Just view the trailer, watching it fullscreen asks you to install some spyware viewer or something first.
Anyway - WOW! Only fleeting glimpses at the Transformers themselves, but it still gives me the chills. I'm still iffy on many of the designs, but at least the vehicle modes look like real vehicles again.
Just to be clear, though: do NOT look for a good story in this film. It's a friggin' MICHAEL BAY movie, for which a well-thought-out story is usually an afterthought. However, we'll get to see oodles of GIANT ROBOT SMASH done incredibly well, which is reason enough to plunk down your $10. Roll out!
Mark
Posted by Mars Needs Women (Member # 1505) on :
If the trailer is any indication, Michael Bay has completely missed the whole mood and idea of Transformers the show. The Transformers themselves do look cool though. I won't pay to see this but I will check it out when its on the tube or on DVD.
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :
I'll be there to see this movie with every other nerd that grew up in the 80s. It's not the greatness known as G1, just yet another version like the dozen others that followed.
Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :
Yick.
Aslo, HAY STROKES PALCEMNET LAWLZ. I bet they have at LEAST one song on the soundtrack.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Wow. I'm even less interested in the movie now than I was before.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
I liked the trailer by and large, except for that little nauseatingly cute poolkid and the obvious PG-13:ness of it all, but then again this is Transformers, not anime.
Oh and good luck making us care about some jock dude and Vogue girl hanging from a building and maybe-falling-but-probably-not when there are 20' robots flying around.
The design of the robots remind me of the APU:s from Zion Defense Force and, like I said before, RoboCop 2, the junkie-robot, which is good. Didn't like the attempt to establish the new transforming-sound, it was nothing like the original, no homage of any kind, more like a Peter Jackson ring-wraith whisper.
Posted by B.J. (Member # 858) on :
Has the movie been rated yet? Personally, I'm hoping that it gets a PG rating, because I know my son (who's in first grade) will want to see it. There are people my age who grew up with this stuff that would want massive carnage, but they need to remember that when the series premiered on TV, they were pre-teens themselves. Anything targeting that age range is going to have some cutesy and campy stuff.
So, yeah, I'm not expecting the story to be anything earth-shattering, but I am expecting lots of eye-candy.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
I don't want massive carnage. Except maybe in an abstract way, to establish that the Decepticons are TeH eViL�. I don't like how Prime's head transforms along with the rest of him. I went to the forums where the creatos of this movie were posting about the development process, and I lost all faith once I noticed that they were blatantly ignoring any criticisms of what they wanted to do. And once again, they're not robots. I know the original tagline said "robots in disguise", but aren't Robots are non-sentient constructs under another's control. That's what the original Diaclone constructs were, but once they established the Transformers as being sentient aliens, that flew out the window. At the least they're artificial life forms -- like Data, but I will always refer to them simply as inorganic life forms.
--Jonah
P.S. The only bit from the trailer that I liked was the helicopter (I still think of him as Vortex) revealing himself at the military base.
Posted by Mars Needs Women (Member # 1505) on :
Actually they're energy based sparks inside metallic bodies.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
I'd say that qualifies as inorganic.
--Jonah
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
At least until you get to the Beast Wars.
Mark
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
The term "robot" in science fiction goes well beyond the original, real-world meaning of a non-thinking, programmed machine.
In Asimov's works (and in Futurama), the word "robot" is used for them, and it works better than calling them inorganic lifeforms (IOLFs?), artificial intelligences or cybernetic entities. It's also catchier too.
Posted by Mars Needs Women (Member # 1505) on :
Yeah Bender is more than your standard real-world robot.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
quote:Originally posted by Hobbes: I'll be there to see this movie with every other nerd that grew up in the 80s. It's not the greatness known as G1, just yet another version like the dozen others that followed.
You seriously need to re-visit those old episodes before attaching words like "greatness" to the G1 anything. The nostalgic fondness of your ten-year-old self of yesteryear for the cartoon will not hold up to reality, i'm afraid.
