't help - a tighter storyline that didn't focus so much on only the humans so much would have improved things somewhat.

 

The utter contempt they had for the source material near the end.

 

The humor. As someone who watched the '80s cartoon fairly relentlessly, I'm not bothered by one-dimensional characters who have stereotypical accents or proclivities, and I enjoy watching human actors and also have some understanding of the realities of special effects budgets and the limitations that places on robot screen time, so those things don't bother me either. But the toilet humor was so tonally out of place.

 

I'm not a hater on the bayverse as i do enjoy some aspects but it would have to be aoe,tlk and the amount of human time throughout the whole movies.

 

The editing is a big issue in these movies. There's absolutely no reason AoE should have been over 2 and a half hours. There's so much pointless filler in these movies and a lot of it should have been cut by the editors.

 

Whilst I agree with you re: most of the characters, I should make the point that there is no one right way to adapt something. What constitutes "doing it right" or a "proper" adaptation? You've said this multiple times, but never explained in full?

And before you bring up Iron Man, that's a bad example, because there's only one Earth-616 Iron Man - for every MCU character, there is a single source to adapt. Just one - yes, different writers have interpreted the characters in different ways, but ultimately, they all exist in the same continuity.

Conversely, there are many different Optimuses, Bumblebees, Megatrons, Starscreams and Soundwaves in many different continuities. The movies are just another new continuity, independent of all the rest - they're no more an adaptation of G1 than TF: Animated is. Why must they all be beholden to the G1 version of the character?

What I think most people don't understand is that you can be faithful to your source material, but you can also be crippled by it. The best thing to do is respectfully acknowledge what came before, but ultimately try and make your adaptation stand on its own - even if, sometimes, that means changing concepts and characters quite significantly.

If you lean too much on your source material, you end up with a bad film - for example, the 2019 Lion King, which is not just an abysmal film, but an absolutely terrible adaptation of the source material.

Why? It was exactly the same as the original, with absolutely nothing that fans of the original had actually wanted from the remake (e.g. a more sympathetic portrayal of the hyenas, a deeper exploration of the backstory re: Scar and Mufasa, complete with a proper explanation on how Scar got his you-know-what).

Both as adaptations and as films overall, I would rank the Bayverse First Trilogy over the 2019 Lion King any day.

 

I've seen this point before and it doesn't work. Most characters share character traits between continuities. My favourite example being Soundwave. He either always has a similar design and/or the voice, the only major exception being the movie version.

As for Iron Man, there are alternate versions of the guy such as Ultimate, to which the MCU has taken something from. Translate this to a TF character and it's usually just a matter of taking consistent traits of the character and go from there.

 

I agree with pretty much everyone on here and would like to add the pointless over-sexualisation of the female characters. I know a lot of movies sexualise their actors but Bay does it so blatantly and to such an extent that it takes you out of what’s happening

 

Throughout the Bayverse, Soundwave has the same position and rank that he does in G1, the same role as a spymaster, the same telecommunication-based abilities, the same sidekicks, and the same loyalty to Megatron.

The only changes that the Bayverse did, his voice and design, were, ultimately, surface-level. Whether or not we dislike those changes doesn't change the fact that Bayverse Soundwave wasn't really a radical departure from previous incarnations of the character.

Re: Ultimate Marvel, many of the Ultimate Marvel characters barely resembled their originals in personality e.g. Reed Richards, half the X-Men, Black Widow and Deadpool, all of whom resembled their original counterparts so little they might as well have been new characters.

The Bayverse did, for the most part, translate consistent traits from the well-known characters and go from there. For the lessser-known characters, they could just go all out - I doubt anyone gives a shit that, say, Barricade and Crosshairs don't look or act like their G1 counterparts.