I still really like the Transformers movies

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

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah, it's part of what sells me on the idea that Bay is trying to do everything he can to make his viewers realize the Autobots are monsters without actually coming out and saying 'Optimus Prime is EVIL'. He'll show you Optimus sacrificing Chicago to prove his political worth, he'll have Optimus tell the viewer he did it, he'll make the 'villains' of the next film a black ops unit that believes the Autobots are as much a threat as the Decepticons...but he'll have Optimus parrot a few lines about Freedom and Honor, and then I guess he'll laugh or weep or whatever he does when people keep rooting for the red truck of genocide.

It's not like the Decepticons are good dudes, but their various endgames are (for better or worse) organized states of civilization. Optimus seems to be a nihilistic wrecking ball intent on driving both Autobots and Decepticons to extinction as long as it preserves his own personal cult of power and his ability to tear off faces. (Are there any surviving Decepticons? How many Autobots are left from the original cast?) Now that he's aware of the existence of God he has to jet off and deface It too.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Jul 23, 2014

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 18:36

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 04:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

api call girl posted:

Again some kind of willful misrepresentation of the actual text. Optimus doesn't fake any disaster, he recognizes the situation that there's an attack coming as soon as the Autobots are in one defenseless location so they never get on the ship. Starscream arrives and shoots it down.

And I'm going by memory here but I'm pretty sure nobody knew Decepticons were going to Chicago until Sam figured it out because that's where the human antagonist character took off to. And that took place only after the Autobots appeared to have left Earth.

And since that was all right after Decepticons showed up en masse all over the world, the monstrous thing to do would have been to let themselves be kicked off Earth and just never return.

They get on the ship, bail out in a booster, then wait until the Decepticons have overrun Chicago in order to make a point. I don't think that's even an interpretation of the text, it's just...what happens. Optimus Prime says 'Your leaders will now understand: Decepticons will never leave your planet alone. And we needed them to believe we had gone.' I suppose you can read referent of 'we' in 'we needed them' as 'the Decepticons', but...why? What advantage do the Autobots gain by delaying until the pillars are nearly activated? It seems pretty parsimonious to read the referent of 'we' as 'your leaders'.

I don't think it's willful misinterpretation to conclude that Optimus decided to make a demonstration of what would happen to Chicago without Autobot protection.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 21:48

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Excelsiortothemax posted:

After the Decepticons broke their word and the city was devastated. Guess he should have just left and let all of humanity be enslaved.

He could've turned up and said 'This is really horrible, I wish we could've stopped it, if only we'd gotten here sooner

' instead of 'All according to plan. Let's kill them all,' followed by his rejection of the enemy leadership's proposed truce in favor of two brutal executions. His actions help illuminate his motivations and beliefs!

# ¿ Jul 24, 2014 00:29

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

api call girl posted:

So Optimus Prime could've publicly defied the general public and the governments of Earth to go around hunting Decepticons, the Decepticons could've killed a lot more people as per their threat, and then they would have gone to Chicago while Optimus Prime was stuck halfway around the world killing Shockwave in Bulgaria or something.

What part of that sounds better as a strategy?

Again, he could have done exactly what he did in the movie but said something other than 'Excellent, now the humans will appreciate how valuable I am' and he would've come off a lot better.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2014 04:26

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Nobody in these movies does a bang-up job of anything, the Autobots have been driven to extinction, the Decepticons are effectively extinct, and the humans have gotten nothing out of the whole affair except an escalating series of new enemies and existential threats (and some weapons).

The point is that Optimus Prime is as manipulative, ruthless, systematically deceptive, and megalomaniacal as everyone else. 'Let's fake our own deaths, then wait for Sentinel's end game so we can strike at the right moment, demonstrating to the humans that we're valuable and necessary' is a good strategy in that it achieves Optimus' goals, it's just not heroic or morally admirable. Optimus completes the strategy by refusing a truce and decapitating the Decepticon leadership. He then promises never to abandon Earth (after closing off an avenue to a negotiated peace).

