Film Review: Optimus Prime: Awakening

'Til All Are One

The decision to kill off Optimus Prime, way back in 1986, to clear young boys’ minds’ mental space for shiny new toys in The Transformers: the Movie was infamously a massive imbroglio for Hasbro. The corporate big shots had succeeded in selling thousands of toys, themselves jerry-rigged into a brand and a story, fronted by a cartoon and a comic, that was cobbled together from multiple Japanese toylines which were discovered at a trade fair by a Holocaust survivor who would go on to invent the type of camera used to televise poker tournaments. They had created brand loyalty through the fiction they viewed as ephemera, through the voice acting talents of the likes of Frank Welker, Chris Latta, and of course the late and great Peter Cullen, who as Optimus Prime was a surrogate father figure for a generation of latchkey kids.

Hasbro did not think that the decision to kill Optimus Prime, and many other Autobots and Decepticons, in the 1986 film would lead to any controversy. Instead, children were devastated, as their father was felled in battle right before their eyes, and flickered out on his deathbed in front of new characters-cum-toys, an audience surrogate, and a single character from the cartoon. Back then, Hasbro was shocked to find out what the death of Optimus Prime meant. Now, after so many reboots of the franchise and so many deaths of so many versions of Optimus Prime, they have finally decided to think long and hard about what the death of Optimus Prime actually means. They do so in the short film Optimus Prime: Awakening, released in 2026 and shown after credits of the fortieth anniversary showings of The Transformers: the Movie.

You start in that operating room, surrounded by other Autobots, as Prime takes his last metaphorical breaths (do Transformers breathe?). He hands the Matrix of Leadership, the physical manifestation of his leadership and noble qualities, to Ultra Magnus, as he did in the movie, and slips away. From there, he wakes up in a Bardo-like realm where he is accosted by an otherworldly being about his choices, his responsibilities, and the wars that he had fought in.

This short film simply could not have been about the passing of Peter Cullen, as it was made before he died. I do, however, strongly believe that it is a rumination about the passage of time, as the brand has become middle aged as has its earliest fans. I am too young to have seen the original cartoon on air; I grew up with the first Robots in Disguise and the subsequent Unicron Trilogy in the early 2000s, and so the Primes of my childhood were either Daniel Riordan or Gary Chalk. Nevertheless, I had a VHS tape of the 1986 film as well as a few Generation 1 episodes, so I also came to know Cullen as Prime. I am now months away from thirty.

One thing that has been noted about that early scene in this short film, that recreates the infamous death scene in the 1986 film, is that a character is missing. Daniel Witwicky, the human child who served as an audience surrogate, is gone, and I think this absence is the skeleton key to understanding the themes of the short film. In the original show and the 1986 movie, the viewer is assumed to be a child, and is invited to view the show and film through the eyes of a child, where the idea that transforming robots having brought their bitter civil war to Earth is an exciting, new thing. Not so in this short film, made forty years later. This new production literally starts with the audience seeing Ultra Magnus, Hot Rod, Arcee, Kup, Springer, and Perceptor through the actual eyes of Optimus Prime. The audience is now assumed not to be a child, but older, having experienced all the wars of Cybertron, and having experienced the suffering and joys of a life long lived.

In this bardo, Optimus Prime is faced with an angry being who makes a terrible accusation: Optimus Prime, through his dedication to the idea that freedom is the right of all sentient beings and his love for his friends, has been the very being that has kept the wars of Cybertron raging for millennia. Furthermore, he argues that Prime has not died only once, but that other forms of him will die several more times for his friends in different realities, likewise keeping these wars raging, the suffering continuing, the death toll ever rising. The One, as it is called, is making the most devastating possible accusation that Optimus Prime has faced: he has fought for nothing, and that his death is meaningless. He is telling Prime to give up his struggle, and Prime cannot help but bristle at the accusation.

Prime is then attacked by old foes: Soundwave, Starscream, the Insecticons. He fights them on a blasted asteroid under the light of a black hole (which is very significant - more on that later), and then seems to meet an ally: Bumblebee, perhaps the friendliest of the earliest Autobots. But this is not the case, as Bumblebee denounces Prime’s role in continuing the Cybertronian wars and shows a Decepticon symbol on him, and joins with Prime’s pursuers before they all combine into a larger, angrier form of Bumblebee.

