Spoiler alert. But then, the movie was spoiled before anyone ever saw it. Rotten, actually. There was potential, but the worms got it.
Dear Mr. Bay; So you and/or the powers that be decided that TF4 needed to focus more on the human characters, probably for reasons of audience/character sympathy and emotional impact. Sigh. Your audience is choosing to pay to see a movie called "Transformers". Shouldn't that indicate an audience set willing to sympathize with non-human characters, able to jive with the humanity of sentient beings. Shouldn't that indicate to you that you audience wants to see heroic and villainous transforming robots, not endless shaky-camera chase- and fight-scenes of bothersome human beings running for the goal line with the football (yet again) while one-dimensional transformer characters run defense(yet again). You should have invested more time in making the robot characters more human, more three-dimensional. Flesh them out, and we'd care about them. Your audience is ready to see humanity in non-humans, but only if you put it there.
Example: Transformers Prime, Season 2, Bumblebee's shame and depression at his fundamental "performance dysfunction," and the struggle to deal with inadequacy and feeling like he's not valued as a robot. The authors played it off like the robo-equivalent of erectile dysfunction, and the audience really felt for the guy, even while laughing.
On that note, fix Bee's freaking' voice. Prime's been BROUGHT BACK FROM THE DEAD at least once in your storyline, and recovered from multiple dismemberment and torso perforations. Give Bee a voice. The whole anger/jealousy at Stinger and the "I hate cheap knock-offs" thing would have played so much better if his spliced lines didn't sound like background noise.
There were hardly any on screen transformations. None at all for the three new Autobot characters except a few brief half-hidden snippets. Again, "Transformer" is in the title. You had a triple-changer character, and didn't even make use of that. So much wow-factor left so far off-screen. And transformium knock-off transformations do not count, because they are appallingly lame. If your budget runs low and you can't pay your CG guys to render transformations, then cut something else. If Galvatron and his minions are all boring cannon fodder who transform from whatever to whatever via writhing levitating cuboid helices, I just don't wanna watch.
Regarding the title and storyline, I think your plot had merit, as far as "Galvatron wants to use the seed to make lots of material to build an army." Lots of cool stuff there, room for human idiocy/corruption/foolishness, But the dinosaur extinction tie-in was unnecessary, and way too far from the science we have (and common folks know a lot of that science - people like dinosaurs, in case you didn't notice). If the dinosaurs went extinct because they were all converted to transformium and harvested, then there wouldn't be any fossils, and associated ash layer. But we do have fossils, and indications of a global blast winter and ash deposition. And why would an entire T-rex (which also misled the audience to think the Dinobots were frozen on earth, and would be revived later in the movie) have been left behind, un-harvested? What you could have done: show the seed blasts also raising mushroom clouds. Then at least we could be left to think that most dinosaurs were converted and harvested for raw transformium (that word makes me gag), and the rest died under the global blast winter, leaving The fossil record we all know actually does exist.
Dinobots - you just kinda stuck them in at the end. there's a lot of story there that you just didn't give us. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why were they imprisoned? All we know is that they are some kind of "honorable ancient warriors" and Optimus is apparently some kinda knight who once went on a crusade, and who the Dinobots might know of and possibly have reason to respect. Fill us in! What's all that? Don't put it in at the climax (where we need to CARE about what's happening) if you don't give us the knowledge and context to understand enough to care. You can't just stick Dinobots in cuz "well, people like Dinobots, so let's do it." You're doing the whole TF story from scratch, so everyone needs an origin, and character traits. The four Autobots were bad enough, but at least those cardboard cutouts had ONE dimension. Your Dinobots didn't even get to speak, and you made no use of their humanoid forms. Just imagine what you could have done with that! You wanna see a real Grimlock, fully realized with heart and soul, oomph and chutzpah? Wanna see a Grimlock you can care about, cheer for? Go see Godzilla.
Soon the Star Wars geeks will get to see a film without Lucas at the reins. Please, do the same for us TF fans. Or, better yet, redeem yourself - hold your script-writers, your actors, your audience, the story, and mostly yourself to a higher standard. Apply respect, intellect, cunning and artistic craftsmanship to your next treatment or the Transformers, and the audience will thank you. And you'll still rake in the dough.
