Sabrblade wrote:I wan't referring to either the lore or continuity. What the TFs in these films lack compared to other TF fiction is personality. Most the bots in the films are stock characters who lack development or character exploration, with most of those qualities being given to the human cast. Sam was the one growing and developing (for better or for worse) in the films, with the people he interacted with affecting him and vice versa. The bots, however, were given next to no reasons for us, the audience, to really care for them as characters (Ironhide's death only bugged me in that they killed off a guy I barely anything about and wanted to know more about, but wasn't going to get to know him because of the films not letting us get to know him before he got axed). They're meant to be flashy special effects and nothing more, which is not the case in just about every other piece of Transformers fiction ever created.Capt.Failure wrote:Their representation of what Transformers is all about is pretty spot on. There's not much to Transformers really. I'm a fan but I don't let my enjoyment of the franchise convince me there's some deeper meaning that isn't there. The convoluted mess of continuity that is the Transformers lore and setting does not qualify it as "deep" by any objective definition. It's more like a poorly maintained toybox, full of bits and pieces of stuff that can be picked and chosen to have fun with.
Ultimately Bay gets it right by trimming the accumulated fat, even if you don't agree. Whether he reaches deeper into the proverbial toybox with the next three films we have yet to see. Ultimately though the quantity of the Transformers lore does not equal quality. And the quality is rather poor.
I fail to see how this is a complaint considering once in my entire memory did Transformers feature character development that was worthwhile (Beast Wars). I'm not saying they shouldn't be developed as characters, but character development is one of the weakest parts of Transformers as a franchise, if not the weakest. The term you should use for the bot's character development is "par the course."
I also found it refreshing to have human companions who were not completely, utterly useless, or that the series ditched the "alien invader = immune to human weapons by default" trope.