Those who are fans of the franchise and have been following its recent comics will have noticed something about this scene: that black hole looming above the battlefield is the Sacred Ring from Void Rivals, one of the comic series that shares a universe (the Energon Universe, as it is called) with the ongoing Transformers title, as well as G. I. Joe and M. A. S. K (NOTE - fans of these titles, I am going to spoil the first two or three arcs of Void Rivals, so stop reading here if you are not there yet). The Sacred Ring is a black hole that contains Goliant, an ancient Quintesson weapon locked in the black hole by Zerta Trion, a Transformer fighting the Quintessons’ oppression of her people, and kept in there by a gigantic ring on which live two nations, Agorrians and Zertorians, who each control half of Goliant’s essence, and, having lost the details of their origins, fight each other pitilessly to keep him from emerging. In other words, these two peoples have been condemned to suffering and war because of the wars of the Transformers. An old war, fought by a literal cassette player and an old VW bug, is waged under the light of a new war, now told monthly in comic shops as we speak. From the beginning of the franchise to the present day, there is war between Cybertronians for our entertainment.

Let’s go back to the notion that the short film is inviting us to see ourselves in Optimus Prime. Optimus Prime, at the end of his last battle, is asked to give up fighting, to give up the Matrix of Leadership, and to accept his own culpability in suffering. He is attacked by old enemies in the shadow of a war that is ancient in-universe and very new in our own. This then raises questions: what are we, and by extension old Transformers fans, fighting? What are we being asked to give up? What are we supposed to accept? What are we suffering from?

Old Transformers fans like myself went to 40th anniversary showings of the 1986 movie out of nostalgia. ‘Nostalgia,’ as a word broken down into its Greek roots, is the pain of homecoming. There are two parts of this whole process, and therefore the decision to watch a film we loved as children as adults: a love, and a pain.

Let’s put that in the metaphor invited by the short film. We, through Prime, are being asked to give up fighting, to give up the infliction and the creation of pain and suffering. We are being asked, on some level, to move on. We, like Prime, are being attacked by memories of the past that have been hostile to us, as well as a memory of the past that seemed friendly but is now hostile. Those two have merged into something wearing the accoutrements of the old, the combined Bumblebee and Decepticons, and they are assailing us with grief, under the shadow of the grief we feel to this very day. The forces fighting Prime are the pain of aging, the pain of the loss of innocence, but also the pain of a loss of purpose. Soldiers who return home have sometimes talked of missing the front, as the front gave them an immediate purpose and, in a way, a simple existence. The One is trying to impress upon Prime that his war is over, and from there that our internal struggle between living in the present and looking mournfully at the past must likewise end.

The short film continues, as Prime is sent to battles on Earth and on Cybertron. On Earth, he is helpless to stop Unicron. On Cybertron, he fights valiantly alongside Bumblebee against Megatron, his greatest enemy. It is the brief sequence on Earth that makes the invited metaphor even more obvious; the damages of something he cannot stop begins to strip away the metal on his hand, revealing under that a human hand. If we are Prime, we are fighting aging, something we cannot stop, and having the self-conception we built for ourselves as children ripped away, revealing us humans, weak and vulnerable to the world around us.

Then, on Cybertron, Prime is almost killed by Megatron, but is saved by his ally Bumblebee. He then almost kills Megatron, but relents at the last moment. He gives up the Matrix by throwing it away, and walks into a shining doorway leading to points unknown. Megatron, a Decepticon, is our desire to return to the past, that much is clear. What does Bumblebee represent? He is an ally, a good thing that is nevertheless capable of turning evil. Bumblebee, here, is the love for something in our past that makes us want to undertake a homecoming. He is the attachment that was born in our childhood. He is the good part, the sweet part, of nostalgia, while Megatron is the evil, bitter part. But, ultimately, this is a desire to let childish things be childish, to let things remain in the past. He is the ‘adult’ part of our brains that is telling us to put down our toys and leave the good memories as memories.

But Optimus does not want to kill Megatron, and the film is telling us not merely to give up nostalgia as a whole. The film is telling us to move beyond this struggle between the desire to return to the past, and the desire to simply leave a memory as a memory. What it does not say is where Optimus went. It does let the metaphor walk through that doorway, and leave us in the theater.

We submitted to nostalgia by going to the theater to watch a film from our childhoods. What, according to this film, should we do? Certainly the answer is not to give up on Transformers. Firstly, Hasbro and TakaraTomy would never allow that and never would want that. We are invited to continue engaging with Transformers as a franchise, but how?

