The Big Picture: Untransformed

[Ashley Blalock]

I get the feeling that the people holding up the common person as the pinnacle of intellect and taste haven't spent much time around the common person.

The epidemic of people who eat nothing but fast food and don't exercise only to say there is nothing they can do about their weight. The people who dress in such bad taste that it can support a website called People of Walmart. The people who think lottery tickets are a great retirement plan. The people when you say what's the last book you read have to think back to their childhood when they were forced to read in school. The people who watch Jersey Shore in large enough numbers to make the cast celebrities.

If loving bland predictable movies with cutting edge special effects was the only thing pointing to the common person being an idiot maybe you'd have a case for it's just taste, but there is too much stupid out there to claim popularity equals quality.

The funniest part though is how people get all mad because somehow they have never done anything stupid in their lives. I'm not the world's smartest person but at least I'm smart enough to say I've done some stupid things and made some bad decisions.

 

[Vausch]

I still do not know why he is harping on the green lantern it was not that bad all things considered.

Actually, it was. I don't think it was as terrible as Bob made it out to be, but it was pretty darn bad. I went into the movie fairly unbiased and had a friend with me that had never read a single comic and she hated it too. Yes, I knew who the Green Lanterns were, had a basic rundown of the story, and understood a lot of the lore, but I haven't gone through the entire history of the comics (yet) and was going to pick at them for not getting a character's hairstyle right.

And yes, it is understandable for different opinions, but there are times when a film can just be provably bad. This was one of them.

I tend to hate subpar films but I found GL to be ok at best the worest thing about it was it was draggy. It was hella better than Ghost rider/Batman 4(the one before bale)/Xmen 3/Spiderman 3(and reboot >> lulz),All the TF films,ect,ect,ect,ect,ect.

I just have seen far worse and far better.

I'd have to say in terms of terrible, it's much worse than Spiderman 3 (I liked it, I know the flaws and what was missed out on, but I hold it much higher than other "bad" superhero movies) and I'd put GL about on par with the 90s Captain America. See, the biggest problems I had with it were what they did to Parallax, they never expound upon the rings' weakness to yellow, the CGI is very sub-par, the entire movie looks like it has a green film over it, we never find out what happened to Amanda Waller, they let Hal keep the most powerful weapon in the universe after quitting the GL corps, Sinestro has NO REASON to take the yellow ring (you can't even say it's because he wants power, that is NEVER given any foreshadowing and reason), and as an added kick to the teeth the movie is way too loud at the "ABLOOGY WOOGY WOO" moments. I'm not even talking like the theatre was too loud, it had to be the sound in the movie itself because it was just as bad when I saw it at home.

I saw the both bad CA films and yet say that GL is simply not that bad, now the Xmen films treated the lore worse IMO but were a tad better paced but all in all I could stand GL more.

Just an FYI, there's 3 bad CA movies. The 70s one got a sequel.

You may be right but honestly I haven't seen X 3. Just never bought it or felt a reason to see it. I'd say it's probably on par with the post 2000 Fantastic 4 movies. If you ask why I say "post 2000", they got a movie in 1994 that was so terrible it was never released. Like the JLA movie.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

MovieBob:

Crushing our idealized hopes yet again.

 

[NortherWolf]

I love Bob, I seriously do. He's every Critic cliché rolled into one package and not only existing in a fictional setting.
He's elitist? Check.
He's somewhat of a giant douche? Check?
He loves pointing out how much better and smarter he is than everyone else? Check!

I'm going to be brutally clear here: I don't give a flying **** what Transformers "fans" think. I'm one and I loved two of the three movies, so did a bunch of other fans i know as well, but we're not the point. The point here is when I see my nephew watching these films and saying "I love Transformers!" and then becoming the next generation of Transformer enthusiast.

It took me a while to figure out actually, but about a year ago I realized: Some Transformers fans would rather see the brand die and exist only in their little minds rather than changing with the times. They don't want another generation to get to experience it, they consider themselves the last worthy ones.

