When did Bay formers start to mess up?

 

Around after the second movie when they never seemed to want to improve the writing or treat the actual Transformers, you know, the movie namesakes, as actual characters and giving Humans far to much of the screen time.

And even when they started to try to do that a bit with AOE/TLK, they just botched it with even worse writing and worse designs.

 

      

There is no magic moment when Bayformers "messed up." Sure, I have preferences for some movies ogre others, but there is no imaginary scapegoat to peg all of the Bay movie's problems on, both real and imagined. One fan's "ruined forever," is another's G1. One fan's "ruined forever," is another fan's, "Doing better."

90% of the responses in these threads are just people projecting their own personal preferences and opinions onto millions of general audience members and/or fans just touting dogmatic fandom orthodoxy as "facts," despite there being little to no evidence backing it up.

 

@Shmoptimus Prime So I was saying.
My thought to TLK was that they could make almost a reboot without reestarting the universe. Most Autobots and Decepticons had died (mainly the cool ones) and KSI was using bodies to make new Transformers. So, the same way Megatron got ressurected, and Barricade came back in that movie, all the other dudes could have come back with better designs, maybe more iconics? They could have been using all bots from Tf1 to 3. And all the Decepticons. And the Optimus with purple eyes was giving me idea of dark energon, so, Unicron. We could have got a brainwashed Sentinel, Megatron and Dark energon-ized Optimus and many Decepticons fighting against the Autobots, at least the main cons and bots, and having some Unicron thing in it which the Autobots would have to bring the matrix to its core just like in the 86 movie. Hot Rod was there, so I really expected something like Rodimus, not in that movie obviously but in future ones. How would the Autobots fight all this? Well, they had ALL the Autobots and the Dinobots, Ultra Magnus could come from space with Hot Rod like. So we could have Grimlock getting his revenge on Prime, or maybe in 2 guys like Sentinel or Megatron with Prime. Ultra Magnus, Ironhide, Bumblebee (?).
Anything better to whatever that movie was. I don't understand what that plot is until today
Also, the characters should get proper development and design, like, making the right design and personality for Jetfire, Soundwave, Shockwave...

 

The designs weren't so bad. They actually looked like complex aliens. I like the fact Crosshairs' "cloths" were part of the transformation, many of them looked way more "humanic" like Optimus and Megatron who are like big people in armor

 

Oh, also, the movie was giving a vibe they were really going to talk about Transformers and history. They could have done something cool, used the predacon properly, explained what he is, something we never see, and giving some story to the Dinobots

 

That's my main problem with the AOE/TLK designs. Most of them you couldn't tell they transformed into anything like you could in the first three movies.

And I never really got the argument that the designs in any of the films were "alien", they were just Humanoid Autobots or Insectoid Deceptions with a whole bunch of moving parts.

 

The main issue was that the films were never concerned with treating the robots as their own real characters as opposed to a somewhat fleshed out non-human presence, simply to repeat terrible deus ex machina alien invasion mcguffin plot device stories ad nauseum.

It never even went into the fact that the war had boiled down to purely Autobot vs Decepticon, since most of the time the decepticons care more about killing the humans in the dumbest, most extravagently obscene ways possible than actually winning the war they're supposedly still fighting.

Like, in DOTM, when Starscream effectively ends the war by blowing up the shuttle with all the Autobots on it, supposedly killing them all. And then the film just keeps going. We know the Autobots aren't dead because the good guys are going to win.

But instead of a scene where Prime rallies the Autobots and reminds them why they're even still protecting the humans...we get a long, drawn out scene of this rag tag group of humans going off to Chicago instead, and THEN when they're predictably useless against permiter defenses of one enemy aircraft, the Autobots THEN show up and proceed to effectively violate the geneva convention by what the Wreckers do to that pilot. We know the Autobots aren't dead but the film still acts like they are until that point, whereas the humans don't really do anything interesting and yet are the focus because that's what the film cares about despite the film not being titled 'Humans'.

Transformers films up to this point, and even Bumblebee does unfortunately also fall victim to this, don't really seem to care about putting Transformers centric plotlines and character driven scenes first. And the argument about how CGI is expensive and shit is itself bullshit because the source material has a couple of ways to get around this, such as the fact they still talk in alt. mode and moreover, holo matter avatars. Have Peter Cullen walk around as Prime's remote control human expy and be awkward, the clash of culture is half the fun of films involving non-human aliens and civilzations interacting with humans.

Instead we get films where the least interesting things are the robots when not blowing off each other's heads.

Oh my god it's almost like this is a public discussion forum or something.

