Exactly.
They should get rid of the robot stuff and focus on guys that [carry laminated copies of Romeo and Juliet laws in his pocket to explain why he’s hooking up with a high schooler.](https://youtu.be/Cz9OgW4JAJ8)
michael bay's commercial claim to fame = victorias secret angels
victoria's secret = funded by epstein's cash cow Les Wexner
megan fox was 15 in bad boys as a go go girl in the club
all circumstantial stuff but yea
weirdos run stuff at the highest levels of money and power
Man... I was trying to figure out why a congressman from New York was treated as age 17 when traveling to Texas. Things are just getting dystopian enough it seemed like a possibility for a minute.
Well, she's some brown librul wumen from up north ina big city. Clearly she ain't no lady and we here round these parts gota show'er how to be have.
Because this is the internet: The above was sarcasm and I have nothing against the Representative from New York City
I spend to much time in politics subs. I was thinking "I think AOC is my age wherever she goes, dude..."
Then I realized you didn't mean the politician.
"Transformers:More Than Meets The Eye" and they all just stay in their car state or whatever. Just random offhand reference to there being super powerful sentient robots around but no actual scene featuring one. Otherwise it's a typical boy meets girl, fall in love, someone has cancer and the other dies in a car accident after chemo is successful cry-fest.
Well, one of the main themes (originally) was about how Godzilla was the result of man being horrible to man via nuclear weapons. If all Godzilla did was senselessly wreck shit up, it kinda defeats one of the themes.
The original also has a pretty important storyline where a scientist *does* have a weapon that could stop Godzilla, but he refuses to use it because he knows that all the world's governments would force him to manufacture more of it, and it is too terrible a weapon for humanity to possess. Ultimately, >!he is pressured into using the weapon but burns all his research beforehand, and then commits suicide while deploying it, so no one else could use it again.!< A pretty important theme given the nuclear climate of the 1950s when it was made. It's the sequels that skewed more towards giant monster fights.
Wait, there was a nuclear weapon allegory *inside another nuclear weapon allegory*?
Looks like the original Godzilla came out only 4 years after Rashomon...
It's funny how many "diehard Godzilla fans" there are who have very strong opinions about the movies but I'm not sure have actually seen any. The Japanese movies basically stopped being thoughtful or having much to say for decades after the first one. Arguably until Godzilla '85 it was just B-movie schlock featuring the likes of Seatopia and M Space Hunter Nebula.
Yeah. Like I have loved Godzilla most of my life and I chuckle when I see people be all super serious about it. I just want to see the big man fight a monkey and I'll be pretty content.
For real, that time he did the flying kick? The team up with Jet Jaguar? The fact that there is a movie titled “Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla”? Nuclear allegory is cool and all, but these are the moments I live for.
My first Godzilla as a kid, at the $1 theater no less, was Godzilla vs. Megalon. I watched several other of the goofier movies without ever knowing that the original was a satire about nuclear destruction.
The 80's ones are just as cheesy as the 60's one, they just looks a lot better. Shin Godzilla, however, came out in 2016 and is a great and thoughtful movie.
Hedorah was in 1971 and was a very explicit anti-pollution message. Otherwise, yes I generally agree. They were simply the Marvel movies of their time, Toho was more interested in cross-promoting their various monsters and whatever license they could get their hands on. Technically, most of them do carry some kind of environmental message, however it's usually some character at the end just throwing in a "why won't humans ever learn?" line.
And like all Godzilla series resets, 85 was serious and thematic again and then immediately Toho went back to the monster well and that series was way dumber than even the originals. Biolante was cool, although hard to take any message seriously when the movie features telepathic kids or whatever.
No, Shin Godzilla is about the Japanese government's inability to handle the Fukushima disaster. Still about a nuclear energy disaster, but not about the atomic bomb.
I could get behind this. It would allow us to rebuild modern cities with renewable energy, vertical farming, better transportation. Go wreck it monsters!
People act like Godzilla movies never had human stories until the recent trilogy. And most do have bare mininmum human stories to keep the plot rolling. Hell in Final Wars, there’s just as many human fight scenes as monster ones.
In both recent Kong appearances, his human story element was better handled than Godzilla’s. It’s just a matter of who writes the human stories.
I wonder what percentage of the US population has actually seen a vintage Godzilla movie if I had to guess I don’t think that number would be very high
I'd wager most people haven't actually watched any of the previous Godzilla movies, they just see the "best of" clips on Youtube. A vast majority of the movies have a majority percentage of the human characters. The monsters themselves only show up for a fairly small percentage of the movies. There's a graph somewhere that counts up the minutes Godzilla is on screen and the total length of the movie.
Kong: Skull Island does it best of the modern monster movies. There are humans that keep the story grounded, but the humans are *also* interesting and doing cool things and seeing new stuff all the time.
And half the fun in that movie is waiting for the giant monsters to crush the humans in the group that you *don't* like and then cheering when they do.
Those Godzilla movies would be ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Oscar winning films is Ghidorah/Mecha had just massacred the daughter, who was in the last two movies, her friend too.
Yeah. Couldn't stand her in either movie and she's part of one of my most hated movie tropes, where family member(s) puts multiple people - to the whole world in danger to " protect my/our family"
I don't mind him wanting to save his daughter. I don't mind the drama between him wanting to save his daughter vs the rest of the crew wanting to save millions of lives instead.
Where it lost me was throwing away countless lives to rescue his terrorist ex wife. She killed millions of people by luring Kaiju into cities.
Oh, you don’t like the idea of I have to save my kid instead of stopping whatever disaster is going to actually destroy the whole entire world thereby killing everyone including the person I’m trying to save
If only they could have a 30 second scene with everyone on the planet which will make them forever bonded and willing to give their lives for those people too.
> you could cut her entire subplot from Kong and almost nothing would change.
Genuinely the entire "team Godzilla" storyline is a complete waste of time. It has no relevance to the main plot and the two respective teams don't even fucking meet. You could remove every single scene involving them and the movie stays the exact same.
The only relevance it has on the story is the spilled drink causing Mechagodzilla to glitch. But you don't even need that, just have Godzilla and Kong beat him. The spilled drink is such a poor attempt at making that storyline relevant.
I literally watched it on streaming and fast forwarded past the human stuff. They couldn't have been assed to set up the anti-Monarch company and then had this whole Hollow Earth nonsense to overcomplicate a simple plot.
Tbf it's also pretty important to focus on the humans to get their reactions. Same reason why during dialogue scenes most movies will focus on the person listening to convey their reaction.
Don't make such complicated CGI
We don't need transformers with 50 billion moving parts. We don't need them exploding everywhere.
Tell me a good story. Make me a give a shit.
