Grave Considerations: Quickly and Angrily, Back to the Transformers Live Action Movies.

A little while back, I wrote a piece on my dislike of thelive action Transformers movies. I wanted to revisit the topic, as I keep boring my wife with a shorter form of the following diatribe. As with most things in life, fans of the Transformers live action movies will point to certain metrics or values as proof of the quality and success of the five movie franchise: elements such as their being financially successful, or enjoyed in markets globally. They will defend the movies’ shortcomings with a set of formulaic yet not untrue qualities, all of which they will claim validate the poor or lacking qualities of the movies.

It is that second point that irks me the most. I am a life-long fan of the Transformers. I have consumed Transformers media in all forms: I’ve watched cartoons, I’ve played video games, I’ve read comics, I’ve read prose, I’ve done all of that. I understand what a decent narrative needs in order to perform at least decently, and I am also aware of the fact that not all narratives are required to be serious or deep. In other words, I understand that “it’s just an action movie” clapback argument which ensues whenever someone states they thing the live action movies are dull, story less affairs that don’t even try to make sense or resolve themselves. In fact, I’m so well versed in that clapback that I thought I’d engage in a little bit of comparative analysis here, and hold up the Transformers live action franchise to another, similar “it’s only an action movie” franchise that is a large cast, multipart affair with a large cast and internal mythology: The Fast and the Furious. Specifically, I want to focus on the Fast and the Furious movie that does the most difficult work in the franchise, Fast 5.

Fast 5 has a lot of work to do. It is arguably the entry that reboots the franchise into its current iteration as that of action-adventure movie following its origins as a street racing music video with plot. Predecessor Fast and Furious can be seen as the restarting line, but what it ultimately does is try to tie three previous movies together and resolve loose ends and question generated by the first three. The first movie introduces the characters that we will stay with for the majority of the franchise, while the second ejects some of them while introducing new characters that will remain in the franchise for future installments. The second film flirts with the notion that the franchise may be an anthology series, and much maligned yet stupidly fun third chapter Tokyo Drift furthers the anthology idea, while further ejecting established characters and further introducing new ones who will stick around. The fourth movie attempts to reconcile as many of the established characters with the budding anthology format of the franchise, so that we know what happened to Dom and Brian despite their not being in the last two movies together. We get closure for the gang.

Fast 5 opens with the gang pulling off their most (on-screen) exciting heist since the end of the first movie: breaking Dom out of a prison transport bus while somehow not killing all the other occupants of said bus. This establishes a lot of the narrative framework for the rest of the franchise moving forward: the gang is back together, and values each other to the extreme extent that they would do all manner of crazy things to keep each other safe; the gang is now a gang of fugitives, not just some guys who were stealing DVD/TV combo machines for cash on the black market; the gang actually has a practical application for their street racing skills, not just late night kicks and slips; the gang is actually worthy of having a dedicated DSS agent hunting them down. As it continues, Fast 5 will lay all manner of rails on which the franchise will run through its following installments. It will reintroduce characters missing since the conclusion of the first movie, and will introduce characters to each other who have never met, yet will always be together from this movie onwards. It starts to situate Tokyo Drift in the larger chronology of the series, and in doing so, will begin to offer an explanation as to why that movie is so totally incongruous with the other seven. It will introduce new characters while offering a quality exit for an old one. In short, Fast 5 will serve as a unifying point for the franchise, explaining certain things while introducing new ones, all while telling a self-contained story and still being an action movie with cars and fights.

After freeing Dom, the gang escapes to Brazil, where Brian and Mia meet up with Vince, the tough guy who gave Brian a terrific fast food recommendation in The Fast and the Furious. It turns out that Vince has been living in Brazil to avoid the Feds for his involvement in the scheme of the original movie. A car heist has been arranged by Dom with Vince’s’ help, during which we learn not only about the value of loyalty and family – the series’ unofficial tag line – but also that Mia is pregnant, a story point that will allow the franchise to eventually let Mia go AND account for the real life death of the actor who portrayed a pivotal character. This is basically a fortunate bounce for the series, but nonetheless. After the heist gets complicated, new franchise regulars Hobbs the DSS agent and Elena, the one honest cop in Brazil, appear. Dom assembles his crack team of experts in everything, uniting Dom, Brian, Mia and Vince from the first movie with Rome, Tej, Santos and Leo, Giselle and Han from movies two, three and four. The movie then allows for Vince to exit the series in a fairly impactful fashion that resolves his character arc. The movie resolves with a heist, there is a street racing scene, and the seeds of the next movie, as well as future movies, are sown.

