The Energon Pub

[Deadput]

Transformers as characters will never be these deep personal characters with in depth roles in live action, just because of being fictuonal characters portrayed by CGI and voice actors rather then real actors.

They just wont, that's life.

[Sabrblade]

Bumblebee was stuck as a child-like mute through most of the film.

He was as much the main focus of the movie as E.T. was in his own movie.

There were two main Decepticons who were fairly two-dimensional.

"Two-dimensional" is a significant improvement over all of the many one-dimensional Decepticon villains we got in the first five films. Only Laserbeak ever came the closest to matching Shatter and Dropkick in how much personality they had. We saw plenty of subtlety and charisma in Shatter and Dropkick as characters rather than as props. Sure, there was no character development for them, but they were never going to be deep, complex, three-dimensional characters who learn life-changing lessons and gain wisdom from their experiences, because this was never going to be that kind of movie. Nor are we ever likely to get that kind of a movie from a Transformers film at this point due to the current nature of the Transformers film-making industry.

You can disagree and all, but to me, the robots are always second fiddle to the humans in these films. Bumblebee didn't do much to change that.

Bumblebee was never going to change that. All it was going to do was to give us better characterized robots to complement the human cast, as opposed to the previous films' mistreating the robots as either one-dimensional monsters and psychopaths.

[william-james88]

I still didnt feel Bumblebee was second fiddle, its like saying ET or the Iron Giant play second fiddle in their own films.

[ThunderThruster]

(Finally) Saw this today. Absolutely loved it, and believe this is the film we should have gotten in 2007.

As for the prqeuel/reboot debate, I think they've left themselves to spin it which ever they choose dependent on how well it does at the box office. ie (and my opinion) if it does badly hey can claim it's the prequel of a decaying film set. If it does well, hail it as a (soft?) reboot for any future films.