I still really like the Transformers movies

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > I still really like the Transformers movies

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Terry van Feleday posted:

Look at this face. Look at it. This is sheer loving contempt dot jpeg.

Or Dredd.jpg. Optimus Prime and Judge Dredd are surprisingly similar in their unsmiling, merciless and single-minded dedication to their cause (whether it be the Law or Eternal War) and their application of instant, brutal and lethal "justice".

# ¿ Sep 29, 2013 19:40

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 06:19

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Olibu posted:

In fact, the film is so embarrassed by them that after that film, they are never seen or mentioned of again.

For all Michael Bay's claims that the Twins weren't in DOTM at any point, someone with sharp eyes and too much time on their hands found several shots where they appear in the film, both as cars and even in CGI Autobot form. (There's also a suspicious two-car-sized gap in the convoy when the Autobots are driving out to the shuttle launch pad; it would have been straightforward enough for ILM to paint them out...)

Considering that the film shows the failure of the surveillance society (the Decepticons cruise around cities as they please without setting off the detectors), it's perhaps apt that this Orwellian attempt to drop the Twins into the memory hole also wasn't quite successful.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2013 15:27

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

SirDrone posted:

It always irks me that when the humans have guns capable of fighting transformers most of them don't go down easy yet Blackout who annihilated an entire base and fought off both Rachet and Ironhide got screwed by a couple of blasts from a grenade launcher despite the so called weak spot seemly pretty armored.

A couple of blasts that the guy firing them was about ten feet away from, at that.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2014 14:17

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Bloodnose posted:

And yeah when I pointed out some of the flaws with Hong Kong geography to one of the producers, he laughed and brought up the drive from LA to Hoover Dam.

Excuse me, but I think you'll find it wasn't LA but "Mission City", which even though it looked exactly like LA and contained numerous LA landmarks was an entirely different place because

# ¿ Jun 22, 2014 18:19

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Liking the Transformers movies can get you arrested.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2014 16:13

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

That's the point. The robots have always been CGI, but there was an aesthetic to it. As I've always said, they look like sentient explosions in the best possible way.

Like, this poo poo is beautiful. I want that as a sculpture. Not an action figure - I mean full size, in the town square.

What the 'knockoff' transformers show is that this chunky, difficult, mechanical transformation is the soul of the creatures. Even if it was CGI, it refers to real, physical work.

The transformations in the first movie were probably the most impressive and memorable thing about it, because it was showing you something you'd never seen before (well, except in those car commercials) - one object changing into another before your very eyes, the hard way, not just by morphing. You could follow a part of the car through the process until it ended up as part of the robot, and back again, and it was a genuinely remarkable effect.

Then in TF2 Bay decided for whatever reason that was old-hat and boring, so the transformations became a whirl of random pieces that was over in just a few frames. The pixelation transformations of the human-made robots in TF4 are that taken to the extreme. Artistry and hard work is replaced by a quick and simple shortcut - maybe it's a metaphor or something.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2014 09:00

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

The MSJ posted:

A bit of of a footballer thing going on with Barricade here. And look closely at his knuckles and elbows.

Barricade survived again? Oh well, at least I'll be able to annoy my wife with some more cool Mustang toys that never actually get transformed for my office.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2016 09:02

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Don't forget the consecutive shots of Apollo 11 with and without the Lunar Module. These are VFX shots! They were specifically made that way! Michael Bay approved them, probably over a chorus of ILM nerds from the Historical Sticklers' Society going "No, actually..."

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 19:06

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Snowman_McK posted:

Wasn't this people not differentiating between the various stages of launch properly and just kind of assuming Bay got it wrong?

Yes, it was.

No, it wasn't. The LM is absent from the Command/Service Module stack on the way to the moon and then appears in the next shot.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2016 19:22

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Snowman_McK posted:

Actually, it was the final launch stage in the first shot, and the landing stage in the second. Apollo changed configuration in the later stages of the journey. The landing module was well inside, protected, for the launch.

That's not the Apollo third stage in the first shot. It goes past quick, but it's much too short to be the top of the Saturn (which was also white, not bare metal). It's the CM/SM.

And don't get me started on the VLA.

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Dec 10, 2016

# ¿ Dec 10, 2016 10:59

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Rap Record Hoarder posted:

The first movie probably has my favorite transformations of the entire series:

1. Prime & Bonecrusher on the highway
2. Starscream during the big city battle
3. Pretty much any of Megatron's, but especially in Hoover Dam bunker

They all seem to be so intricate and complex but with a real sense of weight. It's taken for granted now but Bay really pulled off an amazing accomplishment with that first one.

Also goddamn, it's been a decade. Where has the time gone?

The first movie's transformations (and the integration of CG into the live action in general) really were one of those increasingly rare examples of "something you've never seen on screen before", and ILM clearly worked their arses off to make them look as good as possible. (I was genuinely surprised that it lost the VFX Oscar to The Golden Compass, which even at the time I thought didn't stand up - I never once managed to suspend my disbelief, whereas I just rolled with the far more outrageous stuff in Transformers.)

Had to laugh at that Last Knight video when Barricade showed up to pick a fight with Bumblebee again. He seemed pretty dead in Dark of the Moon...

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 23:34

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

The MSJ posted:

The Bumblebee movie will have a $70 million budget.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/li...e-films-1022310

That seems pretty low for a movie where the title character is CGI. Guess he'll be in vehicle mode as often as possible.

(The first movie had a budget more than twice that, a decade ago, and had CGI robots on screen for less than a quarter of its running time.)

# ¿ Jul 22, 2017 08:46

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Xenomrph posted:

Has CGI gotten more affordable over time? Computer technology prices always trend downward over time.

Computers have got more powerful over the past decade, sure, but the level of quality that's become "acceptable" has gone up, so the amount of work and render time is probably about the same. CG still needs a lot of massaging to fit in with live-action if you don't want it to look like Jumanji, and that costs money.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2017 08:36

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Robocops 1 and 2 were both ultra-violent hard R/18, then Robocop 3 was a PG-13.

Off the top of my head, the only series that became more violent as it went on was Rambo. A girl actually ran out of my screening almost in tears during Rambo 4, and her friends (male and female) who'd been all "woo, yeah, let's watch some action!" before it started left at the end in complete :stare:

silence.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2018 22:09

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

SleepCousinDeath posted:

I loving love Laserbeak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnK4hZHs7gA&t=390s

I'm imagining an Affleck moment when someone asks Bay how Laserbeak got from Wang's office down to a crowded open-plan office and transformed into a copier in a matter of moments without anyone seeing him. "Shut the gently caress up!"

# ¿ Aug 4, 2018 23:27

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Interesting that you mention "kindness". I just tried to think of any examples of kindness in Bay's movies, and I had to go all the way back to "I didn't want your child to grow up without a father" in The Rock. (Which was of course immediately followed by a cynical joke, but whatever.) There may be something later, but it's not coming to mind.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2020 23:33

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 06:19

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Dabir posted:

I loved the early transformation sequences. I actually made notes on my phone about Bumblebee's arms punching out of the sides of his car mode, and Arcee always doing some kind of really cool flip.

The first movie really did go all-out to show you something you'd never seen before with the transformations, and made them look absolutely believable despite the ridiculous amount of fakery needed to make them work (there are behind-the-scenes videos from ILM that show wireframes of parts popping into existence one frame before they enter shot). Which was why it felt so bizarre that from the second onwards they were kind of shrugged off, with only a few 'hero' transformations that gave you a good look at the process - most were just 'clunk-clank-clunk', whirl of bits, done.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2023 12:40

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > I still really like the Transformers movies