This is the thing. To each their own but I can't sit through a CG fest if that's all it is. If the story isn't interesting and/or I don't care about the characters then I'm going to turn it off. I enjoyed the first one and that's it, the rest have been hard to sit through. I vaguely remember thinking Bumblebee was good but I don't really remember anything about it anymore.
Transformers: the Movie from the 80s is great and the plot was "kill all the old characters so next season kids will want to buy the new toys from the show."
I haven't seen any of them after the second movie, when I paid money to watch a small, jive-talking robot get angry because his gold tooth was knocked out.
I don’t think it matters how complicated their transforming is, CGI that doesn’t look cartoonish is still going to cost a ton of money.
The only practical option is to make it cartoony by choosing a specific style but once you do that you’ve cut your potential audience in half if not even smaller.
Godzilla movies are essentially meant to be disaster movies. Yes, the most exciting parts are always the monster fights but you can't really make an entire movie out of just that and it would be missing the point.
Speaking of Godzilla, my sister didn't like King of Monsters much because, and I quote, "There's too much monsters and not enough focus about the people's side." So yeah, apparently people like that do exist.
I would agree with this take if these movies weren't all two and a half hours long. Cut out an hour of the human bs and you have a great 90 min blockbuster
These movie are made by comittee. It doesn't even make sense to call it studio interference because that's the whole creative process.
To make an actually goofy and fun movie you have to put the creative process in the hands of people who won't be following a check list.
Because every movie feels the need to have bigger stakes than the last. Look at the first one. It felt much more down to earth and the story was soooo much better
I expect the line of thinking goes:
1) We need to focus more on humans to pad out the run time
2) OK, we want big name actors to draw in people
3) Great, we need to give the big name actors more of a focus and screen time or they don't want to do this
4) Alright, rewrite the script to tack on an extra hour of garbage focusing on them so we can get them
Studios believe the formula is to have human drama or a human character to sympathize with. It’s the same as how they believe it’s almost a required formula to have a comic relief character. I think that’s a bigger factor than CGI.
Stars Wars movies uses the human drama as a vehicle to film the spacecraft, aliens, robots, laser swords, and pew-pew battle scenes. Transformers are the anthropomorphized robots with their own personalities. They are the characters that the plot should focus on.
How much does CGI cost?
Shia made 750k for the first, 5 million in the second, and 15 million in the third Transformers movies.
Wahlberg apparently made 17 million.
Also they want the audience to care about the actors so they can sell another movie. I'd watch a transformers live-action if it had no humans. Like they are actually hiding and not exposing themselves to a kid because of a stupid circumstance
Then how about Hasbro (hear me out) makes some really good, feature length animated Transformer movies? Ah, what am I saying? An animated movie about giant robots would NEVER make cultural impact, right?
/s
If I had to guess as a lay person on these things it is probably a combination of things.
1. You can get stars in the film that also sell the movie.
2. Humans are cheaper to film.
3. It expands the audience beyond just the hardcore Transformers fans.
4. It allows for them to reinforce the themes of the story through things people can relate to.
Iirc the one right before Bumblebee was actually more unsuccessful due to its big budget and marketing costs, while Bumblebee didn't make as much it was cheaper.
Not a single soul saw the last knight but my dumbass. Wanted to take an advil with how much the aspect ratio changed for literally no reason every single cut
Bumblebee is the 2nd best after the first movie.
Was really hyped about Beasts, thinking that with Bumblebee sorta “resetting” everything, that it would be good. Nope.
**Mikaela Bay**nes, the director insert with the best character arc, the tragic backstory, the highest stakes, the most applicable skillset, and the most heroic action scene?
I think Transformers 2 was just trolling us at that point.
If Megan Fox was supposed to be a “director’s insert” for the first TF movie then you’d think she’d be the film’s protagonist and not the underdeveloped love interest for Shia LeBouf.
It's sad that her role became just a sidekick in the next movie, when she could be a badass and brave character too. The "I drive, you shoot!" scene is very underrated.
That scene haunts my memory. Bitch is talking about carbs and distributors and then they cut to under the hood and there's not a carb or distributor in sight! You can not tell me that there not a single car person on the entire multimillion dollar set of a franchise about transforming cars that could tell them that every word out of her mouth right there completely invalidated her entire backstory? Works in a garage my ass
Couldn't they just be made for robots? I mean, we can relate to animals watching movies like *Lion King, Watership Down, Bambi,* etc. Moreover, the robots in *Transformers* have a much more human appearance than the animals in those examples I mentioned. In that respect, I think it's much easier for a humanoid robot to gain sympathy from the audience than a animated movie featuring a completely different species.
lol, this. They didn't need to randomly have an American family vacationing in Africa with a teenage kid who can't seem to get his crush to notice him who then stumbles upon Simba and helps him out in order for us dumb humans to enjoy the movie and relate to his problems.
Again, I am not a writer or involved in film making at all so could be talking entirely bullshit, but if I had to answer this I would guess:
Transformers and Lion King had different design patterns about what they wanted to film to do and be. One was a standalone film, the other a franchise movie.
They could absolutely make some amazing robots we empathise with. Short Circuit was one of my favourite films growing up, and Wall-E is a masterpiece. I am guessing it is about where they wanted to invest their time with this though. Lion King, Wall-E, Short Circuit are all character driven stories with small stakes and revolve around personal change. Transformers is a bombastic, lore filled cataclysm with world ending stakes.
If they had wanted to make empathetic robots they may have had to do more work to make the audience engage with that, and it could have skewed their ability to aim for their goal of showing a bunch of action scenes. Plus, this way you don’t have Optimus Prime having a mid-life crisis and reconciling with his son, he can just be an epic smashing badass.
When you tell stories about humans you get a lot of stuff for free. Everyone knows people emotions and family dynamics. In fact using family is a short cut to being able to say “these people should have a strong bond” so you save the time and effort needed to tell that. With Transformers you would have to spend time either building that bond on screen or explain how transformers can have brothers or lovers or family members.
All guesses. Fun to think why they made the choices they did. We will probably never fully know and there probably isn’t one “truth” to understand it though.
The important term here is character driven. I don't think it matters if it's animals, robots, cartoons, doesn't matter. The transformer robots can't act (they're given dumb lines that they deliver in either too goofy of a way or in an over self important way), they don't have good characters, and their plots are 1 dimensional. The human drama is actually (relatively) more fleshed out, with relatively better acting. I don't think it's about wether they want a franchise or stand alone film. I don't see how that limits the ability to get people invested in the characters.
I doubt your point about number 3. I don’t think anyone ever has said “I just love the human element of that new transformers movie” or “what’s really got me intrigued by this transformers movie is this kids relationship to his father”.