I will confess to having gotten back into Transformers only within the past year, and as such have not watched and read every single new piece of fiction in the franchise, let alone stuff from before I was born. There is a lot of Transformers. But I think I can detect what the logical conclusion is here, and will demonstrate it with another beloved franchise of which I am a devotee: Star Wars.

An adult Star Wars fan, nostalgic for their childhood when the franchise was new to them, is caught in a struggle between the desire to leave it in the past, to put away childish things, and to struggle with what the loss of that newness means. You are older, pining for what you felt as a child, while acutely feeling the pain that that child no longer exists. You can give up what you love, or you can rage at our own mortality and thereby try to restore something that never really existed. Or, you can take a third option: to learn to appreciate the old stories with adult eyes. You will see the flaws, the stereotypes and the silly acting and the wooden lines, but you will also appreciate in Star Wars the commentary on imperialism and democracy. The proper resolution of the great conflict of nostalgia is Andor, a respect for the old stories bolstered with a respect for where it fits in the adult world, an appreciation that these stories are of the world, created by humans, rather than falling in our laps out of nowhere.

That resolution of the tension inherent in nostalgia is the resolution of the conflict within us, the resolution of the struggle between Optimus Prime and the One. He has given up his desire to return to his glory days, and his desire to rage against their ending. He has ascended to a higher realm, a higher discourse, and will become part of the One. The Autobot rallying cry is ‘til all our one,’ and that rallying cry is also a cry of mourning. It is a cry of loss, and an exhortation forward. As Optimus Prime joins the One, we are invited to rejoin the world, a world with Transformers in it, but also with ourselves in it, with us and the franchise and the world all inextricably linked. Giving up the struggles of nostalgia does not mean giving up what we loved, or giving up love itself. It is, rather, a higher form of love, a love of reality rather than a construct, a love that can accept that a cartoon thrown together to sell toys, written by freelancers who didn’t think much of it, and containing some hideous anti-Arab racism, can nevertheless bring good things into the world, things worth loving.

In his book Anatomy of Criticism, the great literary critic Northrop Frye argues that a comedy ends with the integration of the protagonist into society, as opposed to tragedy, which ends with the total separation of the protagonist from society. With the themes of moving on, one would be tempted to call this film a tragedy, as there is separation of Prime from what gave him meaning. But the Autobots fight until the day that all are one, and he has joined the One. There is, in a way, a happy ending. He has become what he fought for. We, likewise, can join the world of which our love is part, and create a more durable, more formidable love in the process. We can love what we love for what it is, and not what we believe it to be. We can face the world, having used our love to motivate us to be better people, to be strong enough to be gentle. It is the proper use of love.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy

Looking Back at The Transformers

Does an old toy commercial have the Touch?

Before I begin - since I will be discussing a Hasbro property, I want to bring up the fact that staff at Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, have successfully won a union and are now bargaining for a contract. You should support the union here.
  
                                      

The 1986 Transformers show lurked over my nerd-dom for a long time. I got into the franchise in the early 2000s as an impressionable preschooler who dove headfirst into the 2001 Robots in Disguise show (does anyone else remember that one?), and then loved Armada and was more intermittently into Energon and Cybertron. I got rid of my Transformers toys in 2006ish, and then was left to look longingly and regretfully at the toys released for the Michael Bay movies. Even then, I could tell there was something off about those films (I rewatched them recently and concluded that they’re not terrible but they are seriously hampered by being late 2000s blockbusters but that is an argument for another day), but I enjoyed them as impressionable boys do. All of those, though, I knew ultimately came from this cartoon from before I was born: The Transformers, released in 1983.

I wasn’t entirely unaware of the contents of that show when I was a kid; my parents bought me a video tape of the 1986 movie as well as another with two episodes (City of Steel and A Prime Problem), which together formed my view of that show for a long time. I remember being spellbound by the animation of the movie, and bits of those episodes stayed with me as half-remembered snippets for over twenty years (like Long Haul’s line in the former of the aforementioned episodes “Remove! Remove! Always remove! I didn’t join this outfit to be a dump truck! For whatever reason, I also remembered Mixmaster’s particular verbal tic in that episode and that episode alone). But then, last year, I finally got around to playing War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron, both great games that take a military science fiction approach to the basic conceit of Transformers, and I felt that, at some point, I should actually get around to watching the cartoon that started it all (along with the eighties Marvel comics, of course). And then, to my joy, it turns out Hasbro put the entire show, excepting the movie, on one of their YouTube channels. I went on this quest in earnest.