 

So I bring it, they are high tech aliens. Something so advanced we mere humans can't imagine. And I mean, after I saw Dragoon, I don't see problem with them not looking like they turn into something

And another thing that I don't believe, is how comics that don't cost 1/1000 the cost of production of those movies have better writers, better script and better everything. Maybe Hasbro should just have put IDW to direct a movie lol
I mean, any child who sees TLK knows which that has no coerency, absolutely none

 

One aspect I'd consider wasted potential is the retreading of the same ground throughout the series. We didn't need anti-Transformer organizations in 3 out of 5 movies and subplots about the government distrusting the Autobots in 5 out of 5 movies. We didn't need two movies about Cybertron coming to Earth or two movies featuring ancient knight Autobots with beast alternate modes. We didn't need secret alternate history stuff in every movie. I'd go as far as to say we didn't need three movies with the same human protagonist. While the MCU has flaws, one aspect that makes it really interesting is that they were able to do a lot of diverse plots, and eventually get into crazier stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok and Infinity War (stuff people never expected to see on screen). Transformers could have done that too, but they were a bit hindered by wanting to repeat the same things.

 

Weren't the 5 movies about Autobots, Decepticons and humans running for an ancient artifact that could destroy the world? I mean, it summons the 5 movies
And we don't even know what the TLK artefact was supposed to do lol

 

anyway, rotf was prolly where shit just headed to the worst since all it was just took whatever was good about the first movie, got rid of it and made what was bad about that one worse
it also became the face of the franchise so that had its own problems

 

Yeah, exactly.

And I think some formulaic elements would have been fine if the overall series was more ambitious (even the Marvel movies tend to be somewhat formulaic), but the Transformers series just didn't attempt to push the boundaries very much. AOE feels like the most ambitious movie to me, but by that time interest in the series was already declining.

 

How is this not you projecting that you believe your own personal preferences and opinions are better than anybody else, in complete contradiction to your own statement on the matter? What makes you so much more knowledgeable than anybody else? What makes you, to cite the oft quoted term, the true fan because you seem to believe you understand this shit more than any single other person enough that you feel justified in dictating to other people the manner in which they should act and think?

Humor me, if you will, how you would have people converse in your perfect little fandom where people don't shit on the films on a daily basis? How you think people should live their lives because you can't get over a bunch of anonymous users hiding behind jpgs all think your previous little film franchise wasn't anything less than the second coming of Citizen Kane.

Because really, your logic dictates stagnation is the only state in which things can exist. You can not improve upon something if you do not understand where it is faulty, but you oft state that one can not even make such a claim because one person might disagree. That everything exists in a state of neither bad nor good. A world that sounds incredibly goddamn boring.

 

Most transformer media is formulaic, even in TFP we had the running for the artifact formula. But they could do that interesting and kinda rich in development. You know, as a fan, I like to know the why of things, their names, like, even having 3 combiners in the franchise this name is never mentioned and someone who just watched movies would never know their name, why they can combine and the others can't
Imagine if you didn't know the Dinobots, and in aoe 4 robots that turn into dinossaurs appear and you don't even know their name bcs it isn't mentioned, and you have no idea why they turn into dinossaurs

The sad is that everything based in the movies has more development and story, like the comics, any movie game, and even the stories that come in the back of the toy boxes

 

My own personal preferences are not better than everyone else's. When I say you guys are wrong, it's because you use things that are provably wrong to support your opinions and not the opinions themselves. You don't have to like the Bay movies or like what I like. I'm not "better" than anyone else. I just wish people would not play so loosely with facts to support their opinions. Have all of the subjective opinions you want, but if you're going to act is if your opinions are supported by facts, at least get the facts right!

Yes, I admittedly can get in a little heated discussion some times. Most of us are passionate, and maybe we all should simmer down and get a little less heated.

I don't really think the designs are that different?

I also have never claimed to be a "true fan." We're all truly fans here, otherwise we probably wouldn't be here.

The perfect forum is one with a wide variety of opinions and NOT 90+ percent repeating the same things.

A claim I have never made.

You can objectively describe but not objectively judge.

The world I live in is amazingly interesting and endlessly fascinating.

 

Actually doing the most right now.

 

I can agree with that. The movie universe was interesting but a lot of that was from outside the movies themselves. The fights and designs were cool though.

 

Well to be fair the Cons were hunting civilians for the lolz in DOTM like in AHM, so in this case they're just getting warcrimed back

Agreed, i bring that up a lot, all live-action movies seem to be scared to make the cybertronians be the spotlight characters who carry the story

 

I was summoned here so I guess I'll respond to a few things.

Compared to virtually every single other TF continuity, yes bayverse are by far the most alien. They aren't just large humanoid men wearing boxy armor, and there is a LOT of variation in their silhouettes and body types. What other series has main characters with four thumbs on both hands? Transformers even influenced the designs of almost every alien mech movie that came after it for a while.

Comics don't take hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of people to make. Much lower risk means much more creative freedom.

Completely agree with this. In terms of a formula, I didn't mind it as much for the first trilogy, but once aoe ALSO devolved into a search for a thing, and once tlk ALSO introduced some shadowy human organization and ALSO a magic space thingy I was done. Aoe had so much potential and was really breaking the mold but it was bogged down by product placement and unnecessary nonsense. The fan edit is sooooo much better! TLK though is unsalvageable. Too many competing storylines, nothing builds on what came before, and it has very little originality. Some of the bot designs are killer though.