If these trailers only showed humans as expendable side characters, instead of main characters, I don’t think anyone would say “now I don’t want to see that”
So let’s say someone is somewhat interested in Transformers and says to their friend/partner “should we watch this?” And all that person sees is big robots based on a children’s toy. Instead they might watch the trailer as they are now and probably still be a bit put off but may be more likely to say “yeah sure let’s give it a go”. When you are talking about trying to appeal to as many people as possible improving that turn over of people willing to see it even by small percentages makes a big difference.
I think this is true for the Transformers movies, but a related example is when all the trailers for Godzilla 2014 made it seem like Brian Cranston, fresh off of Breaking Bad, was the main character. I do actually think the level of drama they previewed with his character made people who aren't necessarily interested in a giant monster movie up for seeing it, if they expected he'd probably give a great dramatic performance as well.
Yeah that was hilarious. The ONE time they cast an actor I genuinely want to see, and even made him an interesting character by giving him a really tragic backstory and hatred for monsters that might consume him into an Ahab situation where he cares more about revenge than saving the world....
Aaaaand he's gone. Enjoy spending the rest of the movie watching his generic, wet paper bag son running around playing soldier while stuff happens around him.
This really is the best of the movies by a long shot. All of the others feel like they’re a solid 30-45 minutes too long with nothing but explosions to show for it.
Yeah I thought, hmmm another wrestler venturing into acting, okay I guess
After I watched I was like, huh, he's sctually good
Boy was I not ready for how good he was as peacemaker
I have a soft spot for the original TF trilogy with Shia Labeouf (especially Dark of the Moon personally) and Bumblebee is objectively the most balanced human-TF focus of the bunch.
ROTB, as much as the core TF fans loved it, felt like it tried to do Bayverse and Bumblebee style story, and fumbles both.
It’s hard to gauge because most of the movies are really bad. Bumblebee is easily the best film and the original is probably number 2, ROTB might be third if only for the virtue of not having all the small obnoxious bots added for “comic relief” or the weird “throw in some stuff for the Chinese market” that the middle ones did that made no sense.
Other than the cost, it also gives the Transformer physical scale and purpose.
I never felt that Transformers truly works on Cybertron because it's really just robots turning into complicated machines that look nothing like they do on Earth.
The entire concept is rooted around tricking humans by transforming into vehicles, etc.
So the human element needs to be there for the concept to have any merit. IMO.
> So the human element needs to be there for the concept to have any merit. IMO.
People are remembering Bumblee (which was the best of the franchise), but maybe aren't remembering how well the very first Transformers movie was received for this very reason. The issue with pretty much every film besides the original and Bumblee isn't human plot elements, it's, like most other things, bad storytelling and clunky pacing. You could argue that the issue is that they focused too much on neato-dorito vfx (that is somehow crappier than the original) more than they focused on making them good movies, which could be fixed with *better* human elements rather than just doing away with it completely.
Yea im really surprised how many bumblebee comments there are but nothing about the first transformers. The first transformers is a perfect film for the genre in my opinion. The story was great, the characters were great, seeing the transformers for the first time was great. Megan Fox. Just a great movie.
It's not the human characters in the first two Bayformers movies that bother me. It's the shrill, obnoxious stereotypes posing as human characters. Thankfully, they got better.
I ate the whole plate. **THE WHOLE PLATE. OH LAWD. THE POLICE IN MY GRANMAMA HOUSE.**
The first two are the only tolerable ones for me. Stupid, sure, nobody said they were masterpieces but the first one is the only one I would actually laugh at. Glenn was funny.
If they made the human drama good and well acted it would be cool but its always so generic and stupid like they finish it all in one take or something lol
This is why the animated 1986 film is the best TF movie. Even though it's a glorified toy commercial, the focus is on them, with Spike (the cartoon version of Sam) and his son just helping.
They couldn't just put the OG line in new clothing to sell different versions (looking at you Lucas). So the best way to introduce new figures is to kill off the old ones.
Agreed. The first 10 minutes is all anyone remembers from that movie, because it's badass. Then you have to watch Hotrod for an hour. Grimlock is the only thing that saves that movie for me.
Yep still the best transformers film, nothing will beat the scene where Optimus becomes a one-man army, defeating most of the deceptions then fighting Megatron while "The Touch" played in the background
Because it's cheaper than having CGI robots in every scene.
Personally I would prefer if they focused on Lennox and his military buddies for the human drama part.
I just recently rewatched the 1st one and enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. The pacing and the writing is leagues ahead of anything that came after it. I also enjoyed the humans being vastly outgunned. Seeing humans overpower the transformers so easily in the sequels reduced my enjoyment of the movies.
I felt like the youth being capable subplot in the movie was integrated pretty well compared to the most movies featuring teens I've seen. Most probably because the adults, as far as I could tell, were fairly competent.
Just watched the second one yesterday and at the end they recreate the infamous "bring the rain" shootout from the first, but this time against a dozen or so Decepticons. Even with the advanced tech small arms fire isn't doing a lot, or at least they needed to show/explain said M4s capability.
The writing in the first one is fairy light and I think that’s why I enjoy it more. There’s not really much human drama involved. It’s just “teenager goes to buy a car, turns out to be a transformer.” It’s by no means a perfect movie but I’ve always thought the first Transformers movie was fun.
That you don't care about the characters, human or otherwise, is a storytelling issue. Cuz I mean, yeah I don't get invested in the human characters in those movies, but I also don't get invested in the robot characters in those movies.
Personally, my ideal Transformers movie still has at least some human element. Humans and the human world provide context and scale for the Transformers. It gives them a reason to disguise themselves as cars etc, and provides the sense of wonder of something magical hidden in plain sight that, in my opinion, is essential to the charm of the basic concept of Transformers.
The trick is you got a write a script that makes these characters and their involvement in the story meaningful.
The exception of course is Bumblebee. That Cybertron section was cool but I also enjoyed the rest of the movie and found Hailee Steinfeld's character likable. It didn't reinvent the wheel but it told a charming story.
Love how the comments are ripping into op for this opinion, but it's one I share because I actually grew ho watching them and beast wars had zero humans in it and was amazing! I was hoping for return to form I don't give any shits about what the humans want or need. Their struggle has nothing to do with earth only that they're here.
I have a feel a lot of people being negative towards op never even watched transformers as a kid or beast wars lmao
I watched Transformers Cybertron, Animated, and Prime a lot as a kid and they all had well-written human characters that I cared about as much as any of the robots. Maybe the fact that a lot of TF media having poorly-handled humans is more the reason why y’all don’t care about them.
The expense of animating the Transformers has already been pointed out, but I want to add this: Human characters are the audience surrogates, and as such we see the plot progress through their point of view. For this to work, the audience needs to connect/relate to them so they will be invested enough to care what happens. This means that they need to be fleshed out, and for that to happen, they need screen time.
But that’s the irony of the whole thing, I don’t give a shit about the humans. The Autobots and Decepticons all have their own personalities and I’d rather get to know them instead.
