Grave Considerations: The Live Action Transformers Movies

This summer. Get ready. Nothing can prepare you for close to three hours of explosions. Indecipherable CGI. Tragically unfunny improvised one-liners. Bad mugging for the camera. Explosions and car chases. Mangled storylines and entirely optional plot and character development. And explosions.

That’s right, another Transformers movie is sliding its’ way through Hollywood’s intestine, getting closer and closer to the sphincter of summer movie season! Transformers: The Last Knight is the fifth installment in the financially viable franchise, and marks the first time that Hasbro has decided to try and pretend that they think a unified narrative is a good thing. For years, since the release of the second plot starved movie, the official Hasbro party line has been that there was no overarching narrative, and that continuity amongst and between films was unimportant. Now, with the fifth installment, suddenly a “cinematic universe” will be established. Ten years and four movies too late. At least, mercifully, by mid-August The Last Knight is gone from theaters, having made substantially less money at the box office than was hoped.

There are many issues with the Transformers live action movies. And they certainly have their fans, so they must be doing something right for someone. This is not being written by one of those someones, so if it’s positive spin you seek, you’ll need to find it elsewhere.

No, today we gather to undertake the totally original action of badmouthing the live action movies on several fronts. Let’s start with the obvious, and hopefully fastest one, that being their lack of narrative quality. For a franchise with so many stories to tell, and so many characters that feature in them, you’d think that there’d be little difficulty in putting together a coherent and engaging plot for one, two or even five Transformers movies. But you’d be wrong. Ten years ago, 2007’s Transformers gave us the best effort there, itself being a handful of fairly pointless reworking of an origin story. We got some beloved characters who weren’t much more than vague references to themselves character-wise, and boy did we get human hijinks. The movie was a financial success, and a franchise was born. In retrospect, it was the best entry in said franchise.

The second installment was where things went wrong, pretty much right away, and established the pattern for the rest of the movies. Put out a trailer with a bunch of seconds of robots who will barely appear in the movie, pepper with the Michael Bay “hero shot” and some cool blaring horns and grinding metal sound effects. Add subtitle that will fuel speculation and discussion amongst fans. Then, deliver a movies that is mostly humans jerking around, occasionally a blurry shot of a robot, have your subtitle essentially be a throwaway line of dialogue, and make sure there is no plot or character development at all. None. That’s a real big no-no right there. 2009’s Revenge of the Fallen checks all those boxes at least twice. Speculation on the movie raged for months in the fandom, and the movie was almost instantly reviled by the same, although it did also birth the movie sycophants, the ones who just cannot see that the movies are bad. My wife and I went to see that in IMAX, and I can’t speak for her, but I was super excited. A commercial during the Super Bowl that year really clinched my enthusiasm for the movie. There was supposed to be an expanded robot roster, Devastator was going to be in it, and the Fallen, comic book badass and erstwhile founder of the Decepticons, was going to make an appearance. It was to be his first outside of Dreamwave’s excellent and tragically interrupted “The War Within” series. I was so, so excited walking in to the theater. Halfway through I knew the movie was not only bad, but nonsense. Boy did I feel awful afterwards, knowing that my wife probably wouldn’t have seen this tragedy if it weren’t for me. And I love crappy movies, and that kind of shame for making my wife watch something does not happen. Ever. Before or since. I recall feeling so disappointed. Sure, there were more robots, but they didn’t do much of anything, the movie focusing on the mostly poor work the humans were doing, something that was at the time only becoming more obviously the focus of the movies.

I think we waited a few weeks after the release of the third one before we went to see it.

All the while, on the Internet, a new storm was brewing with each successive entry. There would be bits of information that would leak out, and fans would pounce, trying to dissect everything as finely as possible so as to learn whatever could be learned. Incredible arguments broke out when some people could not handle the idea that others did not like Revenge of the Fallen. I was once personally told that I clearly had mental illnesses because I thought the movie was a pack of garbage. Now, as then, I feel that may be a little over the top of a response. Revenge of the Fallen was where it really started. In 2007, people who didn’t like the first movie were at least granted the dignity of indifference, but by 2009 that had all disappeared. And it would never return. The movies are either the truest display of the gods’ love for Mankind, or the most vulgar abomination ever witnessed. There can be no middle ground.

For my part, I find the movies have very few redeeming qualities, but I don’t care that people like them. Every poor argument under the sun has been used to defend them, and by now it’s just sad-funny. The movies aren’t made for fans, but for casual moviegoers, so who cares that they don’t make sense or contain anything like an actual Transformers character? The standard “Hasbro doesn’t care about the fan demographic” reply, one that was used by Hasbro itself for several years at Botcons in relation to toy lines. The old chestnut of “audiences need a lot of human characters so they can identify and relate.” This is disproven by any person who has ever had any even superficial exposure to a work of fiction.  How the titular beings ended up being relegated to third billing behind either Shia LeBouf or Mark Wahlberg and terrible, terrible toilet humor is just incredible. Yeah, that kid owns a sports car that turns into a robot warrior, but man is his life zany because his mom makes masturbation jokes or unknowingly consumes edibles! Ha ha, I swear, it’s like looking into a mirror. My favorite clapback in defense of the movies, now, is the invocation of the Fast and the Furious franchise as prime example of how moviegoers just want action movies and not some kind of dense plot fest. These days, I am offended by the comparison, having seen all eight Fast and the Furious movies, and frankly, finding them to be far better than the five Transformers movies. The adventures of Vin Diesel at least have a general, albeit simple, plot per movie, and actually do give time to the members of their large cast, so that you do end up feeling things for the characters. I have been a fan of the Fast and the Furious franchise for roughly four months now, having bought the collection in April, and I have been a Transformers fan since 1984. I would take a Fast and the Furious movie over a Transformers movie any day; obviously the 1986 animated movie doesn’t count here. Fast and the Furious movies don’t require prequel comics to establish characters or tie up loose ends either. And, most importantly, Fast and the Furious movies are fun, not the arduous task that the Transformers movies present. The last three Transformers movies, Dark of the Moon through The Last Knight, we sat down in the theater and uttered statements of dread: we saw The Last Knight essentially because we had an afternoon free and my wife didn’t want to be cooped up in the apartment, so she tried to make it seem like I was being sheepish about wanting to see it. I did not. Frankly, I don’t think my life would be any worse for not having seen it at all; from the first trailer I was completely disinterested in the movie.

