I started re-watching the 80s cartoon last year and it's really not that good. I think people are remembering their childhood and the fun they had, not the cartoon itself. At one point I thought... You know, the Michael Bay films are quite sophisticated in comparison.
Transformers: Age of Extinction - Grading & Discussion
- Thread starter Agent Richard07
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The cartoon is what it is. But yeah often I think of the G1 series and I picture in my mind the animated style/look of the 1986 movie, thinking the whole show was like that too.
Then you go back and actually watch an episode or two, and you remember how cheap and basic an awful lot of it is.
Then you go back and actually watch an episode or two, and you remember how cheap and basic an awful lot of it is.
Or maybe yet another contradictory origin story.
None of them are contradictory. It's all one story, told out of sequence.
I started rewatching too. After the first season the plots are definitely as weak as the movies and the episodes are full of animation errors. That said calling Michael Bay films sophisticated is going too far.
Well they've never cleared up the whole point/priority of the Decepticons' presence in Earth's solar system: to recover the Allspark, to find the star harvester, or to find Sentinel Prime. Why would they want to follow the Fallen's plan to harvest Earth's sun for energon if Earth could also provide slaves for Sentinel Prime's plan to rebuild Cybertron? And were they going with those ideas before or after they learned that the Allspark was on Earth?Or maybe yet another contradictory origin story.
None of them are contradictory. It's all one story, told out of sequence.
All three, because at some point in time each was important to deciding the conflict on Cybertron. The All-Spark can be used to create new soldiers or turn another world's technology into assloads of cannon fodder with guns. Anyone who could re-energize Cybertron using the star harvester would have an upper hand over his enemies. And Sentinel Prime made a deal with the Decepticon leader to end the war in his favor. I can see a classic dictator like Megatron wanting all these irons in his fire, like Hitler sending idiots around the world looking for mystical weapons.
You're assuming enslaving Humanity was Sentinel's original plan. He actually left Cybertron long before there were as many humans on the planet as there were at the time of "Dark of The Moon." It's more likely that it was his original goal to improve upon the Fallen's plan - by moving Cybertron close to the solar system and then harvesting the star, making the re-energizing of Cybertron easier - but he was waylaid by frontline Decepts who just saw an Autobot ship and attacked (again, Megatron the classic dictator would be stingy about who he shared information with) and ended up crashing on the moon and going into stasis. By the time he was awakened the harvester was already destroyed, so scratch plan A, but there's seven billion potential slaves on the planet, so on to plan B.
Before. The Allspark ending up on Earth was the last in a long line of straws for Megatron, forcing him to leave Cybertron himself to resolve his various problems. The rest of the Decepticons - those with knowledge of his plans and not - were mainly following him.
See? Easy-peasy.
So human wake Megatron up by screwing with stuff they probably shouldn't have touched and it's the Autobot's fault?
It's been implied that the humans responsible might have been AIM, as they're never identified by that name but they wear uniforms similar to AIM's. Not all of the survivors shared the same animosity towards the Autobots and were even willing to accept their help, but Megatron represented a seemingly invincible threat after the nuclear strikes. It didn't help that he resurrected many of the Transformers who had been killed off by Starscream in the Underbase saga (despite the fact that it was stated both factions would recover their own dead, several Autobots are clearly shown as part of Megatron's army) as mere puppets, and he needed to keep Ratchet at least partially alive because of their link.
For their part, it's probably true in a small sense that Prime and some of the other Autobots got distracted by rebuilding Cybertron and didn't think about other worlds that the war had affected. When it became clear to him that the human resistance wasn't comfortable with the idea of having Transformers around, he persuaded them to establish an alliance between Earth and Nebulos that would benefit both cultures. The advanced Nebulan technology could help Earth rebuild, and the Nebulans could benefit from human intelligence and endurance after Scorponok briefly had control over their world.
I sure wonder what the United Nations and the Autobots will do about Lockdown's ship and all the aliens aboard.
Yeah that was a huge surprise for me; they showed a biological alien in this one!
So, I've just finished re-watching "the original trilogy" and it just impresses on me the little ways that TF4 went wrong. They're definitely not perfect, but all three are iconic classic popcorn movies that look gorgeous that I can watch over and over again.
BTW in the opening of TF1 Prime's narration says that they don't know who created the Allspark Cube but it gave them life. So that jives with these mysterious creators in TF4 that they don't know anything about. They created the Cube which the TFs came from.
So, I've just finished re-watching "the original trilogy" and it just impresses on me the little ways that TF4 went wrong. They're definitely not perfect, but all three are iconic classic popcorn movies that look gorgeous that I can watch over and over again.
BTW in the opening of TF1 Prime's narration says that they don't know who created the Allspark Cube but it gave them life. So that jives with these mysterious creators in TF4 that they don't know anything about. They created the Cube which the TFs came from.