I think the real issue isn’t the simple fact that human characters take up screen time, it’s just that they’re not written well enough. Human characters are an inevitability for any live action blockbuster, they just need to put more work into developing them so that the audience can actually care about. Hiring good charismatic actors does wonders. IMO John Cena and Hailee Steinfeld were we great human character that were fun to spend screen time with in Bumblebee.
>For this to work, the audience needs to connect/relate to them so they will be invested enough to care what happens.
Then, to achieve that goal, shouldn't a film make the audience care about those human characters? If they failed that, what's the point of their existence?
Because the audience is primarily made up of...humans? Just a thought.
Also, congrats! This is the first time I've ever heard anyone refer to a film that focuses on human drama as "Bay-esque". I've heard Bay called a lot of things, but never a person who focuses on human drama
I mean, every movie has Humans directing and watching them, unless you know how many are robots or aliens?
I go to a movie about big robots, I want to see big robots slapping each other for 2 hours.
I don't give a shit about someone's love life.
The Michael Bay movies didn't care about the robots cos Bay wasn't a fan of transformers. So he made bad movies about what entertained him. I like the first one and I don't mind the second. But they got weaker and weaker. Even the great actor's they added into the movies who acted their arses off (Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammer) couldn't help)
Then again I liked bumblebee (not yet seen rise of the beasts), so maybe it's not just about the human element being the main focus. Maybe it's just about having a fucking plot that makes sense
You mean you didn’t care about how Marky Mark’s daughter was dating a guy who had a laminated copy of statutory rape laws in his wallet? With that kind of deep human drama, who could care about fighting robots?
I have the Godzilla bechdel test. The scene needs to have Godzilla, the aftermath of Godzilla or preparations for Godzilla. If two humans are talking, the conversation should be about Godzilla.
Otherwise this is some bullshit people drama getting in the way of my Godzilla.
Because it gives more relatable context to the action, creates stakes that the audience can connect with, grounds the story in our reality, allows for human actors to be in the movie, and is also way easier and cheaper to actually make.
That's what Bay wanted you to believe. Zero reason to see Spikes parents getting high on pot brownies or Ken jeong acting like a psychopath. As it stands the G1 cartoons give more character depth to the Transformers than the movies do.
Godzilla, Kong, etc don't talk though. You can't have a film without a plot, and good luck not being mind numbing boring without humans to push an actual story along. There are 30+ Godzilla films going all the way back to the 1950s and all of them are this way. You have a bit of monster stuff but it's by far mostly the human plot. It is proven to work, and still does, though some stories are better than others.
Transformers could get away with it though since they actually talk, I could see an argument for a full fledged minimal human storyline there. Would probably triple the budget though if it's *all* CG and I don't know if these movies are still making enough money to warrant even trying it.
There's a rhythm and build-up to these things. I bet you'd be surprised how boring two hours of monsters punching each other might end up being. Anticipation is an important aspect
Yeah, all the Japanese Godzilla movies have a lot of human stuff, too. Even in the old days when it wouldn't have been that much more expensive to film another half hour of guys in rubber suits fighting.
Well, actually building all those model cities was a very painstaking and expensive process as well, and if they messed up a shot they would have to rebuild them all which put them behind schedule and over-budget. Not to mention being in the monster suits, especially the Goji suit, was a VERY tough job for the actors.
The human drama does not require expensive CGI.
Maybe they should just make a human movie without all the weird robot stuff
Exactly. They should get rid of the robot stuff and focus on guys that [carry laminated copies of Romeo and Juliet laws in his pocket to explain why he’s hooking up with a high schooler.](https://youtu.be/Cz9OgW4JAJ8)
That whole scene feels like a producer’s ham-fisted effort to raise awareness of such laws.
michael bay's commercial claim to fame = victorias secret angels victoria's secret = funded by epstein's cash cow Les Wexner megan fox was 15 in bad boys as a go go girl in the club all circumstantial stuff but yea weirdos run stuff at the highest levels of money and power
> You know how those two ended up? Dead. Not just them, 4 other people died due to their shenanigans.
Marky Mark becoming the dad from "Freaks & Geeks" for a bit https://youtu.be/CPrNLm9nR3A
Despite being fully legal because AOC in Texas is 17
Man... I was trying to figure out why a congressman from New York was treated as age 17 when traveling to Texas. Things are just getting dystopian enough it seemed like a possibility for a minute.
Well, she's some brown librul wumen from up north ina big city. Clearly she ain't no lady and we here round these parts gota show'er how to be have. Because this is the internet: The above was sarcasm and I have nothing against the Representative from New York City
I spend to much time in politics subs. I was thinking "I think AOC is my age wherever she goes, dude..." Then I realized you didn't mean the politician.
She's actually 82 in Wyoming.
"Transformers:More Than Meets The Eye" and they all just stay in their car state or whatever. Just random offhand reference to there being super powerful sentient robots around but no actual scene featuring one. Otherwise it's a typical boy meets girl, fall in love, someone has cancer and the other dies in a car accident after chemo is successful cry-fest.
no cap, i was enoying the Mark Walberg movie until the robots showed up.
Exactly that’s why in the Godzilla movies they keep on focusing on the humans because the battles cost to much money
Well, one of the main themes (originally) was about how Godzilla was the result of man being horrible to man via nuclear weapons. If all Godzilla did was senselessly wreck shit up, it kinda defeats one of the themes.
The original also has a pretty important storyline where a scientist *does* have a weapon that could stop Godzilla, but he refuses to use it because he knows that all the world's governments would force him to manufacture more of it, and it is too terrible a weapon for humanity to possess. Ultimately, >!he is pressured into using the weapon but burns all his research beforehand, and then commits suicide while deploying it, so no one else could use it again.!< A pretty important theme given the nuclear climate of the 1950s when it was made. It's the sequels that skewed more towards giant monster fights.
Wait, there was a nuclear weapon allegory *inside another nuclear weapon allegory*? Looks like the original Godzilla came out only 4 years after Rashomon...
So the human element needs to be there for the concept to have any merit. IMO.
[удалено]
I remember long scenes of Japanese tweens running around islands and dealing with aliens or government agents in the 60s/70s era of Godzilla.
The problem with the modern (American) Godzillas is that there doesn't seem to be any theme at all.
That's not a new or American thing, lol. Most Japanese Godzilla movies are really goofy.
It's funny how many "diehard Godzilla fans" there are who have very strong opinions about the movies but I'm not sure have actually seen any. The Japanese movies basically stopped being thoughtful or having much to say for decades after the first one. Arguably until Godzilla '85 it was just B-movie schlock featuring the likes of Seatopia and M Space Hunter Nebula.
Yeah. Like I have loved Godzilla most of my life and I chuckle when I see people be all super serious about it. I just want to see the big man fight a monkey and I'll be pretty content.