The Transformers movies aren’t able to manage any of this over the span of five movies, and are mostly incapable of doing most of this stuff even within the span of a single movie. Over the course of any entry in the series, there is a vague menace introduced, followed by shots of characters that we should remember from the last movie, or previous movies. But those characters weren’t at all developed in their prior appearances, or at least not developed to any notable degree, for there to be much more of a reaction than “hey, it’s that actor.” Some brief action sequence will occur, just enough to remind us that we’re watching a movie where things will explode and people will run and a robot will appear and jump around. Whatever the threat for this movie will be is briefly and generally explained, declared as a matter of critical importance, and then largely ignored for a time while underdeveloped humans walk around and talk the way no actual human ever would. The Transformers, themselves characters with over thirty years of history and character, will make their appearances, only to be relegated to the background while someone makes a joke or does something comical. A larger, disorienting action sequence takes place, the only actual inclusion of the title characters. The threat is resolved without much detail. Multiple plot holes pervade the movie, many things go unresolved or without even attempts at resolution. Characters appear in one movie, are missing for another, and reappear a few movies later, because they can, since they apparently didn’t die, or weren’t accounted for by previous installments; like Barricade, the Decepticon police car, present in the first half of the first movie, absent the second, rematerializing in later chapters, and somehow voted the Best Movieverse Character at the recent Hascon. Other characters appear in several movies with a different paint job and are thus expected to be recognized as different entities, such as Blackout and Grindor from the first and second movie, identical helicopter Decepticons, one of whom was pretty clearly killed and the other who appears, and later disappears, without any explanation. Maybe he dies, I don’t know. Several robots will all look exactly the same, raising huge questions about the viability of the live action franchises’ only combine, like the Constructicons in Revenge of the Fallen, a potentially limitless group of identical warriors with six different body types, any number of whole can merge into Devastator. There is no demiurgical continuity either, as catastrophic damage to major metropolitan areas in one movie are completely and totally repaired by the next movie, except for the one or two parts of town that are needed to stand in as burned out rubble heaps for the purposes of one shot in the next movie. No one seems to be worried about, or even remember, the giant alien robot war invasion that they just lived through, from one moment to the next.

These are not nitpicky criticisms, either, as is often alleged on internet forums. These are all pretty large issues of narrative. And now, that there is allegedly an effort being made to retcon a “cinematic universe” out of five movies, starting with a fifth movie that did this with the least possible effort, they are issues that are going to be lumps under the cheap carpeting of unification. Oh boy, there’s a picture of Shia LeBouf in The Last Knight, and it really ties the franchise together!

A substantial difference between the Transformers franchise of movies and The Fast and the Furious franchise of movies is that one of them started with a deep well of characters and storylines. While it was not, and is not, necessary for the Transformers movies to adhere to a 1980’s cartoon, they began life with so much more at their disposal than the movies about street racing. Yet The Fast and the Furious movies do so much with their characters, even though they get fairly one note after a while. Some characters are defined by what they do when they appear on screen:  Han eats snacks. It’s what he does. Leo and Santos goof with each other in Spanish and handle all the dirty jobs. It’s what they do. But you know that. Han at least will wind up being the arm candy for super-secret agent Giselle, in a neat reversal of roles, where the female character is the one who does things and the implied boyfriend is kind of just there for her to riff with. They seem like real people. In the world of the Transformers, Agent Simmons is a powerful agent for clandestine outfit Sector 7, until he works at a deli, or runs a conspiracy website, or is living in Cuba. Because. Optimus Prime is the wise and strong leader, until he’s a psychopath, or a knight. Because.