Dear Mr. Bay; So you and/or the powers that be decided that TF4 needed to focus more on the human characters, probably for reasons of audience/character sympathy and emotional impact. Sigh. Your audience is choosing to pay to see a movie called "Transformers". Shouldn't that indicate an audience set willing to sympathize with non-human characters, able to jive with the humanity of sentient beings. Shouldn't that indicate to you that you audience wants to see heroic and villainous transforming robots, not endless shaky-camera chase- and fight-scenes of bothersome human beings running for the goal line with the football (yet again) while one-dimensional transformer characters run defense(yet again). You should have invested more time in making the robot characters more human, more three-dimensional. Flesh them out, and we'd care about them. Your audience is ready to see humanity in non-humans, but only if you put it there.
Example: Transformers Prime, Season 2, Bumblebee's shame and depression at his fundamental "performance dysfunction," and the struggle to deal with inadequacy and feeling like he's not valued as a robot. The authors played it off like the robo-equivalent of erectile dysfunction, and the audience really felt for the guy, even while laughing.
On that note, fix Bee's freaking' voice. Prime's been BROUGHT BACK FROM THE DEAD at least once in your storyline, and recovered from multiple dismemberment and torso perforations. Give Bee a voice. The whole anger/jealousy at Stinger and the "I hate cheap knock-offs" thing would have played so much better if his spliced lines didn't sound like background noise.
There were hardly any on screen transformations. None at all for the three new Autobot characters except a few brief half-hidden snippets. Again, "Transformer" is in the title. You had a triple-changer character, and didn't even make use of that. So much wow-factor left so far off-screen. And transformium knock-off transformations do not count, because they are appallingly lame. If your budget runs low and you can't pay your CG guys to render transformations, then cut something else. If Galvatron and his minions are all boring cannon fodder who transform from whatever to whatever via writhing levitating cuboid helices, I just don't wanna watch.
Regarding the title and storyline, I think your plot had merit, as far as "Galvatron wants to use the seed to make lots of material to build an army." Lots of cool stuff there, room for human idiocy/corruption/foolishness, But the dinosaur extinction tie-in was unnecessary, and way too far from the science we have (and common folks know a lot of that science - people like dinosaurs, in case you didn't notice). If the dinosaurs went extinct because they were all converted to transformium and harvested, then there wouldn't be any fossils, and associated ash layer. But we do have fossils, and indications of a global blast winter and ash deposition. And why would an entire T-rex (which also misled the audience to think the Dinobots were frozen on earth, and would be revived later in the movie) have been left behind, un-harvested? What you could have done: show the seed blasts also raising mushroom clouds. Then at least we could be left to think that most dinosaurs were converted and harvested for raw transformium (that word makes me gag), and the rest died under the global blast winter, leaving The fossil record we all know actually does exist.
Dinobots - you just kinda stuck them in at the end. there's a lot of story there that you just didn't give us. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why were they imprisoned? All we know is that they are some kind of "honorable ancient warriors" and Optimus is apparently some kinda knight who once went on a crusade, and who the Dinobots might know of and possibly have reason to respect. Fill us in! What's all that? Don't put it in at the climax (where we need to CARE about what's happening) if you don't give us the knowledge and context to understand enough to care. You can't just stick Dinobots in cuz "well, people like Dinobots, so let's do it." You're doing the whole TF story from scratch, so everyone needs an origin, and character traits. The four Autobots were bad enough, but at least those cardboard cutouts had ONE dimension. Your Dinobots didn't even get to speak, and you made no use of their humanoid forms. Just imagine what you could have done with that! You wanna see a real Grimlock, fully realized with heart and soul, oomph and chutzpah? Wanna see a Grimlock you can care about, cheer for? Go see Godzilla.
Soon the Star Wars geeks will get to see a film without Lucas at the reins. Please, do the same for us TF fans. Or, better yet, redeem yourself - hold your script-writers, your actors, your audience, the story, and mostly yourself to a higher standard. Apply respect, intellect, cunning and artistic craftsmanship to your next treatment or the Transformers, and the audience will thank you. And you'll still rake in the dough.
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