The thing that struck me again and again about this show is how clearly very few people involved in its creation actually gave a shit about it as a work of art. Every comment one of the writers, Donald Glut, made about the show in retrospect sounds like more polite versions of “why do you still give a shit about this?” Glut, whose most prominent work is probably the novelization to The Empire Strikes Back, nevertheless created several characterizations and wrote several memorable episodes, which to me is a sign of how good he is; even his phoned-in scripts are entertaining. The animation is often clearly phoned-in, with many, many obvious errors with little regard to consistency or continuity. More broadly, there’s a sort of slap-dash quality to the writing, not necessarily the dialogue (which is usually serviceable if never particularly deep), but rather the coherence of the world. You have Atlantis out of nowhere in one episode, never mentioned again, and in another episode the main characters are sent back to Arthurian England for no particular reason.

But it’s this potpourri of SFF influences on the different episodes that I think ultimately made the cartoon, and from there the franchise, the success that it was. As I watched it, I came to understand why so many kids came to love this show, as the sheer variety of situations, the sheer diversity of the little nooks and crannies of this universe both on Earth and on Cybertron as well as elsewhere, comes together in a way that feels vast rather than inconsistent. Sure, we have talking, transforming robots at war with one another, so why not Atlantis? Why not time travel to Arthurian times? I have a hard time putting my finger on why, precisely, this worked out the way it did, but it did.

Somewhat surprisingly, most of the time the show is not obviously a toy commercial. Yes, the robots look cool and can do things, but for the most part the fast-paced adventure plots don’t feel too contrived to sell a toy (there are, of course, exceptions). The toy-driven nature of the show is much clearer when you take a look at the broader narrative arcs. The show starts with the Autobots’ ark stranded on Earth, and there is a fairly small cohort of both Autobots and Decepticons for the first season and the opening few episodes of the second season. But, after those few episodes, for no reason whatsoever there are more and more new robots, on both sides of this war, that were never established previously. The cast grows and grows, to the point that the Protectobots, a team of five Autobots that can combine, are inelegantly squeezed into the final episodes of the second season, the last before the 1986 film. This is also at the expense of human characters, several of whom appear only a few times but could have been turned into series regulars to its profit. The one who comes to mind first is Raoul, who appears in two episodes set in New York, a city which is given a certain grotty atmosphere that is ultimately a kid-friendly pastiche of a Scorsese film of that era. He is a product of that particular era in the city’s history and as such he feels rooted in a way that few human characters do. I wish we got more of him. Likewise, I wish we got more of Carly, the girl who eventually gets romantically involved with Sam Witwicky but is ultimately both more intelligent and more daring than he is (it’s why, after finishing the first two seasons, I came to see how Dark of the Moon was a massive character assassination on Carly. She is far too interesting a character to be reduced to eye candy).

Another reason the show has endured as long as it has is the voice actors. Peter Cullen and Frank Welker are legends for a reason, after all, and the voice actors more generally are one of two groups of people involved in the production of this show who are clearly giving it their all. It can be very surprising to see how certain actors provided so many voices; both the rasping voice of Megatron and the breathy voice of Soundwave are both Welker! All of these voices are unique, all capable of giving their characters a vibe, which provides a certain depth.

The other group of people who clearly gave a shit about their jobs are the composers. There were but two of them: Johnny Douglas and Robert J. Walsh, who produced the wide variety of background music in the series. What struck me, looking on from forty years in the future, is how much of it is orchestral. You’d think that your giant transforming robot show would have a lot of synthesizers, more electronic music, to go with the artificial nature of the protagonists. There is some of that, yes, but for the first two seasons the score is overwhelmingly recorded via orchestra, which felt like a sixties World War II movie - tell me this doesn’t sound like something out of the golden age of those films. There are even leitmotifs! There are bits for triumph, and for planning, and for panic. The spacier third season changed this, halfway through, to a soundtrack with more synthesizers that quoted liberally from the score of the 1986 movie, which worked for the pulpier feel (the particular sound of the old score just felt out of place in the new setting, feeling less John Williams and more Ernest Gold).