Between that event and TF4 someone apparently decides he's actually incredibly dangerous and decides to disassemble his power base. The people who make and carry out this decision are also fairly terrible, selfish, and manipulative, but it's not like they don't have a point.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Jul 24, 2014

# ¿ Jul 24, 2014 04:37

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

You could totally do that but I think the movies are only watchable if you get to cackle at Optimus' thinly veiled villainy. It's not like I want Bay to start presenting Optimus as a real hero.

And yes I agree with your reading: the Autobots in these movies are incredibly bloodthirsty. The Decepticons sometimes seem that way too, but often they feel more instrumental and objective-driven (something I think Terry has touched on).

# ¿ Jul 24, 2014 04:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Wheeee posted:

I watched Transformers when it came out and hated it largely due to Shia Lebeouf and Megan Fox both being terrible; should I give this series another chance?

Are you interested in a lot of movies that violently despise the viewer, telling a story about a genocidal space robot dressed up as an America truck who says things like "you're free now, so follow me or I'll kill you" and who allows the destruction of major cities to prove his necessity to humanity, while prosecuting a civil war of extermination against the desperate remnants of his own species?

# ¿ Apr 16, 2016 21:02

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Man those stills are all really loving well composed.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 15:56

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The end of Dark of the Moon wasn't subtle at all and then in the dinosaur one Optimus was an unhinged outlaw tyrant who would say things like "you are free, now follow me or I'll kill you"

e: "We're giving you freedom! Now defend my family or die!"

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Dec 6, 2016

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 18:04

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah, I agree. It's kind of more fun to see what kind of atrocities Optimus will pull as the 'hero' anyway.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2016 18:26

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I hope they ditch the stupid voxel transformations, these movies need the incomprehensible visual gibberish of the chunky mechanical transformations. Robots need to look like they're torturing themselves as they turn into car sponsorships

e: like the problem with the voxel transformation is that you understand what's happening, whereas the classic garbage pile loving itself is suggestive of some inner logic but impossible to really grasp. I hope there's a ton of cosmic horror in this movie, all my favorite parts of these weird-rear end idiot films involve ancient starships full of dead machines

# ¿ Dec 7, 2016 02:38

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I swear these movies are just loving with people sometimes, in this obligatory oft-repeated hero shot Optimus grabs Marky Mark's daughter and, instead of shielding her, drives her headfirst through a truck. I can't imagine Bay or anyone else saying 'yeah just do something obviously fatal but have her live cause lol', but on the other hand, with all the person-hours that go into CGI you've got to imagine this was sort of on purpose.

e: lol he grabs her, has her kind of 'safe' by Transformers standards, passes her off to his other hand, and extends and turns the arm to make her impact head-first. Optimus is playing with his toys :bandwagon:

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Dec 8, 2016

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 01:59

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

How many 'final hopes for cybertron civilization' have they destroyed by now.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2016 02:45

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm glad they remembered (maybe?) that they blew up/wrecked the Transformers home planet, I've always felt bad for Cybertron :shobon:

# ¿ Dec 14, 2016 22:47

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

No, in the movies he's just obsessed with destroying faces. It's not something he targets on the Fallen in particular. Dude is a face wrecker, he's got skulls to peel, now give me your FACE

# ¿ Dec 25, 2016 08:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm genuinely curious about how this movie will handle all the bizarre loose ends and beautifully schizoid thematics left by past Bayhem.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2017 17:26

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Remember that time a transformer ripped his own soul out so his body could be cannibalized to make wings for Optimus Prime.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2017 06:51

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm pretty sure the scorpion is chasing them because they took a picture or saw too much, right? And it's defeated by the air support they call in by cell phone while hiding in a village? And there's some kind of subplot about the decepticons tapping military networks. There's all sorts of poo poo about the inversion of American power. Kind of makes sense in a movie where the villains want to awaken our machines and products.

By the end of the fourth one Megatron has been re-manufactured as a product by a corporation, complete with iannic chest hole to devour and break Optimus' sword. I wonder what that means

# ¿ Feb 7, 2017 17:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Should have made copper EFPs their one weakness.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 19:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

A transformer that rips off other transformers' heads and becomes their new head. Give me your face.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2017 14:50

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

So is the giant tentacle planet supposed to be Cyberton. Are they actually going to follow up on casually destroying it in 3?