As to the movie, it wont win any awards for story, but will probably be as good (better hopefully!) as the typical comic-book turned movie schtick.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
I agree. A friend of mine is a diehard "if it wasn't animated in the 80s, it's CRAP" kind of guy. When the first season came out on DVD, he was first in line to pick it up. He sold them off a month later, and doesn't want to talk about Transformers anymore. Seriously, it does NOT hold up over time, the second and third seasons even less so.
Mark
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
I have all of 'em on DVD, and the Movie. Grantd some of them are absolute pants, but then, the same goes for Star Trek, BSG, Doctor Who, Babylon 5...
--Jonah
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
The basic premise was geared towards children and the marketing of the toy line. At it's best, it can be said t inspired our generation much in the way the old Flash Gordon serials inspired guys like George Lucas.
If it were made for our current age group, many plot flaws would have to be addressed- like why the Autobots just hang around the the bot-cave waiting for Megatron to imperil millions of humans instead of them hunting them down. Only an idiot would follow such a strategy...
Thus, I blame Transformers for Bin Laden not having been captured yet- Bush is a G1 fan.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
I think what confused me most about transformers as a nipper was exactly why did NOTHING change on Cybertron in the several million years they were away? I mean when they get back it's as if they never left.
I don't actually expect a credible answer to that and it dosen't take away for the feeling of nostalga I got from watching the old movie some months back. Mind you that movie is probably the exception as I did borrow a DVD of G1 from a mate a while ago and Mark's right, it really doesn't hold up very well AT ALL.
To be fair though, the same can be said of most cartoons of that era, it wasn't until the early 90's that they started to get more watchable. *cough* Batman *cough*
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Yeah- I always wondered what Shockwave was doing all that time...waxing his blaster, I guess. In the (very strange) Marvel comic (a theme brought back by Dreamwave), a LOT had changed- Shockwave had taken over everything and there was no war- evergy was too damn scarce for all that waste anyway. Maybe half of the Autobots and decepticons fall in with Shockwave and everyone else either gets killed or goes rogue. Shockwave's right hand man...er bot...is Ultra Magnus (sporting size 1000 feet of clay).
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
In defense of Shockwave, when Megatron left to pursue the Ark, he did say "Cybertron shall be as you left it".
True, some eps have the 'Bots learning of some evilness and going out to combat it, and I expect they were using the Sky-Spy to try and find the Decepticons, but being under several hundred feet of Pacific Ocean makes a good screen. But other eps showed the Autobots out doing something when the Decepticons showed up to ruin it. So it worked the other way, too.
--Jonah
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
I'd always figured that energy was so low on Cybertron that they couldn't afford to do ANYTHING, and the war was at a standstill for much of that time. There were doubtless skirmish wars every few centuries, but for the most part everyone just held fast waiting for the Nemesis or the Ark to come back with some energon. Then one day Shockwave happens to try picking up the phone, and the whole thing flares up again.
Mark
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
He probably tried once every millennium or so.
--Jonah
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
He got tired of Megatron's lame-ass answering machine for millions of years.
Seriously though, the standstill is pretty lame- I mean no one developed any new means of energy production for millions of years?!? Fuck, even solar cells could have stored an incrdible amount of power in say, a century of inactivity (presumably the state most everyone was in anyway).
OTOH, theres an episode with an Autobot bounty hunter skipping from one robot-filled planet to the next, and there's those robot worlds that Unicron eats in the movie, so maybe some hardy colonists ventured forth and Cybertron was eventually forgotten/discared as being too energy costly to maintain. That last explanation I can dig- maybe the adverage movie-era robot uses only a hundredth of Bumblebee's energy consumption (a million year's worth of tech advancment) and the homeworld is both dangerous after so long a war and far out of date with modern tech.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
They probably could have invented a new energy source. But then, they're functionally immortal robots. It's not like they're in a rush.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
*cracks knuckles* I've spent far more time than is probably healthy obsessing over these guys, so...