I didn’t binge this show and I think that was the right call; I watched one or two episodes a day, mostly, with the exception of multi-episode events which I watched the whole way through in one sitting. These older series, with less connective tissue between episodes (and frankly a raft of continuity issues), benefit from letting the characters stay in your mind a while, so that the underlying repetitive structures don’t become too obvious. I started in January and ended in April, and remained mostly consistent to the one episode per day rule. It became a ritual I looked forward to, for as long as it lasted.

And this, of course, brings us to the movie, and what a movie it is. The movie is the first two seasons of the show, but more epic - better animation, better voice acting, better writing (none perfect, mind you, but definitely on a higher plane). It’s a better movie than it is a toy commercial, seeing how Hasbro treated its characters like the disposable toys they thought they were, rather than the beloved icons of childhood the children in question did. And so, the deaths of Optimus Prime and so many other stalwarts of the cartoon were decreed with no thought to the fact that people actually loved them, to be replaced with shiny new toys with not enough writing done to make them lovable.

(in fairness to them, Hasbro has tried to make up for it)

I had watched the movie on VHS as a kid several times without the benefit of familiarity with the series before it; now that I have, I realized what I was missing. The conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons in those early seasons is a conflict fought under conditions of utter scarcity; their wars are fundamentally for fuel, regularly raiding power plants and the like for the bare necessities of their continued existence. There is a sparseness to those seasons that doesn’t really come into relief until you compare them with the movie, which begins with a lush view at a fully functional Autobot base on the moons of Cybertron with the stated intention of soon liberating the planet from the clutches of the Decepticons. The music in that sequence, a soaring number by Vince DiCola, is designed to highlight the awe of this new state of affairs, the rough-and-tumble Ark of the series replaced with Cybertronian civilization in its resplendent glory. The same goes for Autobot City, which is more detailed than anything that came before it, and the battle for that city is a crowning achievement of the franchise.

I have a vivid memory of watching this movie as a kid and finding the Quintessons to be terrifyingly fascinating, all through that one scene where Kup and Hot Rod are thrown to the sharkticons. The way that these various scary faces coexist around a central bulb with tentacles, each a personality that bickers with the others, lodged itself in my mind and never really let go. That’s why I found the way the Quintessons were portrayed in the third season to be so disappointing; none of them get a name, none of them really get a personality, and as such they are just sort of a blob.

After the movie, the third season felt like a step down. The movie wasn’t free of animation errors but neither did it look as shoddy as the rest of the cartoon could look. The third season, the one that is the most openly space opera, looks all too fake. This is unfortunate, as the upgraded animation of the movie really sold the vastness of space and therefore the vastness of the story, something that the third season is lacking. You have the growing pains of the new cast; this season has a strong idea for a cast dynamic, with the rookie Rodimus Prime contrasting the experienced, firm-handed Optimus, while leading and serving the more experienced Kup and Ultra Magnus. There’s also one of the few female transformers, Arcee, and the first to be a major part of the cast. Not unlike Avatar: the Last Airbender, Rodimus’ arc is about the burdens of being the chosen one.

In terms of deeper themes, there are two major ones beyond the obvious one of “buy Transformers toys.” Much of this show, if you think about it for a bit, is about anxieties regarding the nature of industrial civilization as something capable of both great accomplishment but also great destruction. This becomes very obvious when you consider the Constructicons; I find it very telling that construction vehicles were chosen to be Decepticons. All six of them have vehicle modes that can be used to create things, oftentimes good things, but together they can combine into a gigantic robot literally named Devastator. This suggests a dialectical relationship between the positive and negative aspects of the second industrial revolution; that which creates can also devastate.

There’s one particular episode in the earlier part of the second season that has a heavy subtext about this, namely The Master Builders. In this episode, Autobots Grapple and Hoist, who turn into a crane and a tow truck, respectively, are possessed by the idea of building a solar power collection device, and in the process of doing so are offered help by aforementioned Constructicons, who claim to have defected. The episode bounces between these two groups, one building for altruistic reasons and the other building for sinister reasons. Again and again, you are confronted with their fundamental similarity. The difference is the choices they make with their awesome powers of creation. Throughout this episode, I was reminded of The Bridge on the River Kwai, particularly the character of Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, the British engineer captured by the Japanese whose love of building is harnessed by his captor and used against his own people. Both Nicholson and the two Autobots are entranced by the act of creation, but refuse to think about on whose behalf they are creating, and to the detriment of their own.

