CliveStaples said:
Transformers wasn't about Transformers?
No, it wasn't. It was about Douchey Human and his team of "hilarious" comic relief characters.
And you couldn't tell the difference between the Transformers' personalities? You couldn't distinguish Bumblebee from Optimus Prime, or the two little dudes?
Okay, so Prime had a personality. Bumblebee... uh, what was his personality? "Likes to save Sam?" The two little dudes? Who? Skids and Mudflap? Yes, let's praise their personalities for a moment, good point. Or maybe you meant the two little dudes in the new movie. Well, I haven't seen it, but I've heard these guys are also aggravating.
Well, that's one guy with a personality, someone who saves the protagonist a lot, and a host of annoyances. I concede the point, sir!
Seems like you're mad that they didn't have a bigger stable of characters.
Wha...what? No, I'm mad because the characters were either window dressing or aggravating. We don't need MORE of that, come on.
You didn't like Sam? Or you didn't care, because you wanted to see Transformers! : The movie with only Transformers in it, because fuck adaptations.
No, I didn't like Sam, and no, that's not what I said. We can have human characters in our Transformers movie, sure. The original source material featured them quite frequently. But the Transformers were the stars, that's the thing. In Bayformers, they always take a back seat to human characters who aren't very compelling anyway, so... what? How could that possibly be considered a good thing?
Oh, so the movie needs to be targeted exactly at your preferences, but not at your demographic?
No. We can have a movie that can be all enjoyed by all ages. It is not necessary to resort to frat-boy levels of humor, which--and this is what I'm desperately trying to convey to you--is insulting to an older audience and inappropriate for a younger audience.
Yes, that's a ridiculous statement. Transparently so.
People are still nostalgic for TFTM because they saw it 20 years ago without applying the same critical apparatus. My point is that if you would have seen it using the critical apparatus you're using against Bay, you'd have fucking hated the original too.
No, because the original TFTM didn't suffer from all the disadvantages that Bay's film has and which I just discussed. While cheesy, it has a lot of memorable scenes and quotable lines. Hell, the opening scene with Unicron devouring Lithone is worth the price of admission by itself. That's why people remember it. But what we can remember from the Bayformers movies aside from "I guess Megan Fox was hot" or "It was cool when the robot blew up"? Wait, hold on, there is one thing. "I am underneath the enemy's scrotum!" Yeah, I'm going to remember that forever.
Kill me.
True, but you could level the same 'measuring up to potential' argument against the original. "Imagine how much better this could have been!" is not a persuasive argument that the product isn't enjoyable. "It could have been more enjoyable than it is" may be true, but it doesn't show where you are on the entertainment spectrum.
What? Give me a break. Of course anything could be better, but if we're handed a terrible product then it's within our rights to look at the problems with it and try to imagine how it could be better. If we didn't do that we'd all be driving uncomfortable cars with horrible gas mileage and explode when they're in low-speed collisions.
If I'm a carpenter who hates carpenting and I build a crappy, ugly house, and I'm criticized by comparing my house to a house made by a better carpenter who loves his job, that's a perfectly legitimate argument. If people say my house could have been better if the superior carpenter had made it, that's legit. If people say my house could have been better if I gave a damn, that's also legit. And I can make those exact same comparisons with Bayformers to other movies based on "geeky" franchises (say, Iron Man or the new Star Trek) and which were made by people who CARED. Do you understand? The Bayformers movies are bad, at least in part, because Michael Bay doesn't give a rats' ass about Transformers. That is the entire reason for my original first three complaints, and if you don't understand then I don't know what else to tell you.