Some will argue that general movie goers don’t care about stories, or that casual fans can’t be burdened with mythology or backstory, as those things would cause the Transformers movies to become pulled down with unnecessary details. Unnecessary details like character, or plot. Harry Potter fans got 8 movies that were pretty faithful to their source. The Lord of the Rings movies did this pretty well also. Sure, things get left out, but that’s not an excuse for having left everything out and claiming it was for the benefit of the general public. But, in general, Transformers fans are masters of self-deprecation, simultaneously asserting that Hasbro doesn’t care about them and that Hasbro is the greatest benefactor they could possibly dream of. Everything Hasbro does is wonderful, because brand loyalty is apparently the core tenant of being a Transformers fan.

Aside from just their cinematic offal, the movies also mess up the toy lines and distribution. In 2007, the movie toys were something new and different; or at least, they were a spiritual return to the original Transformers toys days. They were robots that converted into realistic, real-world vehicles, and not some stylized or vaguely related to a real vehicle alt modes. G1 Starscream was an F-15, and 2007 movie Starscream was an F-22. Numerous Starscreams in between were fighter jets of some general type or another, based on or influenced by something in the real world, but always off enough to be fantasy. With the exception of Cybertronian alt moded chaos like Megatrons or Shockwave from Dark of the Moon, movie Transformers were pretty realistic. In 2007 I bought everything. I remember the phony Concept Bumblebee shortage, which was nothing more than an overreaction by people brand new to collecting to a later wave toy that they couldn’t find in the early waves. The toys were pretty good at the time, and they were aided by the hype of the first movie. Subsequent movie toy lines got worse and worse. People laud the Revenge of the Fallen toy line as one of the best Transformers lines, and I think some of the figures were pretty cool, but I wouldn’t get close to calling it an all-time line.

Overall the movie toys possess a very particular aesthetic, and they don’t go well with toys from other lines. Over the years, culmination just last week, I have managed to expunge the movie toys from my collection almost completely, the only exceptions being Revenge of the Fallen Leader class Starscream and Voyager Mindwipe. I know that some other sublines spiral out of the movies, and so figures that I also retain like Voyager Seaspray and crazy twin prop aircraft Highbrow are technically movie toys, but I don’t really count them as such. I bought figures from all the movie lines up to Age of Extinction; I’ve bought nothing from The Last Knight, and don’t plan to either. The figures just don’t work in my collection, and oh how I have tried to make them work. They are too jangly and gaunt, too much a collection of wires and pistons to look like anything cohesive or good. Thy wind up being thin, gangly robots that burst forth from car panels, and then look plain and dull.

I think that the movie universe began with good intentions. I believe that they started with some good ideas. But what never happened was any type of recalibration for things that weren’t working out. Said recalibration was promised, and paid lip service, but never was actually delivered. After the 2007 movie a common complaint was that future entries feature more robots and be more robot-centric. Revenge of the Fallen added more robots for sure, but still focused on uninteresting humans. More lore was called for, and Revenge of the Fallen added it, though in tragic fashion, reducing the Matrix to some dust that would activate a vaguely defined superweapon. Dark of the Moon provided both more lore and more robot focus, but ultimately still pivoted on human “characters,” whatever her name was calling Megatron a bitch and having that be the bridge too far for the megalomaniac. Age of Extinction went right back to the too much humans and stupidity, because now there was Mark Wahlberg, and he needed to get his chance at mugging his way through a Michael Bay movie. I don’t even want to talk about The Last Knight, the movie that was supposed to be the dawn of a cinematic universe, but wound up being just another Transformers, with everything that that phrase can possibly mean at this point. They did it again, Hasbro did. “This time, things will be different” and then you watch the same movie again. Again. Five times now. But I think that, in 2006 or whenever writing and planning for the first movie started, the people involved wanted to make a Transformers movie, and they didn’t intend to have the results be the trash fire they wound up with in 2017. But it also seems that no one ever tried to intervene in any of this, as promises of writers’ rooms and all of that just crapped out the same old movie. Apparently a new director has been signed for the Bumblebee spin off, but one must wonder if it even matters any more. The movies and their ‘cinematic universe’ are what they are, and what they will be: there’s no changing course five movies in to a project that is going to be a success. What they should have done, had they wanted a successful franchise, is start out by trying to inject some quality, rather than wait four movies with the automatic response being that there was no unified storyline or universe, and that the movies were for casual fans rather than deep fans, and then, realizing the success Marvel has had with their cinematic universe, say “now, we are going to get serious.” The Fast and the Furious franchise managed to do that, after two movies and what amounts to be a standalone, they made a running, cohesive narrative that has lasted, as of this moment, five movies and has withstood characters leaving and re-entering, and even a main actor dying.

So, for everyone who wants to try and compare Transformers with Fast and the Furious, thinking that such a comparison will identify a clear winner, you are correct. The Fast and the Furious franchise is a far better and higher quality one than the Transformers franchise.