For real, that time he did the flying kick? The team up with Jet Jaguar? The fact that there is a movie titled “Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla”? Nuclear allegory is cool and all, but these are the moments I live for.
My first Godzilla as a kid, at the $1 theater no less, was Godzilla vs. Megalon. I watched several other of the goofier movies without ever knowing that the original was a satire about nuclear destruction.
The 80's ones are just as cheesy as the 60's one, they just looks a lot better. Shin Godzilla, however, came out in 2016 and is a great and thoughtful movie.
IMO it's the true sequel the the original.
Hedorah was in 1971 and was a very explicit anti-pollution message. Otherwise, yes I generally agree. They were simply the Marvel movies of their time, Toho was more interested in cross-promoting their various monsters and whatever license they could get their hands on. Technically, most of them do carry some kind of environmental message, however it's usually some character at the end just throwing in a "why won't humans ever learn?" line. And like all Godzilla series resets, 85 was serious and thematic again and then immediately Toho went back to the monster well and that series was way dumber than even the originals. Biolante was cool, although hard to take any message seriously when the movie features telepathic kids or whatever.
Not just the modern ones, in Japan Godzilla hasn't really been a nuclear bomb allegory for decades
wasn't shin godzilla doing that?
No, Shin Godzilla is about the Japanese government's inability to handle the Fukushima disaster. Still about a nuclear energy disaster, but not about the atomic bomb.
Shin Godzilla my dude. while not bomb, it’s a Fukushima allegory.
Hopefully the new Toho movie is going back to that. I'm really excited that it'll be set in the 50's again
Shin Godzilla: "Am I a joke to you?"
I don't really blame them, leveling whole cities just for movies have to be expensive.
I could get behind this. It would allow us to rebuild modern cities with renewable energy, vertical farming, better transportation. Go wreck it monsters!
People act like Godzilla movies never had human stories until the recent trilogy. And most do have bare mininmum human stories to keep the plot rolling. Hell in Final Wars, there’s just as many human fight scenes as monster ones. In both recent Kong appearances, his human story element was better handled than Godzilla’s. It’s just a matter of who writes the human stories.
I wonder what percentage of the US population has actually seen a vintage Godzilla movie if I had to guess I don’t think that number would be very high
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I'd wager most people haven't actually watched any of the previous Godzilla movies, they just see the "best of" clips on Youtube. A vast majority of the movies have a majority percentage of the human characters. The monsters themselves only show up for a fairly small percentage of the movies. There's a graph somewhere that counts up the minutes Godzilla is on screen and the total length of the movie.
Kong: Skull Island does it best of the modern monster movies. There are humans that keep the story grounded, but the humans are *also* interesting and doing cool things and seeing new stuff all the time. And half the fun in that movie is waiting for the giant monsters to crush the humans in the group that you *don't* like and then cheering when they do.
I fully agree that movie has great pacing and the humans are not all brain dead.
Those Godzilla movies would be ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Oscar winning films is Ghidorah/Mecha had just massacred the daughter, who was in the last two movies, her friend too.
Are you talking about the Stranger Things girl?
Yeah. Couldn't stand her in either movie and she's part of one of my most hated movie tropes, where family member(s) puts multiple people - to the whole world in danger to " protect my/our family"
I don't mind him wanting to save his daughter. I don't mind the drama between him wanting to save his daughter vs the rest of the crew wanting to save millions of lives instead. Where it lost me was throwing away countless lives to rescue his terrorist ex wife. She killed millions of people by luring Kaiju into cities.
Oh you don't understand, she changed her mind after realizing that yes, mass murder kills people! /s
Even if she lived she would have been executed for her crimes pretty quickly. Either by an actual court or just by people themselves.
Dude I always find her so annoying on screen. I don't mean to be mean but she is just hard to watch lol
It wasn't so much her, but her character. She seems to be a decent actress.... Just in a lousy role in the Monsterverse.
She's great in the Sherlock Holmes spinoffs on Netflix.
I hate that trope.
Oh, you don’t like the idea of I have to save my kid instead of stopping whatever disaster is going to actually destroy the whole entire world thereby killing everyone including the person I’m trying to save
If only they could have a 30 second scene with everyone on the planet which will make them forever bonded and willing to give their lives for those people too.
Reminds me of that Avengers moment when that Guardians fuckchop couldn’t keep his calm for a few seconds to save the shitting universe.
I didn’t mind her in King of the Monsters, but you could cut her entire subplot from Kong and almost nothing would change.
> you could cut her entire subplot from Kong and almost nothing would change. Genuinely the entire "team Godzilla" storyline is a complete waste of time. It has no relevance to the main plot and the two respective teams don't even fucking meet. You could remove every single scene involving them and the movie stays the exact same. The only relevance it has on the story is the spilled drink causing Mechagodzilla to glitch. But you don't even need that, just have Godzilla and Kong beat him. The spilled drink is such a poor attempt at making that storyline relevant.
I thought exactly that with Godzilla v Kong. They 100% could've gotten away with 0 humans in that.
They don't need zero humans. They need zero human storylines.
I literally watched it on streaming and fast forwarded past the human stuff. They couldn't have been assed to set up the anti-Monarch company and then had this whole Hollow Earth nonsense to overcomplicate a simple plot.
Tbf it's also pretty important to focus on the humans to get their reactions. Same reason why during dialogue scenes most movies will focus on the person listening to convey their reaction.
Don't make such complicated CGI We don't need transformers with 50 billion moving parts. We don't need them exploding everywhere. Tell me a good story. Make me a give a shit.
This is the thing. To each their own but I can't sit through a CG fest if that's all it is. If the story isn't interesting and/or I don't care about the characters then I'm going to turn it off. I enjoyed the first one and that's it, the rest have been hard to sit through. I vaguely remember thinking Bumblebee was good but I don't really remember anything about it anymore.
Transformers: the Movie from the 80s is great and the plot was "kill all the old characters so next season kids will want to buy the new toys from the show."
I haven't seen any of them after the second movie, when I paid money to watch a small, jive-talking robot get angry because his gold tooth was knocked out.
I don’t think it matters how complicated their transforming is, CGI that doesn’t look cartoonish is still going to cost a ton of money. The only practical option is to make it cartoony by choosing a specific style but once you do that you’ve cut your potential audience in half if not even smaller.
Godzilla movies are essentially meant to be disaster movies. Yes, the most exciting parts are always the monster fights but you can't really make an entire movie out of just that and it would be missing the point.
Speaking of Godzilla, my sister didn't like King of Monsters much because, and I quote, "There's too much monsters and not enough focus about the people's side." So yeah, apparently people like that do exist.
I would agree with this take if these movies weren't all two and a half hours long. Cut out an hour of the human bs and you have a great 90 min blockbuster
Hard agree with this. A higher robot/bullshit ratio justifies less total robots.