The other big thematic category that appears a lot in this show is the cost of warfare on the environment and on the combatants. The conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons is a resource war for their own survival. Their sustenance is energon, and energon can be created from terrestrial sources of energy, such as oil or hydroelectric power. A surprisingly high percentage of episodes in the first two seasons are about raids on power plants and the like, and the results are always destructive to the environment around them. One episode has the Insecticons running roughshod over Indonesia, and another features Constructicons drilling into the Earth’s core. Both sides of this war are concerned with survival, but they differ in what they are willing to justify in its name.

I finished this show with an understanding of just why this toyline became a cultural juggernaut. When you get down to it, the show is simply fun, and in a way that creates a universe that feels like it could be endlessly explored. It’s rough around the edges, yes, and it’s a bit janky, yes, but by the end I found it quite charming if you can stomach something which was obviously created to sell toys. By the end of the last episode, there was part of me, somewhat surprisingly, that was sad it was over.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy

The Transformers franchise hasn't learned the lessons from Bumblebee

Rise of the Beasts has interesting layers of subtext, but doesn't use or develop them in an interesting way

Dear Hasbro, next time you make a movie that cheers for the United States, try not to send the message that one needs to heroically save from annihilation every planet in the universe before one can get basic health care coverage. Not a good look.

After the much needed, much welcome course correction seen in 2018's spinoff/prequel Bumblebee, it's clear that Hasbro didn't learn the lesson from the experience, to wit: keep the film as far from Michael Bay's hands as possible. Compared to Bumblebee, the production of prequel/sequel/crossover Transformers: Rise of the Beasts had substantially more creative input from Bay, and it shows: once again, the big robots look so devoid of color that the eye strains to tell apart who's punching whom; once again, the U.S. military is uncritically celebrated; once again, the jokes go for the crassest common denominator; once again, the story fails to be about something. Bay's artistic vision is things go boom, and we should never have let him train our brains to expect only that. Bumblebee had the good sense to use the military as a minor antagonist; this entry backtracks so hard that it makes the protagonist a former soldier whose only contribution to the heroes' victory is his army training.

Rise of the Beasts noticeably struggles to become more than things go boom. The thematic content of the Autobots' eternal quest for survival acquires a different meaning when the movie is handed to a Black director who gives most of the prominent roles to Black actors and Black voice actors. And the first bit of information one needs to keep in mind to properly analyze this movie is how Black audiences have historically responded to the Transformers franchise. In case you didn't know, Optimus Prime (along with many other nonhuman characters in pop culture) is perceived as Black. The ethnicity of his voice actor is not the point; it's, as far as I've been able to understand it, more of a vibe. The character's values and personality and relationships with other characters are felt by Black audiences as having the specific contour of how Black people experience the world. With this reading of nonhuman characters, Black viewers have found a way to resist their invisibilization by recognizing themselves in works of art not explicitly made with them in mind.

This context gives added meaning to key scenes in the plot of Rise of the Beasts. The cathartic moment of realization at the end of the second act has Optimus Prime admitting that his zeal in defending his people clashed with the human protagonist's similar mission, and they should have forged a bond of solidarity instead of seeing their struggles as mutually exclusive. Now, it's one thing to hear a robot speak of his duty to defend his people and the need for solidarity; it's another thing to hear a Black character say it. Instead of the military commander of previous entries, here Prime is recast as a caretaker of refugees. In the Transformers mythos, the Autobots are usually a persecuted class, happy to mind their own business until the Predacons show up to conquer everything. The movie mirrors their situation in the human characters, who are established in early scenes as targets of racial discrimination. Those scenes aren't exactly subtle or insightful in their portrayal of 1990s racial relations, but they serve their purpose.

However, there are other moments where the script seems to lash out at its own message. In blatant reference to criticism of previous Transformers movies, a robot character is given a Spanish accent and a whole portion of dialogue is spent commenting on that fact. One can almost feel Michael Bay snatching the camera to aim it at his face and scream at the viewers, "No, what I did with Skids and Mudflap is totally not racist. Look, I'm doing it again, and the characters say it's all right." The symbolic weight of the movie's choice of final battlefield is also wasted: the brief remark that an Indigenous temple was supplanted by a Spanish temple could have been used as a stepping point for larger questions of conquest, resilience, and coexistence. Instead, our all-American heroes, fresh from leaving their lives marked by exclusion and inequality, casually intrude into the sovereign airspace of a Third World country to wreck its archaeological sites in the name of helping refugees return to their home, because what's thematic consistency?