After the Ark left, I have that being the era on Cybertron that they perfected gestalt intelligences (the Constructicons went with Megatron, and Devastator was an early, and imperfect, attempt), triplechanging, and the idea of sending out protoforms. That would be Shockwave's biggest accomplishment. The Decepticons sent out automated vessels to various worlds. The ship would scan the local fauna, use that as a template for the protoforms. Those robots would build an energon collection station, and start sending out abeacon for retrieval. And in case something big and nasty threatened, they could join together into a gestalt. This is where I have the Predacons, Seacons, Terrorcons, and Insecticons coming from. The Insecticons' ship was damaged, and only three were able ot be activated, and that with damaged programming. Megatron found them later when the Ark was revived.
As for all the robot-inhabited planets in the vicinity of Cybertron, I say that during the Quintesson occupation of Cybertron, they did a lot to populate the area with exports who, after the Quints were driven out, set up their own independent societies. Yes, that's a very condensed version.
I also have written about the origin of Cybertron, Primus and Unicron, sparks, the Allspark, Vector Sigma, ane Matrix, forms of reproduction, the nature of transforming, mass-shifting and subspace, and a bunch of other stuff.
--Jonah
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
But can you tell us what a few Autobots are "female"? Is there's kinky some power socket hidden somewhere or what?
Posted by Krenim (Member # 22) on :
quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: But can you tell us what a few Autobots are "female"? Is there's kinky some power socket hidden somewhere or what?
I'm assuming you mean "why" instead of "what". The answer depends on what continuity you're looking at.
In the G1 comic, I've read that there weren't female TFs until the creation of Arcee. The reason she was created with a female form was because the Autobots were attempting to understand the idea of gender, which was alien to them.
So far as the G1 cartoon goes, female TFs seem to have been around for a long time, although they're almost mythical by the 1980's. The best reason I've heard for their existence in that continuity is that the Quintessons created robots that resembled both genders, depending on what their clientele wanted.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
In my Grand Unified Transformers Theory, it goes something like this.
The Spark is a bit of -- essentially -- plasma-based genetic/soul/personality/whatever material (still working on better defining that). It is a glimmer of the Allspark, being the energy within Primus, a.k.a. Vector Sigma. Besides providing energy for their bodies, energon keeps the Spark going. It's like RAM -- if the power goes out, whatever was encoded in the Spark is gone forever.
As with Terran sexual reproduction, where a half-portion of genetic material from each parent is combined to make a new individual, so can two Cybertronian parents combine portions of their Sparks to create a new one, which then inplants into a new body, whether grown or built or whatever (still working on this aspect, too).
When the Quints came along, part of their subjugation included trying to erase the Cybertronians' racial memory of a time before the Quintessons, and thus set themselves up as gods and creators. Whether a result of their own quasi-organic nature or what, they were able to build Cybertronians with vaguely Sparklike life essences, although not completely sentient (the Guardian robots, various drones, etc.), but so thoroughly brainwashed the Cybertronians, even their natural offspring were considered part of the Quints' greater abilities to create life. Even much later, Cybertronian scientists and engineers were able to replicate their work (cf. Wheeljack and the Dinobots).
Another way is to directly infuse constructed bodies with a portion of the Allspark, either directly from Primus, or via the fragment of Its essence -- the Prime Matrix.
As for the later scarcity of female Cybertronians (transforming or not), millions of years of civil war had a damaging effect on the less durable portion of a sexually-dimorphic species. A lot of males who were either unable or unwilling to fight -- like Orion Pax -- would have been weeded out, too. But only the tougher females would have survived to the present, like Arcee, Elita-One, Moonracer, Chromia, and so on.
And no, that isn't what I think Optimus and Elita were doing in "The Search for Alpha-Trion". Although they did kiss (awkwardly, with that damn faceplate in the way) in the original two-part version of it that I really wish I'd had a VCR for at the time. *grump*
--Jonah
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
Jonah, get some fresh air. Seriously.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
I bet you won't believe me when I say I do. And everyone on here knows I have a hot girlfriend. bX and Charles have even met her, too. I've just had over twenty years to think about such things.
--Jonah
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
I give you, without a doubt, the coolest Transformers site ever.
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)