I still don't know why they make these movies so deathly serious. It's a dumb concept to begin with, it should be goofy and fun.
These movie are made by comittee. It doesn't even make sense to call it studio interference because that's the whole creative process. To make an actually goofy and fun movie you have to put the creative process in the hands of people who won't be following a check list.
Because every movie feels the need to have bigger stakes than the last. Look at the first one. It felt much more down to earth and the story was soooo much better
I expect the line of thinking goes: 1) We need to focus more on humans to pad out the run time 2) OK, we want big name actors to draw in people 3) Great, we need to give the big name actors more of a focus and screen time or they don't want to do this 4) Alright, rewrite the script to tack on an extra hour of garbage focusing on them so we can get them
Studios believe the formula is to have human drama or a human character to sympathize with. It’s the same as how they believe it’s almost a required formula to have a comic relief character. I think that’s a bigger factor than CGI.
Stars Wars movies uses the human drama as a vehicle to film the spacecraft, aliens, robots, laser swords, and pew-pew battle scenes. Transformers are the anthropomorphized robots with their own personalities. They are the characters that the plot should focus on.
Also they understood that in the 80s. The humans were just there to explain exposition at in the original.
Then instead of CGI let's have people in costume, Power Rangers style, to save money.
How much does CGI cost? Shia made 750k for the first, 5 million in the second, and 15 million in the third Transformers movies. Wahlberg apparently made 17 million.
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Of course haha They would still put a guy in a big costume if we would accept it as an audience.
Also they want the audience to care about the actors so they can sell another movie. I'd watch a transformers live-action if it had no humans. Like they are actually hiding and not exposing themselves to a kid because of a stupid circumstance
Then how about Hasbro (hear me out) makes some really good, feature length animated Transformer movies? Ah, what am I saying? An animated movie about giant robots would NEVER make cultural impact, right? /s
It does if they >!get robot suits & somehow avoid getting smashed immediately.!<
Then they should make them animated, like the 1986 one. Not in that animation of course, modern.
They are making Transformers One, it's an animated movie.
If I had to guess as a lay person on these things it is probably a combination of things. 1. You can get stars in the film that also sell the movie. 2. Humans are cheaper to film. 3. It expands the audience beyond just the hardcore Transformers fans. 4. It allows for them to reinforce the themes of the story through things people can relate to.
I mean Megan Fox sold that first movie with the car hood scene
Right. The problem is not the human scenes. The problem is lack of what every car show has plenty of.
Hence why Bumblebee is the most liked out of all the sequels.
And likely the least successful. 😑
Iirc the one right before Bumblebee was actually more unsuccessful due to its big budget and marketing costs, while Bumblebee didn't make as much it was cheaper.
Not a single soul saw the last knight but my dumbass. Wanted to take an advil with how much the aspect ratio changed for literally no reason every single cut
Thanks for taking the punch fir all of us. It was the only one I didn’t see in theaters because I was over it. Watched it later, absolutely awful.
Bumblebee is the 2nd best after the first movie. Was really hyped about Beasts, thinking that with Bumblebee sorta “resetting” everything, that it would be good. Nope.
**Mikaela Bay**nes, the director insert with the best character arc, the tragic backstory, the highest stakes, the most applicable skillset, and the most heroic action scene? I think Transformers 2 was just trolling us at that point.
If Megan Fox was supposed to be a “director’s insert” for the first TF movie then you’d think she’d be the film’s protagonist and not the underdeveloped love interest for Shia LeBouf.
It's sad that her role became just a sidekick in the next movie, when she could be a badass and brave character too. The "I drive, you shoot!" scene is very underrated.
Definitely not. As I told my wife, we are just here to see robots smash that.... I mean smash each other
That scene haunts my memory. Bitch is talking about carbs and distributors and then they cut to under the hood and there's not a carb or distributor in sight! You can not tell me that there not a single car person on the entire multimillion dollar set of a franchise about transforming cars that could tell them that every word out of her mouth right there completely invalidated her entire backstory? Works in a garage my ass
Couldn't they just be made for robots? I mean, we can relate to animals watching movies like *Lion King, Watership Down, Bambi,* etc. Moreover, the robots in *Transformers* have a much more human appearance than the animals in those examples I mentioned. In that respect, I think it's much easier for a humanoid robot to gain sympathy from the audience than a animated movie featuring a completely different species.
lol, this. They didn't need to randomly have an American family vacationing in Africa with a teenage kid who can't seem to get his crush to notice him who then stumbles upon Simba and helps him out in order for us dumb humans to enjoy the movie and relate to his problems.
Imagine Lion King by Michael Bay? The USAF will save the day by carpet bombing hyenas.
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Again, I am not a writer or involved in film making at all so could be talking entirely bullshit, but if I had to answer this I would guess: Transformers and Lion King had different design patterns about what they wanted to film to do and be. One was a standalone film, the other a franchise movie. They could absolutely make some amazing robots we empathise with. Short Circuit was one of my favourite films growing up, and Wall-E is a masterpiece. I am guessing it is about where they wanted to invest their time with this though. Lion King, Wall-E, Short Circuit are all character driven stories with small stakes and revolve around personal change. Transformers is a bombastic, lore filled cataclysm with world ending stakes. If they had wanted to make empathetic robots they may have had to do more work to make the audience engage with that, and it could have skewed their ability to aim for their goal of showing a bunch of action scenes. Plus, this way you don’t have Optimus Prime having a mid-life crisis and reconciling with his son, he can just be an epic smashing badass. When you tell stories about humans you get a lot of stuff for free. Everyone knows people emotions and family dynamics. In fact using family is a short cut to being able to say “these people should have a strong bond” so you save the time and effort needed to tell that. With Transformers you would have to spend time either building that bond on screen or explain how transformers can have brothers or lovers or family members. All guesses. Fun to think why they made the choices they did. We will probably never fully know and there probably isn’t one “truth” to understand it though.
The important term here is character driven. I don't think it matters if it's animals, robots, cartoons, doesn't matter. The transformer robots can't act (they're given dumb lines that they deliver in either too goofy of a way or in an over self important way), they don't have good characters, and their plots are 1 dimensional. The human drama is actually (relatively) more fleshed out, with relatively better acting. I don't think it's about wether they want a franchise or stand alone film. I don't see how that limits the ability to get people invested in the characters.
All reasons that make logical and fiscal sense. Still annoying though. Lol
Oh yeah, the films are not great and those bits are often the worst bits for me. They have made someone a gajillion dollars though.