If the original Transformer movies are "iconic classics" one can watch over and over again then I weep for our future.
doubleohfive
Fleet Admiral
Saw Age of Extinction on Saturday afternoon.
It was a loud, obnoxious, pointless, incoherent yet repetitive mess. Utter cinematic garbage with the intellectual capacity of a wet sock.
That being said, that was precisely what I was wanting at the time, so even though I fell asleep in the middle of the film, I'm not complaining.
Michael Bay is a moneymaking genius and knows how to get butts into those theater seats. I wouldn't call it good and I sure as shit wouldn't call it art, but it satisfied my needs at the time.
It was a loud, obnoxious, pointless, incoherent yet repetitive mess. Utter cinematic garbage with the intellectual capacity of a wet sock.
That being said, that was precisely what I was wanting at the time, so even though I fell asleep in the middle of the film, I'm not complaining.
Michael Bay is a moneymaking genius and knows how to get butts into those theater seats. I wouldn't call it good and I sure as shit wouldn't call it art, but it satisfied my needs at the time.
I suppose Lockdown could have been fed a summarized story or maybe he was telling a summarized story, but he said "You think you were born? You were built." The movies never show the Allspark actually birthing any of the major characters, but it seems strange that the original Transformers such as the Fallen know all about the Allspark but never mentioned the Creators.
I was pleased to speak to a 17 year old couple who recognised the nonsense.
Gives me some hope.
I would say the best part of this movie is the boyfriend who has something like fourteen different accents, all of them bad, and all of them attributed to "Irish."
And are we supposed to like a character who carries in his wallet a laminated outline of AoC statues and openly MOCKS to the father of the teenage girl he is doing that he's going to pipe her pretty much right under his nose?
I mean, is this guy supposed to be a character we're to like or see as the complete creeper he is?
I mean, if the two are in a relationship, fine. If the two's relationship is legal under the statues of the state, fine. But it's hard to really root for the guy and accept him as the girl's boyfriend when we hardly see any relationship between the two and just see the guy bragging that he gets to plow some under-age tail.
The character was an asshole. I enjoyed how bad the actor was.
Second best part was Mark Wahlberg wearing glasses because his character was an inventor. Ooo. Range.
Second best part was Mark Wahlberg wearing glasses because his character was an inventor. Ooo. Range.
It makes perfect sense if none of the above know the origin of the All-spark, as Prime implied in that same opening narration. And it's entirely possible that they know its purpose but not its origin if it was created in the time of the dinosaurs.
Here's how I see it: At one point in the ancient past the creators decided they wanted to mass produce autonomous robotic lifeforms. Why isn't important. The important thing is how. To mass produce a product you need raw materials, an assembly line and a factory to put them in. They created the raw material - living metal - by coming to Earth and killing the dinosaurs. Then they built the factory - Cybertron - and they built the assembly line - the All-spark - installed the assembly line in the factory and turned it on, whereupon it began producing copious numbers of autonomous robotic lifeforms.
The thing is, if the creators' reasons for doing all this don't include them actually interacting with their creations, the Cybertronians could go for millennia thinking the All-spark is the source of their existence. And without knowing their true purpose in the universe, they'd simply make up their own, so they either become champions - Autobots - or conquerors - Decepticons - and act accordingly.
What the latest movie implies is that the creators have finally woken up to the chaos being caused by what they consider their property and decided to take action. They created Lockdown - Unaffilated - to essentially "lock down" the troublemakers.
I rated it 'Just OK'.
If only cause I went in knowing full well what to expect. I didn't go in thinking this was going to be a game changer. Same director who's controlling script and direction as the prior installments. Anyone who expected better only fooled themselves. It's clear though that Steven Spielbergs influence from the first movie has been missing the most in the sequels. It seems very apparent that the heart of what made the first film unique fun has slid away in the sequels.
I won't pretend to explain away plot holes. It was exactly what it set out to be and was largely as I was led to believe it would be based on trailers. This didn't pretend to be anything other than advertised.
If only cause I went in knowing full well what to expect. I didn't go in thinking this was going to be a game changer. Same director who's controlling script and direction as the prior installments. Anyone who expected better only fooled themselves. It's clear though that Steven Spielbergs influence from the first movie has been missing the most in the sequels. It seems very apparent that the heart of what made the first film unique fun has slid away in the sequels.
I won't pretend to explain away plot holes. It was exactly what it set out to be and was largely as I was led to believe it would be based on trailers. This didn't pretend to be anything other than advertised.
So the Allspark was the source of energy and sentience for all the Transformers. But what's the significance of the transformium metal? In the first film, any machine or device that the Allspark "touched" transformed into a sentient robot.
doubleohfive
Fleet Admiral
I realize this is a thread about a Tranformers film, so naturally it's going to be not only a sausage-fest but a sausage-fest with all the usual suspects in here, but I am 100% certain you could have probably phrased the point you were making about this without being so damn crude.