Rise of the Beasts falls apart because its plotlines pull in opposite directions. The introduction of the Maximals as exemplifying a more harmonious relationship with humanity seems to point toward a deeper exploration of the theme of coexistence, but the film only pays quick lip service to that idea before the mandatory digital bloodbath begins. For all that the Maximals were positioned as the selling point of the story, they don't rise above plot device status. Although Optimus Primal is as thoughtful and kind as in the Beast Wars cartoon and its underappreciated sequel Beast Machines, the rest of his team is just decoration. Cheetor and Rhinox barely speak any lines, and we never get to know them as characters. More damningly, the Maximals only have about a minute of blurry screen time in their transformed bodies, which is supposed to be the whole point of making a movie about shapechanging robots.

You've seen this plot before. In order to summon the all-devouring Dormammu Unicron to our world, evil murderer Enchantress Scourge prepares a ritual with the pieces of the Mother Boxes Transwarp Key. To stop him, the Elves and Dwarves Autobots and Maximals must set aside their differences and work together, building up to a confusing maelstrom of computer models punching waves of disposable minions. After the end (because this movie has three endings), some enigmatic character comes out of nowhere to set up the Dark Universe Hasbro Cinematic Universe, because everything these days has to connect to other milkable IP. It's an insult to the audience, a punishment to the eyes, and a waste of everyone's time.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Thursday Morning Superhero

The family and I are going on a much needed vacation next week so I am going to have to come up with a non-traditional Thursday Morning Superhero post for next week. I am attending PAX East at the end of the month, but that is for professional reasons and I am not sure I will be able to cover it properly.  I am excited to learn more about the world of esports and will hopefully sneak in one or two board games.

Pick of the Week:
The Batman Who Laughs: The Grim Knight #1 - This week we are introduced to the Grim Knight, a Batman from another world with a violent past. Having the same motivations as our Batman in terms of stopping crime, but differing on the methods employed to achieve similar results. It almost feels as if this Batman found the Death Note that Ryuk dropped and is using it to cleanse Gotham. The Gordon from this world is like L trying to track down who this mysterious killer is, despite the good intentions. I have fallen behind the main series, but this issue has me intrigued and motivated to return to a Scott Snyder Batman book and see what the Batman who Laughs, the one corrupted by Joker, has in store for Gotham.

The Rest:
Star Wars Age of Republic: General Grievous #1 - I learned something new about one of my favorite, if not my favorite, Star Wars villains.  George Lucas had bronchitis during the recording sessions and the sound editors thought it would be fun to include. This issue, and I'm not sure if it is a one-off or an ongoing, reads like the fusion of Indiana Jones and General Grievous. Watching him work his way through the Jedi Temple, dodging booby traps and outsmarting those who laid the path before him, was extremely satisfying and I am blown away at what an amazing job Luke Ross did capturing the mannerisms of this being and made him jump off the page. I hope this is an ongoing series as I am always thirsty to learn more about Grievous and who he was prior to the machine hybrid he became in the films.

Transformers #1 - We are treated to a new Transformers series courtesy of IDW publishing. Set in a time before the war between the Deceptions and Autobots, I was intrigued to learn more about life on Cybertron.  This is before Optimus Prime was a prime and was on pretty good speaking terms with Megatron. They are far from friends, but this issue hints at the beginning of what sparked the great war. Overall this book, despite it being a blast of nostalgia, fell a little flat. The art from Angel Hernandez and Cachet Whitman is stunning and they do an incredible job paying homage from a popular franchise.  I am not giving up on this series yet as author Brian Ruckley appears to be setting the stage for something big, but I'm not quite sold.



POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.

Enough Bad Movies

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blockbuster

Summer blockbuster season is almost upon us, and there are some great movies on the docket. There are some.... not so great movies as well, and we need to talk about those. A common refrain these days is "No more remakes! No more sequels!" But no one is complaining about Spider-Man: Homecoming, are they? It looks like a good movie. At the same time, no one asked for another Transformers movie, yet there it is, in all it's explodey glory, trotting out the same crap Michael Bay has since Bruckheimer let him off the leash.

