Optimus Prime: “Megatron!”
Megatron: “Priiiime!”
That classic exchange of words means a lot to someone like me but did the writers and producers of the new Transformers movie keep in good faith with the original franchise? Yes, they did. Before all the fanboys start flailing their arms around about how this and that was wrong, keep in mind that it’s Hollywood and their main focal point is to make a blockbuster smash hit – not appeal to traditional nerds that would probably download the movie anyways.
So if you lowered your standards and understood that this movie was not meant to please you then you’ll find a very entertaining flick about robots just tearing each other up. In a perfect world, James Cameron would direct this movie and it would get an “R” rating. With that said, let’s try to make the best of it.
“In the beginning there was The Cube.”
Okay that was a very lame opening line - for any type of movie. I guess the writers had to come up with some sort of replacement for the almighty Matrix of Leadership and this silly cube was their answer. And if it wasn’t silly enough by itself they decided to call it the “All Spark.” I would have been happier with just “Cube.” Another thing they screwed up with The Cube was showing the bond between human and Autobot. Optimus Prime instructed Spike to put The Cube into his chest if they were not able to beat Megatron, which would kill Prime, but Spike turns around and puts it into Megatron’s chest, destroying him instead. Any logical robot would have told Spike to “keep that fucking cube away from me.”
It’s a cheap way of showing the bond between Spike and Prime.
As far as Megatron goes, I favor him way more then Prime because of his relentlessness and that raspy, vile voice. The new voice didn’t suck but nothing can beat the original voice of the big gun himself. Most disappointing was that the original voice of Megatron, Frank Welker, is alive and healthy but was rejected for the voicing role due to (rumor has it) that the original voice didn’t match Megatron’s new look. Well, of course it doesn’t because it’s not really Megatron. Now don’t get me wrong, because as a big badass robot Megatron looks great, but as the actual Megatron he wasn’t even close. They could have at least done us a favor and brought the old voice back.
I have a very simple formula to sum this all this up.
It’s okay for a cinematic rendition to not be exactly like its original as long as it’s not insulting.
Michael Bay’s Transformer movie was not insulting to its origins.
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