 

[ablac]

Bob just stop it. Continuing to insult people because of their choice of movie is not something anyone older than 12 should be doing. I agree with you on a lot of things but you go about by insullting those you disagree with continuously. Your just an elitist prick and episodes like this show it. I dont have a problem with these movies and my dad enjoys them a lot. Neither of us are retarded. But according to Bob I shouldnt be aloud to drive or vote because im too stupid. I mean I must be because I dont despise every bit of these movies. Grow up Bob. You wouldnt say what you say about these people to their faces so why say it at all.

Also on the movies being like the comics and actually being good and true to the source material. Those movies make huge amounts of money. They clearly work and "the average moviegoer" seems to have better taste than you think otherwise they would have flopped rather than being the biggest movies in hollywood.

 

[Bonecrusher]

I love War For Cybertron game, it really portrays the 80s G1 cartoon very well. It also has an interesting story.

But Michael Bay movies really really suck.
In lots of website, I see some weird people argue that "what you expect from a movie that some robots fighting" for the complains of the movies.
Yes, but, that's the problem. Transformers is about robots fighting. And in a Transformers movie, I want "ROBOTS FIGHTING!". I don't want to see Megan Fox, I don't want to see weird looking Shia Labeouf, I don't want to see army pornography, I don't want to see prismatic cgi... I just want to see the robots.

I wish Dreamweave made those movies, like the rebooted Marvel movies.

 

[Mousse Templar]

Yes, the next transformers is (for better or worse)
going to be exactly like the previous installments,
for pretty much the same reasons movieBob lists.

I also think the high production costs of rendering giant
transforming CGI-robot versus the generic romantic sub-plot,
might factor in.

 

[NortherWolf]

I love War For Cybertron game, it really portrays the 80s G1 cartoon very well. It also has an interesting story.

But Michael Bay movies really really suck.
In lots of website, I see some weird people argue that "what you expect from a movie that some robots fighting" for the complains of the movies.
Yes, but, that's the problem. Transformers is about robots fighting. And in a Transformers movie, I want "ROBOTS FIGHTING!". I don't want to see Megan Fox, I don't want to see weird looking Shia Labeouf, I don't want to see army pornography, I don't want to see prismatic cgi... I just want to see the robots.

I wish Dreamweave made those movies, like the rebooted Marvel movies.

G1 had Spike, Chip, Daniel and Carly.
The Unicron Trilogy had some of the most horrible humans ever.
The old comics had Spike, Daniel, G.B Blackrock etc.
Transformers Animated had Sari.
Transformers Prime had those three brats who's death cannot come soon enough.

Transformers has basically never been about robots fighting. The only ones who half-arsedly tried to give that to us fans were Dreamwave and IDW. then McCarthy ruined that part about IDW too.
You want to know why? Even if you and me would love to see the war solely from the Transformer's perspective, that won't sell to the broad masses who are needed to make the movie earn a profit.
I learned this a long time ago when I prayed for the next Transformers cartoon to be like The War Within.
Then again, Transformers: Prime is damn good.

 

[Scooter65]

While nearly everything that Bob does is at least well researched, every once in a while he really hits it home. Great video, one of my favorites thus far.

 

[agiganticpanda]

Think of how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are stupider than that. - George Carlin

 

[Warforger]

Ok great, if you don't like it then stop watching them, it's not like the Transformers movie from the 80's or the cartoons are going anywhere. Although when I saw them I thought they were ok (I don't think Megan Fox is hot so that was just generic to me) but now re-watching them I don't remember anything from them, the story seemed to be short while going in all of actuality forever because it was broken up by some cheap humor, while not great not horrible just shit teenagers do when they can't come up with any conversation. Although now watching them again I admit they're terrible and I got pretty bored after a 5 minutes.

Way to contradict yourself... again. *points to The Phantom Menace episode*

Oh, and nice one on insulting the fans of these movies... again.

Seriously, Bob; Grow up.

Honestly I thought he was merely reinforcing it, he didn't say that Episode 2 and 3 were good in that review, just that episode 1 was ok and not as bad. Although insulting an entire group of people because they do something for fun that you don't like I agree is retarded, "herp ok I guess my PhD degree means nothing and that I am a retard because I like Transformers", what you like for entertainment is totally unrelated to how smart you are really.