If you've read any of my missives on this site before, you know that I find mediocrity more a crime than simply being bad. There are a lot of bad movies out there that tried. Ed Wood may have made terrible movies - and terrible they are - but he tried. It drives me bonkers that Michael Bay gets handed hundreds of millions of dollars to roll out (that was unintentional) Megan Fox lookalikes while junkyards mash into each other.

Then you are in the wrong franchise

Which leads me to question my own hypothesis here- what is it that separates a bad movie, from a good one, from a mediocre one?

(This is the part where i realize this should be a video essay)

The first thing that a movie should do is tell a story. That may seem an obvious statement, but if it is, a lot of people missed the obvious. What story, exactly, do any of the Transformers movies tell? Or any of the DC movies? Suicide Squad felt like six different movies spliced together into something entirely unintelligible. Compare that to, say, Arrival, which told a brilliant story that was, for being complex, easily understood and explained. There are a lot of aspects to making a good movie, but if it has no story, or the structure is terrible, none of them matter. All the flashy effects and A-list actors mean nothing without a skeleton for the meat to hang on.

Which ties nicely into another essential element- originality. We live in the age of reboots and sequels. For that matter, though, nearly everything is an adaptation. Sure, every bestseller with the word "Girl" in the title gets a blockbuster adaption, but Arrival was a story first, and so is nearly every movie. That's no crime, though- as long as something original is brought to the story. Take comics, for example. Watchmen was basically a shot-for-shot adaption of the comic, with a tweak to the end, yet it managed to have exactly zero substance. The current run of Star Trek films (of which I am a huge fan /s) are rehashings of old Star Trek with glitzy effects. 

There are boundless options for these adaptions- especially in the era of 90's nostalgia and comic book movies. The ones that work, though, are the ones which use the format of a movie to bring a new dimension to those stories- Spider-Man: Homecoming, Logan, and The Dark Knight leap to mind. All draw heavily on the source material, but are not limited by it, or by simply trying to copy it. That originality and creativity is what sets them apart from the dour affairs which are, say, Batman v Superman, which has rich source material that it recycles into incomprehensible garbage.

via GIPHY

"But DESR, I just want to go shut my brain off for two hours," I hear some people saying. "It's just a dumb popcorn movie." Fair enough- it is entertainment, after all. But this is like skipping a steak dinner for McDonalds. It's pretty pointless and unhealthy. Jaws is responsible (largely) for the summer blockbuster, but it is still a damn good movie. What makes it a great movie? It is creative, it has stakes, and it has a ton of depth to it. It's a better way to spend a few hours being entertained than any of the interchangeable, forgettable affairs the come out every summer.

Because, let us be honest, it's about money. You and I only have so many dollars to spend going to movies, and movie studios have many many many dollars, but still only so many, to invest into making them. Where we spend *our* money, however, actually counts for more than where they spend theirs. The best example of this is this years Oscar drama, of La La Land and Moonlight. Now, La La Land was a serviceable film, but aside from being well-acted and directed, it was completely uninspiring. Sure, it had some emotional moments, but none of them were original. It fell victim to [DIGRESSION ALERT] one of my biggest directing pet peeves, and that is "paying homage" to another movie or director. Except it's not that, it's literally lifting the shot/plot point/camera move, and putting it in your movie and then the audience is all "OMG he did the same thing Spielberg did!" It's not clever, it's cheap, and it needs to stop. It's also 98% of La La Land. [END OF DIGRESSION ALERT].

By contrast, did you SEE Moonlight? Go watch it. I'll wait. Back? Yeah, that's how you make a movie. Only one of those movies is truly original, emotional, inspiring AND entertaining, and it's not the one where the white dude saves jazz.

But what drove it was money- $1.5m budget for Moonlight, with very little marketing. Word of mouth did most of the work. La La Land, on the other hand, $30m for La La Land, and it was marketed and shown everywhere. It made tons of money, as one would expect- and that's the difference. Moonlight wasn't expected to make the money it did- but the fact that it did, that people went to see it, that word spread like wildfire around it, lead to its well-deserved best picture award. More than that, it will hopefully lead to more movies like it being recognized and being put forward in place of the cookie-cutter blockbusters to which we have become accustomed. It won't just happen with one movie though- So, please, I beg of you, when you consider how to spend your movie-going money and time, spent it on something worthwhile, something meaningful, and something original.

-DESR