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Perhaps its fitting that the fourth movie of the trilogy plus one (until it makes another billion dollars and puts who knows how many more in production) is called AGE OF EXTINCTION. Because no war is endless, and if people are starting to clue in...well, maybe it's time to end it all. Edit: Another funny detail. In the novelization of the DOTM, the final scene doesn't happen. Megatron says he wants a truce, and Optimus AGREES, and Megatron leaves and that's that. Obviously working off an earlier version of the script, with the final shot version being 'Megatron gets slaughtered'. Even more to think about, that change. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Sep 30, 2013 |
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Sep 30, 2013 10:25
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Terry van Feleday posted:I simply have to believe that all this theatric complexity has meaning, because suggesting that the team made the antagonist more emotive and filmed him in a more sympathetic camera than the hero because they can’t even get sub-filmmaking 101 framing poo poo right feels both facile and ludicrous to me. It's funny, because people I know think exactly this. I actually had a very long argument with a friend of mine (we'll call him C) over this thread, and his viewpoint was basically this: No, there is no great, secret depth to these three films. All the issues Terry brought up, mainly based on how Optimus and the Autobots 'are really the villains', C basically derided as Michael Bay being a complete hack. C's argument, in the end, ultimately boiled down to "Transformers G1 was a half hour commercial for toys". The cartoon was simplistic, filled with animation errors, and as a result had about as stark a black and white morality as could be. Hell, it's even in the opening: the Decepticons are evil. While it's true that later works, like Beast Wars, and apparently the current IDW comics, were able to take those basic concepts and actually get more out of them than 'sell more toys', at its core the Transformers is a commercialistic cash grab. Trying to 'force' it to be more than that requires a deft hand and a LOT of luck, and perhaps most importantly, no table of Hasbro executives breathing down your neck to try and sell more toys. Sometimes it succeeds, most of the time it doesn't, and it definitely won't with Bay in the director's seat. The man cannot do subtle: when he tries, you get something like Pearl Harbor, which was so tone deaf on what a war film or romance film should be that it ended up as a punchline in Team America: World Police. The man may not exactly be lacking in intelligence, but he knows what he likes, and what he's good at, and when he tries to go outside that box, well... Let's assume that all this subtext about Optimus and Megatron are purposely in the films, that it was what Bay was really trying to convey. Why? This isn't the Shattered Glass Transformers universe, where the moralities are flipped. As said, the G1 Transformers are supposed be as black and white as possible. Autobots good, Decepticons bad. Simple morality in films is not inherently a bad thing: it's all in the execution. All this stuff, like the Autobots with their facial destruction, and Optimus' 'Give me your face' and 'Time to find out', reads to my friend C as less like 'More than meets the eye' and more like Bay trying to insert shades of grey into the conflict and failings so bad that it ends up with a reading of the film where Optimus is the real villain, which is likely not what Bay meant or wanted at all. The whole point of the Autobot/human interactions, which has almost always been the case, is that the Autobots are protective of humans. They see humans as smaller, more frail, and far more vulnerable than them to death by physical trauma and death by age. Yet humans side with them and put themselves at risk fighting forces that, on paper, are completely their superior (Sam, as someone pointed out, only managed to kill Starscream because he magically acquired plot armor that kept him from being smashed to a pulp or having his arm torn out of his socket from all the bouncing, swinging, and flailing around he did). As a result, when Decepticons overtly threaten humans, basically attempting to kill them en masse for basically 'being there', the Autobots, and especially Optimus, get angry. The hero flipping out and abruptly gaining strength, and more important, savagery, is a well-worn road in fiction (Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi, anyone?), and it shows in stuff like Optimus ripping apart Grindor, brutalizing the Fallen, and responding to Megatron's peace offering with a decapitation. It's not supposed to be 'Optimus is really the bad guy', it's supposed to be 'Optimus can get pissed off like the rest of us, and when a war leader for millions of years loses his temper, be his rage hot or cold, look out'. He got mad that Megatron and his cronies were threatening Sam (and Megatron's whole thing of 'Isn't one death worth it?'), he got mad that the Decepticons were about to wipe out Earth for fuel, and he got especially mad at the fact that the Decepticons IMMEDIATELY started attacking humans the second it looked like they were gone in DOTM: the whole last act is basically Optimus stomping around in a guilt-fueled rage paying back his enemies for their terrible crime. In the hands of a credible filmmaker, C argues, this would be more apparent. In Bay's hands, we get Terry's long analysis, which basically concludes that the human race was hoodwinked by the evil Autobots. It's less 'There's really a lot of depth in these films' as 'Michael Bay sucks so bad at doing anything beyond explosions that when he tries to not do explosions, well...' I will note that C agreed that Pain and Gain worked pretty well, but he argues that was mostly the fact that Pain and Gain was based on a true story that might be even more absurd that the film itself. Basically, Bay succeeded there because the source material was just so out there to begin with. With stuff like 'a movie based on a commercial for toys' and stuff like Pearl Harbor, not so much. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Oct 7, 2013 |
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Oct 7, 2013 00:47
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:-The fact that its sister-film is the explicitly-about-class-warfare (and frankly superior) Friday the 13th remake. Okay, I'm curious. Explain, please?
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Oct 10, 2013 15:22
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Any word on whether the Duel side-trip will be added to the PDF file any time soon?
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Oct 20, 2013 05:04
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I'd also like to point out that all jokes aside, the reason Optimus rips off the Fallen's face is because his face was used to create the Decepticon icon according to some supplementary material. Optimus is basically going to the logical end point of pulling down statues of dictators.
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Dec 25, 2016 07:29
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