 

[uhohimdead]

?The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.?
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

 

[Nigh Invulnerable]

Way to contradict yourself... again. *points to The Phantom Menace episode*

Oh, and nice one on insulting the fans of these movies... again.

Seriously, Bob; Grow up.

I second this motion. I'm so tired of Bob's whining about movies he doesn't like. Hey, Bob, if you think the movie is dumb, just say so and then shut up about it, but don't be surprised if someone likes it anyway. Too many of his positive reviews (especially when he raves about something) have lead to disappointment when the movie is just average (I'm looking at you, Scott Pilgrim). I'm sure I'll catch flak from fanboys for that one.

 

[master109]

but i liked the transformers movies

 

[girzwald]

Oh great, another Bob rant about how Transformers fans are stupid, idiotic drooling morons and how he is the lone voice of smart reason.

Ugh, really, Escapist, you're actually paying him for writing these self-congratulatory, masturbation pieces that he's ALREADY DONE, not once, not even twice, but three times now!

With all your money troubles and such, you'd think that there would be better places and better people to spend the last few schillings on. Hell, I could point out people here on the forums and the commentators on these sections that would be less biased, more accurate and certainly a hell of a lot less judgmental, offensive and downright lazy than Bob.


And THAT'S the big picture.

Burn.

 

[Hiroshi Mishima]

Bob, I just had a realization. Remember how foreign films critics AT THE TIME were always harping on the low budget and stilted acting of the Godzilla films from Toho? Those are considered classics of the film genre now.

Funny, growing up with Godzilla films I never thought they were bad movies. Japan's way of making movies differs from American ways of making movies. In fact, many Japanese movies still, insofar as I know, use people in suits for monster films while the US insists on lackluster CGI with no presence. At least when you saw Godzilla, you knew he was actually there and not something cooked up on a computer over the weekend.


Anyways, I really have tried hard to pretend the second Transformers movie didn't exist. The first one was okay-ish, but largely disappointing. The only one that I felt was any good was the third one, and that may have been due to Leonard Nimoy being in it.

Oh, and 370999.. please don't get me started on how much I hate people making a fuss about how sexy an actress is while stating their opposition to misogyny, please don't. I have enough issue with that in the game industry.

G1 had Spike, Chip, Daniel and Carly.
The Unicron Trilogy had some of the most horrible humans ever.
The old comics had Spike, Daniel, G.B Blackrock etc.
Transformers Animated had Sari.
Transformers Prime had those three brats who's death cannot come soon enough.

Transformers has basically never been about robots fighting. The only ones who half-arsedly tried to give that to us fans were Dreamwave and IDW. then McCarthy ruined that part about IDW too.
You want to know why? Even if you and me would love to see the war solely from the Transformer's perspective, that won't sell to the broad masses who are needed to make the movie earn a profit.
I learned this a long time ago when I prayed for the next Transformers cartoon to be like The War Within.
Then again, Transformers: Prime is damn good.

I think you're missing something, to be honest. Either you clearly didn't actually watch more than maybe a couple episodes of the shows you're talking about, or you really don't like kids and/or Humans at all. Well, it could also be that you just don't like the old material, since the one example you said was good was one of the most recent series.

The thing with the Transformers movies isn't that they HAD people, but that they had uninteresting people that often took center stage while the robots did their thing in the background. At least in the first two movies, it wasn't so bad in Dark of the Moon. You claim that Transformers was never about robots fighting, and yet that's what made up many of the cartoons. While Chip, Carly, and others certainly showed up from time to time, their roles were often backdrops to what was going on. Hell, the episode "Autobot Spike" had his brain put into an empty robot body and he goes crazy and we get lots of "robots fighting", so again I can't really see your point.

If the old show had something going against it, it would have been the lack of a consistent overarching storyline, but since this was the 80's and that was rarely done in those days, it just didn't happen with stuff like GI Joe, Thundar, and Voltron. The overall plots might move along after a while, but most of the episodes were still pretty standalone.

And honestly, the character of Sam and the others in the movies would've been better if they'd been better written. Trying to throw in cheap laughs that don't flow naturally, romantic subplots that weren't really necessary, AND low-brow sex-appeal (in a movie about robots) is really a large part of what undermined the movies' appeal.

