Eww. Another one of THESE threads.

I think I'm masochistic. It's the only probably explanation for why I venture into the movie subforum.

 

I think the problem is Revenge of the Fallen being profitable taught Paramount and the production team a bad lesson.

Get the right release date, get the right marketing, and then everything else doesn't matter because it's like the Pirates franchise of selling tickets even if the overall quality goes down in every respect except for the special effects.

Throw in that Paramount learned screw making the US ticket buyer happy we can sell films somewhere else and it just compounds the problem of Paramount not having a real interest in improving the film franchise until they have worn it out world wide.

Yes once in a while you still find the crazy artist types in Hollywood but mostly it's films by accountant where profit trumps art so as long as Transformers makes money screw the art of film making.

 

The issue is their are good moments that are ruined by a bunch of bad. If we strip a large portion of the movies then you find the good moments buried underneath - given that I'm doing a fan edit I've been noticing that a lot of these films improve from simple changes.

He said he 'wanted' to give them characterisation - but in truth all we got were stereotypes again. He doesn't seem to know how to write characters as the only Transformer with actual character is Optimus... and his characterisation fluctuates in quality throughout ROTF to AOE.

Anyway... maybe he does care... but probably not for the right reasons. I'd compare him to the Hasbro toy designers for TF;AOE. They have an idea of what their surveys suggest makes people interested in Transformers - but they have no clue of what people actually enjoy about the brand.

They've read the lore multiple times, they've seen the shows, but they've never played with the toys and thoughts that those aspects were acceptable on their own. They keep questioning what they can do to make it appeal to a larger fanbase and make more money... They think the idea of Transformers alone is not good enough to sell a movie on and due to this they instead force in every other aspect to sell the movie; a cheesy romance, tons of childish forced comedy, tons of over-done action scenes, etc...

Its this 'lack of faith' in the brand that causes them to include so much unnecessary stuff. Take TF;AOE for example, they were likely worried about it underperforming so they stretched out the movie and filled most the final battle with obvious product placement, songs, etc... we even had the Dinobots forced into the movie despite Bay hating the characters solely because they wanted to bring back the Dinobots and make more profit.

 

Scream 3!? Oh boy. I liked the Ring but that was easy enough to write as it was a almost shot for shot re-make of an already good film. So basically he's a bad writer.

 

Yep pretty much this.

 

Or you don't.

 

It does seem they could be really good action films by cutting out some of the padding and bit of re-editing to narrow the films down to a lean, mean, quick paced action film.

I guess people think movies have to be super long because Lord of the Rings was super long but sometimes shorter is better. I mean Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark is 115 of fun so I'm not sure why Transformers can't be shorter films.

 

Excellent topic, excellent post, and you are correct on many counts. Hasbro's interest is in selling toys, so they have a big say in how their toys are used in movies in which they have financial stake, because it relates to toy sales. Not all the ills of these movies can be laid Bay's feet; though its easy, customary, and for some even addictive, to do so.

 

 

^This.