I love how often this series involves Optimus loving up Decepticon plans to save their species from extinction.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2017 20:54

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm kind of sad this movie is going to need a plot and characters, I'd pay to see two hours of Bay doing robot cosmic horror.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2017 15:44

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

He died.

Then he was reconstructed with a gaping turbine-hole in his chest, into which he plunged Optimus' sword, melting and devouring it.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 17:31

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

General Battuta posted:

Then he was reconstructed with a gaping turbine-hole in his chest, into which he plunged Optimus' sword, melting and devouring it.

Optimus was then imprisoned on a spaceship full of caged vagina monsters, and rescued by a man who found and claimed a sword.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 17:32

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

banned from Starbucks posted:

why is megatron 10x bigger than he was before

Gains

Did they get rid of that awful cube-swirl transformation from Age of Extinction, I hope so

# ¿ Apr 24, 2017 06:21

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

DoctorWhat posted:

only the Vehicons had that transformation and it was explicitly to mark them as "other", why does no one understand this?

What's a Vehicon and is Megagalve one of them

# ¿ Apr 24, 2017 06:40

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The pixelly transformation did not look grotesque, painful, wretchedly dangerous, suggestive of an intrinsically tormented and provisional attitude towards form, or capable of macerating human flesh and pulverizing all nearby. Therefore it did not meet my requirements

# ¿ Apr 24, 2017 06:53

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The Bayformer in its purest state is a protean and flaming mass of kibble, casting about with cancerous hunger for something, anything, to imitate.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2017 06:55

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The MSJ posted:

Maybe this review?

This seems like...a pretty decent point, though? Like it's the opposite of the poo poo I'd expect from a 'female planes' rant.

# ¿ May 30, 2017 12:28

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Tell me you've read the goon conspiracy theory that transformers the film franchise is an increasingly desperate plea for the audience to realize Optimus Prime is, in fact, a fascist villain who will do anything up to and including genocide to hold on to po ��

Hang on that's the plot of this movie isn't it.

e: holy poo poo did you actually make him remove ALL their faces?

# ¿ Jun 10, 2017 05:36

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

This franchise's approach to continuity is quite Transformative, be pretty interesting to see if this movie follows up on its trailers and tries to explain why the god cube and the sun harvesting machine that caused a civil war and the moon spaceship all ended up here.

Tighclops posted:

I feel like if continent sized pieces of a broken planet were dragged across the surface of the earth that would straight up be an extinction level event for humanity so I don't understand how there's any way for the species to survive what we've seen in the trailers

like I know these movies and the franchise as a whole is pretty loving far from hard sci fi but this is like that massive alien ship in ID42 (among other things), it somehow shatters my disbelief in a way none of the other nutty poo poo does

Maybe it's mating with Earth

# ¿ Jun 11, 2017 00:31

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Anthony Hopkowns

# ¿ Jun 11, 2017 17:11

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

savinhill posted:

I went to the premier of this earlier tonight and enjoyed it a lot. I don't know anything about Transformers mythology or anything like that, and my only other exposure to this film franchise is having seen some of the first one and not liking it much, but this one was a very fun and funny film. The action scenes were very well done imo, they had a good mixture of giant robots with huge gently caress-off battle axes, swords and rail guns, cool dinosaur robots, human military and alien artifacts, and they made the majority of the characters, both robot and human, likeable or interesting. My only complaint was that it may have been a bit too long, but the pacing was good enough to offset that. I didn't hit that point I usually do with a lot of summer actiony blockbusters where I get bored and just check out of paying attention to the plot with this movie because they mixed things up enough to keep me interested throughout most of it.

Oh, also, one of my favorite things in the movie was Anthony Hopkins and his rad robot butler sidekick exchanging banter, and some of the other robots trying to crack jokes on them

How much of a genocidal maniac was Optimus Prime

e: serious version of that question, was Cybertron's destruction explicitly a result of Optimus loving up the space bridge mid teleport? This question must look like insane babble so, I guess, in what way does the movie blame Optimus for destroying his home

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Jun 20, 2017

# ¿ Jun 20, 2017 14:45

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I finally saw the fifth transformer, I watch these movies purely to boggle at the hidden-in-plain-sight sadism and tyranny of Optimus Prime. Let's catch up with our favorite truckalomaniac, who recently survived his exile to Mark Wahlberg's barn and flew off in a narcissistic rage to kill god.