 

[minuialear]

Way to contradict yourself... again. *points to The Phantom Menace episode*

Oh, and nice one on insulting the fans of these movies... again.

Seriously, Bob; Grow up.

I second this motion. I'm so tired of Bob's whining about movies he doesn't like. Hey, Bob, if you think the movie is dumb, just say so and then shut up about it, but don't be surprised if someone likes it anyway. Too many of his positive reviews (especially when he raves about something) have lead to disappointment when the movie is just average (I'm looking at you, Scott Pilgrim). I'm sure I'll catch flak from fanboys for that one.

Re: his positive reviews about a lot of movies (Suckerpunch, Scott Pilgrim, etc):

Nerds tend to have a kind of elitism about ourselves where we like to think we know better, and are better than regular people. See the level of complaint any time a nerd property is about to become mainstream. A freind actually said he was mad that Michael Bay was going to ruin TMNT. I had to explain to him that is impossible because TMNT was already incredibly stupid. But he was having none of it.

IN short, nerds don't like to think that we turn our brains off to enjoy things, so EVERYTHING has to be about something grander so the narrative we've constructed still frames us as the intellectual hero.

So someone who enjoys something he KNOWS to be bad, has to come up with some elaborate excuse. for why it is actually incredibly complex and the rest of them just 'don't get it'.

(comment found here: http://io9.com/5785590/)

 

[Nigh Invulnerable]

Way to contradict yourself... again. *points to The Phantom Menace episode*

Oh, and nice one on insulting the fans of these movies... again.

Seriously, Bob; Grow up.

I second this motion. I'm so tired of Bob's whining about movies he doesn't like. Hey, Bob, if you think the movie is dumb, just say so and then shut up about it, but don't be surprised if someone likes it anyway. Too many of his positive reviews (especially when he raves about something) have lead to disappointment when the movie is just average (I'm looking at you, Scott Pilgrim). I'm sure I'll catch flak from fanboys for that one.

Re: his positive reviews about a lot of movies (Suckerpunch, Scott Pilgrim, etc):

Nerds tend to have a kind of elitism about ourselves where we like to think we know better, and are better than regular people. See the level of complaint any time a nerd property is about to become mainstream. A freind actually said he was mad that Michael Bay was going to ruin TMNT. I had to explain to him that is impossible because TMNT was already incredibly stupid. But he was having none of it.

IN short, nerds don't like to think that we turn our brains off to enjoy things, so EVERYTHING has to be about something grander so the narrative we've constructed still frames us as the intellectual hero.

So someone who enjoys something he KNOWS to be bad, has to come up with some elaborate excuse. for why it is actually incredibly complex and the rest of them just 'don't get it'.

(comment found here: http://io9.com/5785590/)

Interesting response and link. I think this basically hits the nail on the head. People, in general, who are into something that is a little "underground" like to think it caters to their specific taste and always will, but then go berserk when it gets adapted and changed in a slight way they dislike. My own example would be the Hitchhiker's guide movie. Each version, tv, books, and radio, have been different from the others. Partly due to Douglas Adams desire to mess with people and partly because different mediums do things in distinct ways.

Bob seems to have problems with accepting the differences in mediums when a given IP changes and evolves. My thought is simply that if someone doesn't enjoy the newer version, just watch/read what you do enjoy.

 

[LordFisheh]

Honestly, there will always be fun, bad films. Yeah it's a shame for Transformers fans that their franchise got cannibalised to make some, but is it really that big a deal? You wouldn't only read highbrow philosophical literature or only eat gourmet food. I think the apoplectic level of hate for Bay's films is far to high for what they really are. They're trashy action, not Nazi kitten hunting propaganda.

 

[Dragonforce525]

I am a proud member of the "Will Never Pay To See A Michael Bay Transformers Movie" I watched the first round a friends house, fucking hated it, the second looked like more of the same, I'll let you guess how that panned out, and the third looked like Shia Lebeofffffeff got fucked by the army and had an American Flag shitting propaganda baby.

Keep Bay away, as well as 90% of the human characters and my arse will be in that seat.