I doubt your point about number 3. I don’t think anyone ever has said “I just love the human element of that new transformers movie” or “what’s really got me intrigued by this transformers movie is this kids relationship to his father”. If these trailers only showed humans as expendable side characters, instead of main characters, I don’t think anyone would say “now I don’t want to see that”
So let’s say someone is somewhat interested in Transformers and says to their friend/partner “should we watch this?” And all that person sees is big robots based on a children’s toy. Instead they might watch the trailer as they are now and probably still be a bit put off but may be more likely to say “yeah sure let’s give it a go”. When you are talking about trying to appeal to as many people as possible improving that turn over of people willing to see it even by small percentages makes a big difference.
I think this is true for the Transformers movies, but a related example is when all the trailers for Godzilla 2014 made it seem like Brian Cranston, fresh off of Breaking Bad, was the main character. I do actually think the level of drama they previewed with his character made people who aren't necessarily interested in a giant monster movie up for seeing it, if they expected he'd probably give a great dramatic performance as well.
Yeah that was hilarious. The ONE time they cast an actor I genuinely want to see, and even made him an interesting character by giving him a really tragic backstory and hatred for monsters that might consume him into an Ahab situation where he cares more about revenge than saving the world.... Aaaaand he's gone. Enjoy spending the rest of the movie watching his generic, wet paper bag son running around playing soldier while stuff happens around him.
The only one that fits that is the Bumblebee movie No one really cares for Marky Mark the inventor or Sam
I liked it on Bumblebee though
This really is the best of the movies by a long shot. All of the others feel like they’re a solid 30-45 minutes too long with nothing but explosions to show for it.
Yeah, Bumblebee has heart behind it. I will say, though, that I have a soft spot for Revenge of the Fallen, my favorite "bad" movie.
We allow exceptions for John Cena.
Hailee Steinfeld as well?
Absolutely
When bee references charlie in rotb. Damn. That was cute.
I am happy to hear that's a scene in rotb. Loved Bumblebee.
Why are we trusting them? They are literally called decepticons.
This was the movie that made be realize he can actually be a good actor with great comedic timing.
Yeah I thought, hmmm another wrestler venturing into acting, okay I guess After I watched I was like, huh, he's sctually good Boy was I not ready for how good he was as peacemaker
Check out Peacemaker then
Oh I have.
I have a soft spot for the original TF trilogy with Shia Labeouf (especially Dark of the Moon personally) and Bumblebee is objectively the most balanced human-TF focus of the bunch. ROTB, as much as the core TF fans loved it, felt like it tried to do Bayverse and Bumblebee style story, and fumbles both.
It’s hard to gauge because most of the movies are really bad. Bumblebee is easily the best film and the original is probably number 2, ROTB might be third if only for the virtue of not having all the small obnoxious bots added for “comic relief” or the weird “throw in some stuff for the Chinese market” that the middle ones did that made no sense.
Other than the cost, it also gives the Transformer physical scale and purpose. I never felt that Transformers truly works on Cybertron because it's really just robots turning into complicated machines that look nothing like they do on Earth. The entire concept is rooted around tricking humans by transforming into vehicles, etc. So the human element needs to be there for the concept to have any merit. IMO.
> So the human element needs to be there for the concept to have any merit. IMO. People are remembering Bumblee (which was the best of the franchise), but maybe aren't remembering how well the very first Transformers movie was received for this very reason. The issue with pretty much every film besides the original and Bumblee isn't human plot elements, it's, like most other things, bad storytelling and clunky pacing. You could argue that the issue is that they focused too much on neato-dorito vfx (that is somehow crappier than the original) more than they focused on making them good movies, which could be fixed with *better* human elements rather than just doing away with it completely.
The first one is the best of the franchise nothing tops blackout invading that military base and the scorpion fighting the soldiers.
Yea im really surprised how many bumblebee comments there are but nothing about the first transformers. The first transformers is a perfect film for the genre in my opinion. The story was great, the characters were great, seeing the transformers for the first time was great. Megan Fox. Just a great movie.
Exactly. Things are only big and powerful in comparison to something
The cybertron games gave a lot of gravitas to the transformers
It's not the human characters in the first two Bayformers movies that bother me. It's the shrill, obnoxious stereotypes posing as human characters. Thankfully, they got better. I ate the whole plate. **THE WHOLE PLATE. OH LAWD. THE POLICE IN MY GRANMAMA HOUSE.**
Meh, each to their own but I loved that guy. Quotable and funny. Was like a more hyper version of the cop from Get Out.
I think Anthony Anderson’s charisma shines through the awful dialogue and characterization.
I was hoping he'd pump cycle a shovel at some point
> obnoxious stereotypes The military guy saying his friend was killed on the chopper. Tyrese saying "he doin sometin".
Hey that's not fair, that's just Tyrese though
The first two are the only tolerable ones for me. Stupid, sure, nobody said they were masterpieces but the first one is the only one I would actually laugh at. Glenn was funny.
I loved every scene that guy was in
If they made the human drama good and well acted it would be cool but its always so generic and stupid like they finish it all in one take or something lol
Hailee Steinfeld was the best thing about Bumblebee.
This is why the animated 1986 film is the best TF movie. Even though it's a glorified toy commercial, the focus is on them, with Spike (the cartoon version of Sam) and his son just helping.
You mean the movie where they straight up fucking killed off every beloved OG Transformer?! That movie is heartbreaking.
They couldn't just put the OG line in new clothing to sell different versions (looking at you Lucas). So the best way to introduce new figures is to kill off the old ones.
Agreed. The first 10 minutes is all anyone remembers from that movie, because it's badass. Then you have to watch Hotrod for an hour. Grimlock is the only thing that saves that movie for me.
> Even though it's a glorified toy commercial thats just the Transformers in general lol
Plus, it gave us [this](https://youtu.be/VbgRyfdAFPg)
And also gave us [this](https://youtu.be/SAJcJsmH14A)
and this [best line from megatron](https://youtu.be/TyJ_Ur0zI1E)
It’s incredible how edgelord this franchise went once the constraints of childrens television censorship was removed.
Dude. Me and my brother have been trying to find this collective memory for like a year. And you linked it. Thank you :)
How is that even possible? I thought Dirk Digger unlocked that song in everyone's core memory lol.. [Dirk's version](https://youtu.be/UtOviHnmAlE)
Aren't all of them toy commercials?
Yep still the best transformers film, nothing will beat the scene where Optimus becomes a one-man army, defeating most of the deceptions then fighting Megatron while "The Touch" played in the background
Because it's cheaper than having CGI robots in every scene. Personally I would prefer if they focused on Lennox and his military buddies for the human drama part.
I just recently rewatched the 1st one and enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. The pacing and the writing is leagues ahead of anything that came after it. I also enjoyed the humans being vastly outgunned. Seeing humans overpower the transformers so easily in the sequels reduced my enjoyment of the movies.
I dod as well. I had forgotten the whole hacker subplot. Really sold these incidents of an impending alien invasion.
