Are the Transformers movies really that bad?

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Being a Michael Bay movie, if you go in expecting explosions, 1 funny joke among several bad ones, strange humor and passable acting, you won't be disappointed, so that's why I take Transformers for what it's worth. Not the worst franchise out there but just something fun to watch if you've got nothing else going on.

I don't think they can do worse than Decepticons with balls and racist twins though.

Agreed. I liked the voices of Optimus, Megatron, and the others.

The voice casting is absolutely perfect, I will say that.

Here's a link to the trailer for the new Transformers movie, Transformers: Age Of Extinction, set for release on June 27th.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubGpDoyJ ... e=youtu.be

Rating movies is really hard as there are multiple ways to do it. Do you focus on the technical aspects or entertainment value? Other than special effects, the Transformers movies are extremely lacking. Poor script, poor character design/development, questionable casting, etc etc, but damn it, they're still entertaining to watch.

Give Michael Bay some credit, he knows what he's good at, what he wants to put in his movies and what his target audience is and delivers. He knows he's not making Citizen Kane and they're FAR from the worst movies out there.

The character design, as far as the Transformers themselves go, is nearly perfect.

Exactly. I think we can expect that in the fourth movie.

Nope, not for me. As described the mechanical protagonists were designed too similar to me, so for endless time, I saw nothing else then pieces of crap rolling around, without having any clue, what should be actually happening. Less bare silver-grey metal parts and focusing more on the typical colours of the protagonists, would have maybe been of help for me. Actually the way it was, it was boring for me, because of simply waiting for minutes, that that metal rolling ended, and I would finally see what happened.

I watched the first movie, but didn't bother with the sequels. I thought it was a very 'loud' movie, if that makes sense. Lots of people running around and screaming. Now these are just personal objections of mine that don't necessarily say much about the quality of the film.

Let me first say that I was a huge fan of the original cartoon. It remains my all-time favourite cartoon, though I can acknowledge its flaws. Now, it doesn't really bother me that Bay did his own thing with the adaptation. Changing things around is fine. But the reason I didn't enjoy the live-action movie is that everything I truly liked about the 80s Transformers cartoon, was missing from the live-action movies.

Transformers was a cartoon about robots who turn into cars and jets and who beat up on each other.

Transformers is a movie series about robots who turn into cars and jets and who beat up on each other.

Both are pushing a toy line.

I know this very well.

BUT

What I liked about the cartoon was the Autobots were basically a crew of marooned friends, each with a distinct personality. I liked how the Autobots interacted with the humans they were sworn to protect, like Spike, Sparkplug, and Chip. I enjoyed their attempts to fit into the world, and how their alternate modes played into this. I liked the clear distinction between Autobot ethics, which were built on teamwork and mutual respect, and Decepticon ethics, which were built on scheming and brute force.

What I saw in the Bay movie was jingoism, militarism, toilet humour, juvenile sex jokes, very chaotically choreographed action scenes, deliberate T&A courtesy of Megan Fox. Not much of it I could recognize from my favourite cartoon. This is why I personally thoroughly disliked it. Because I wasn't looking for a frame-for-frame remake of the cartoon's storyline, but I was looking for the sense of wonder and amazement that I got out of the cartoons and comics; I was looking for the most iconic characters, like Optimus, Bumblebee, Wheeljack, Starscream, and Soundwave, as I know and love them with their distinct personalities. For the most part, that failed.

Hell, I'm somewhat disappointed in Peter Cullen. If you'll look at the below video from 2006 and skip to 5:40:


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bng-SwSoZ4[/youtube]

"If they were gonna go one inch away from my character that I had conceived for a hero, I'd fight 'em. I'd say: Optimus Prime wouldn't say that".

Flash forward to 2009. and it's 'Give me your face!'

So yeah. Call me a Gee-Wunner if you must, but I have muchly enjoyed Beast Wars, the Unicron Trilogy, Animated, and Prime, and all of them are a fair bit more clever and subtle than the Bay films- even if all of them involve big sentient robots beating up on each other. And that's a sad, sad thing, if you have Transformers playing on the big screen, when somewhere on the world, a TV station is airing a Saturday morning cartoon that's based on the same toyline, yet it's at least a dozen times more profound than the live-action films.

Short answer, YES.
I can't sit through them. The CGI hurts my eyes and I can't tell between the robots (especially in the first one). The acting and script are just demeaning and insulting. I really can not understand how any Michael Bay movie makes money.

So how many Transformers movies are there now, like four or five of them?

Yes, in 80s cartoons the h00mans were the side show, everything was from the Transformer perspective.

The 80s cartoons had more colorful and simple designs for the Transformers. They are very easy to tell apart in those cartoons and in the comic books. The cartoons were also "filmed" from the size-perspective of the Transformers (with really tiny humans), while the new movies are mostly filmed from human-sized perspective I think (haven't seen all of them).

I hope they can keep up that pace. I'm more interested in the Transformers than the Human characters, anyway.

IMO, Roland Emmerich would have made the Transformers much more entertaining. He knows how to make a movie less crappy than Michael Bay.

This video explain how the Transformers films fail on a film-making level.