Optimus crashes into the ruins of his home planet, powerless and frozen. Note that he's still broadcasting his I'M COMING FOR YOU GOD message even while crippled, suggesting that he considers it his most vital system.

He is horrified by the ruins, apparently forgetting that he caused this devastation back in movie 3, when he aborted Megatron's plan to teleport Cybertron to Earth and rebuild it using human slave labor. He meets God, who tells him it is all his fault, that she is the God of Life and has been waiting for him. Optimus, driven to rage by this assault on his moral delusions, responds with unilateral and preemptive violence, screaming 'What have you done to my home? I will kill you!'

God imprisons him and calls him out on his shittiness as a leader of Cybertron. Optimus literally says "Megatron started it!" God is not impressed. Optimus says he wants redemption, which he will gain by destroying Earth to fix Cybertron.

A bunch of nonsense happens. Optimus snaps out of his loyalty to God when one of his soldiers, pinned beneath his sword, volunteers to die for Optimus. Optimus remembers that he's supposed to be god, and so vows to kill God (he ultimately uses said soldier to carry out the killing). A bunch of old robots call him a traitor and nearly execute him, but his human pawn Mark Wahlberg saves him.

Cybertron starts to eat Earth, killing tens of millions.

Optimus and friends raid God's inner sanctum. Optimus doesn't join the battle until the humans and Decepticons have hosed each other up pretty badly, with the humans getting the worst of it. This is a favorite tactic of his. He partakes in another one of his favorite tactics too, which is the mutilation of his enemy's faces. He storms God's inner sanctum and murders her, and his humans disable the system that will destroy Earth to rebuild Cybertron.

With a quiescent Cybertron now parked above Earth, Optimus beseeches the humans to ally with the Autobots to rebuild both worlds. This is exactly what Megatron wanted back in the third movie ��human labor to repair Cybertron ��but now Optimus is in control and the humans are his 'allies', not slaves. Optimus is a genocidal self-aggrandizing nihilist, so he will always choose to destroy a chance for Cybertron's survival in favor of preserving his own power on Earth. So far in the series he has taken out:

1. The Allspark, capable of awakening machines as new transformers
2. The sun killing device the Decepticons needed to feed their babies
3. Cybertron itself, collapsing it mid-teleport and leaving it shattered and feral
4. Whatever the gently caress that movie was about
5. God

At each step he has frustrated his enemies' plans to rebuild Cybertron and give his species a future. He has also alienated his human allies, leading to the extinction of most of his own followers. In a loving shot near the end of this film, Optimus' brightly-painted truck emerges from the dust of a castoff piece of Cybertron as it crashes into green English fields. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Nov 9, 2017

# ¿ Nov 9, 2017 06:30

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

And he says "honor to the end" as he stabs his foe in the back.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2017 07:15

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

She practically doesn't need to.

In 4 a rebuilt Megatron liberates his people from corporate control and spends the movie trying to find a 'seed' (more working class + reproductive imagery). Optimus Prime shoves a gigantic sword through a hole in Megatron's chest, which Megatron uses to destroy the sword. Optimus is on the run from humans, who have decided he isn't much different from the Deceptions. A robot's face turns into a gun. Optimus bellow 'honor to the end!' as he stabs his foe in the back. At the end of the movie, he flies off into space to kill God, bellowing warnings.

In 5 he finds God and tries to kill her. She mind controls him and he doesn't break free until one of his soldiers volunteers to die on his sword. Etc, etc. They read like they were written to give Terry material.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 19:29

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Sir Kodiak posted:

I love all the hideously grey overgreebled Cybertron designs. That ship is practically Gigeresque, and when they find the dead crew on the moon it's a straight up quote of the space jockey scene. They should get Alastair Reynolds to write a Bayformers movie.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2018 19:41

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The Cybertronians are all basically barbaric.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 05:56

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I don't trust any Transformers that lacks Bay's mean-spirited nihilism and hatred of the franchise.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2018 01:31

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 04:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I don't think anyone in this thread has said it does.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2018 06:57

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