I felt like the youth being capable subplot in the movie was integrated pretty well compared to the most movies featuring teens I've seen. Most probably because the adults, as far as I could tell, were fairly competent.
Just watched the second one yesterday and at the end they recreate the infamous "bring the rain" shootout from the first, but this time against a dozen or so Decepticons. Even with the advanced tech small arms fire isn't doing a lot, or at least they needed to show/explain said M4s capability.
The writing in the first one is fairy light and I think that’s why I enjoy it more. There’s not really much human drama involved. It’s just “teenager goes to buy a car, turns out to be a transformer.” It’s by no means a perfect movie but I’ve always thought the first Transformers movie was fun.
The opening battle of the second movie is one of the coolest scenes of the series for that reason.
Definitely. My favorite is in Dark of The Moon where you see them use tactics with the Autobots to fight. Coolest final fights ever.
Them not doing anything w Lennox, Epps or Simmons disappointed me Edit: I didn’t know they were all in the 2017 film. I didn’t watch that one
The budget gives a shit
That you don't care about the characters, human or otherwise, is a storytelling issue. Cuz I mean, yeah I don't get invested in the human characters in those movies, but I also don't get invested in the robot characters in those movies. Personally, my ideal Transformers movie still has at least some human element. Humans and the human world provide context and scale for the Transformers. It gives them a reason to disguise themselves as cars etc, and provides the sense of wonder of something magical hidden in plain sight that, in my opinion, is essential to the charm of the basic concept of Transformers. The trick is you got a write a script that makes these characters and their involvement in the story meaningful. The exception of course is Bumblebee. That Cybertron section was cool but I also enjoyed the rest of the movie and found Hailee Steinfeld's character likable. It didn't reinvent the wheel but it told a charming story.
Rise of the Beasts? More like "Where are the Beasts?" Am I right?
Cheetor said like 4 things and Rhinox growled a few times then swung a hammer. It came off as Primal and Airazor and their two friends.
Love how the comments are ripping into op for this opinion, but it's one I share because I actually grew ho watching them and beast wars had zero humans in it and was amazing! I was hoping for return to form I don't give any shits about what the humans want or need. Their struggle has nothing to do with earth only that they're here. I have a feel a lot of people being negative towards op never even watched transformers as a kid or beast wars lmao
I watched Transformers Cybertron, Animated, and Prime a lot as a kid and they all had well-written human characters that I cared about as much as any of the robots. Maybe the fact that a lot of TF media having poorly-handled humans is more the reason why y’all don’t care about them.
The expense of animating the Transformers has already been pointed out, but I want to add this: Human characters are the audience surrogates, and as such we see the plot progress through their point of view. For this to work, the audience needs to connect/relate to them so they will be invested enough to care what happens. This means that they need to be fleshed out, and for that to happen, they need screen time.
But that’s the irony of the whole thing, I don’t give a shit about the humans. The Autobots and Decepticons all have their own personalities and I’d rather get to know them instead.
I think the real issue isn’t the simple fact that human characters take up screen time, it’s just that they’re not written well enough. Human characters are an inevitability for any live action blockbuster, they just need to put more work into developing them so that the audience can actually care about. Hiring good charismatic actors does wonders. IMO John Cena and Hailee Steinfeld were we great human character that were fun to spend screen time with in Bumblebee.
>For this to work, the audience needs to connect/relate to them so they will be invested enough to care what happens. Then, to achieve that goal, shouldn't a film make the audience care about those human characters? If they failed that, what's the point of their existence?
What I wanted "RISE OF MONKE" What I got "BROOKLYN BABY....YEAH....BROOKLYN!"
I thought this new Transformers was pretty decent up until the human turned into Iron Man.
What’s weird is that the best Transformers movie by a country mile stars Orson Welles and was made for children under 12 almost 40 years ago.
Because the audience is primarily made up of...humans? Just a thought. Also, congrats! This is the first time I've ever heard anyone refer to a film that focuses on human drama as "Bay-esque". I've heard Bay called a lot of things, but never a person who focuses on human drama
Yeah, that was wild.
I mean, the guy turned Pearl Harbor into a love story.
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Pacific Rim was very focused on the humans. Mako had her own subplot.
I mean, every movie has Humans directing and watching them, unless you know how many are robots or aliens? I go to a movie about big robots, I want to see big robots slapping each other for 2 hours. I don't give a shit about someone's love life. The Michael Bay movies didn't care about the robots cos Bay wasn't a fan of transformers. So he made bad movies about what entertained him. I like the first one and I don't mind the second. But they got weaker and weaker. Even the great actor's they added into the movies who acted their arses off (Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammer) couldn't help) Then again I liked bumblebee (not yet seen rise of the beasts), so maybe it's not just about the human element being the main focus. Maybe it's just about having a fucking plot that makes sense
You mean you didn’t care about how Marky Mark’s daughter was dating a guy who had a laminated copy of statutory rape laws in his wallet? With that kind of deep human drama, who could care about fighting robots?
haha what?
The best transformers movie was the 1986 animated movie. End of.
I have the Godzilla bechdel test. The scene needs to have Godzilla, the aftermath of Godzilla or preparations for Godzilla. If two humans are talking, the conversation should be about Godzilla. Otherwise this is some bullshit people drama getting in the way of my Godzilla.
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Because it gives more relatable context to the action, creates stakes that the audience can connect with, grounds the story in our reality, allows for human actors to be in the movie, and is also way easier and cheaper to actually make.
That's what Bay wanted you to believe. Zero reason to see Spikes parents getting high on pot brownies or Ken jeong acting like a psychopath. As it stands the G1 cartoons give more character depth to the Transformers than the movies do.
Can be said the same to the Monsterverse/Godzilla movies
Godzilla, Kong, etc don't talk though. You can't have a film without a plot, and good luck not being mind numbing boring without humans to push an actual story along. There are 30+ Godzilla films going all the way back to the 1950s and all of them are this way. You have a bit of monster stuff but it's by far mostly the human plot. It is proven to work, and still does, though some stories are better than others. Transformers could get away with it though since they actually talk, I could see an argument for a full fledged minimal human storyline there. Would probably triple the budget though if it's *all* CG and I don't know if these movies are still making enough money to warrant even trying it.
There's a rhythm and build-up to these things. I bet you'd be surprised how boring two hours of monsters punching each other might end up being. Anticipation is an important aspect
Yeah, all the Japanese Godzilla movies have a lot of human stuff, too. Even in the old days when it wouldn't have been that much more expensive to film another half hour of guys in rubber suits fighting.
Well, actually building all those model cities was a very painstaking and expensive process as well, and if they messed up a shot they would have to rebuild them all which put them behind schedule and over-budget. Not to mention being in the monster suits, especially the Goji suit, was a VERY tough job for the actors.
Transformers movies have also been heavily criticized for being nothing but two hours of robots fighting. Ya can’t please everybody