Both of the franchises have their fans and their detractors. I am a fan of one and am outright mortified by the other. But what I am not trying to do is act like The Fast and the Furious is a perfect, or even intellectually demanding, franchise. But it is honest. All eight of the movies know what they are; they know what they do that works; they know the pieces they have to play with. And they know what happened in the last one, and are able to project what will happen in the next one. The Transformers movies often simply forget whatever happened last time: it was a big deal two summers ago, but it is no longer of concern. That was the biggest threat we’ve ever faced, but it was quickly dealt with so as to leave maximum time for toilet humor, and now this is really the biggest threat we’ve ever faced. For real, this time. And no one will remember that all we need to do is stock up on those magnesium rounds that were so effective in the first movie. No, now we’re boned until some tragically uninteresting final battle sequence that mercifully signals the movies’ end.  An action movie or its franchise does need to deliver on the premise of action, but that is not to say that it can contain nothing else. The Fast and the Furious provides fun and likeable and memorable characters, the kind that make you grin when they show up in the next movie and say that thing that they would say that defines them as who their character is. In the last two Transformers movies, we know Cade Yeager is an inventor, because he tells us so over and over and over and over in one of the movies, at least. Then, he goes on to live in a junk yard, because that is perfect cover for a man on the run and a fully stocked playground for an inventor. At least we know that Rome was in prison once; when the same man playing Epps shows up in Transformers, the franchise expects you to cheer but doesn’t tell you why you should. Dom and Brian assemble the team (or family…..) in Fast 5 and then they never disband, unless someone dies; in The Last Knight, Megatron assembles his hand-picked team of somehow incarcerated Decepticons, despite the military’s’ open admission of finding and simply killing Cybertronians, who don’t make it out of the very next scene alive. An actor comes back for another movie, and that’s supposed to be a big thing.

Maybe we shouldn’t even talk about The Fate of the Furious, which refocuses the entire franchise in its now Paul Walker-less direction while still throwing one back to the previous movies by naming Dom’s kid Brian. That kind of meta action is barely accomplished in the Transformers movies aside from all of them having “Transformers” in their titles.

I hate the “argument” that both series of movies are nothing more than dumb action movies, summer blockbusters where you should just “turn your brain off” and accept them as they are affairs. Why is that a legitimate excuse for poor quality? It’s not, and it shouldn’t be. True that The Fast and the Furious movies are “dumb” action movies, my wife thinks less of me since I developed my affinity for the series, but if they are dumb, then the Transformers movies are downright stupid.

It’s hard to argue that poor quality of the Transformers movies is a result of a fluctuating or inconsistent cast, as some misguided people will do. As bizarre as it is to write, the franchise does have a fairly large cast, despite not having any actual characters. There are a lot of humans, some of them sticking around for multiple movies, and a lot of robots, but they don’t actually do anything, so they are easy to lose track of. But the series changes main characters, and several “major” characters, like Lennox from the first one, or Mikela from the first two, exit the series and maybe return, or are maybe replaced in Mikela’s case, with a new character that barely even registers as a different character. Once filling the role as Sam’s girlfriend, Mikela is replaced by . . . Sam’s girlfriend. It’s not that big of a deal that someone was replaced: it’s a big deal that someone was replaced, and it barely caused a ripple. Cybertronians come and go and mostly without impact.

The Fast and the Furious movies have a large cast as well, and it is also inconsistent. Brian and Dom are both in the first, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh movies; Dom is not in the second or third (not really); Brian is not in the third or eighth (for a pretty understandable reason). Letty is not in the second, third, or fifth movies. Essentially the only movies that have everyone in them are five (minus Letty), six, and seven. Brian, Han and Gisele don’t make it to the eighth movie. The series shifts main characters as well, as in the first movie, Brian is clearly the protagonist, sent to infiltrate Dom’s gang, which places Dom as the initial antagonist, before we learn that The Man was the bad guy all along for coming between bros. Dom’s absence in the second movie furthers Brian’s’ protagonist status; both of their absences in the third cool this off a bit, and by the time they reunite in the fourth movie, they are on the path to becoming co-protagonists, which they will remain until the eighth movie, which now moves to establish Dom as the protagonist, which some could argue he’d been all along. All of this turn over, all of these here for a movie, gone for the next movie, then back again for another movie, and characters are still more or less developed people, who we care about, who we remember. Transformers can’t manage this, and their title characters have a 30 year head start on Dom and Co.

Ultimately, the reason one franchise, as flawed and silly as it is, is able to flourish for several movies, and probably will for the near future, is that people who take the movies and their characters seriously make The Fast and the Furious movies. The Transformers movies are made by people who don’t care about either of those things, but pile on the box office successful moments of the movies again and again and again in subsequent installments.  Despite having several recurring actors and actresses, the Transformers movies don’t have the loving feel that the Fast and the Furious movies do. Both have been very profitable, and both have dedicated fans, and both do occupy that action movie berth that is so often dismissed outright as being stupid, or evoking ideas that narrative values like plot and character don’t really matter. But one of the franchises contains those elements and does a very good job of displaying them, while the other makes no efforts whatsoever to hide the fact that they blatantly disregard them. A single Fast and the Furious movie does more in the pursuit of narrative and “cinematic universe” than the entire Transformers franchise has done to date.