by primalxconvoy » Sat Jul 31, 2021 5:30 pm
IMO...
Positives:
- Lovely colour palette and animation (when used), and it looked fine in 1080p on my old HD telly.
- The intro was short, but featured "wireframe", 80's styled CG. All of which ticked my TF/sci-fi boxes.
- Black Arachnia liked "the fembots" (which I was happy to see, for a more inclusive attitude towards our general population and, I'm ashamed to admit, because as a neanderthal male, I thought it was "hot", sorry...).
- Some good voice acting (at least in approximation to the original characters) for Ratrap, Black Arachnia, etc.
- Interesting use of both Nemesis and Galvatron as Unicron's heralds (something, I and many others, have, I'm sure, imagined for a long time).
- Musical score seemed functional and didn't detract from the show.
- Lots of fan-service (G1 and BW animals fighting each other, BW references, such as "Air Commander Starscream", etc).
Negatives:
- Awful voice acting for Optimus, etc (I...must...speak...wiiithhh...long...pausessssssss....").
- Muddy, indistinct sound mixing, such as indistinct voices (Soundwave, Nemesis computer, The Ark, etc), the music, sound effects and dialogue all being different volumes (currently requiring me to change the volume) and actors often mumbling their lines (requiring subtitles for me to understand what was said, at times).
- What the DICKENS were all of the Scorponok clones about?
- The BW bot modes didn't look like their recent toys. If Hasblo wanted the show to shoe-horn the Ark and many other toys into this show, why did they allow these "new" botmodes (however nice they may/may not look) to be used, when they don't look like the toys they're meant to promote?
- A confusing, convoluted "plot" with faaaaar too many mcguffins (I didn't understand how Rhinox magically fixed the Ark, why the dead universe helped everyone survive, etc).
- No point of using the Ark in bot mode (as the budget could have been used for other, more important things in the show).
- Far too many "faction switches" (just like the previous shows, characters seem to change allegiances at the drop off a hat and end up chatting amicably with an enemy that was trying to kill them brutally mere seconds previously).
- Hardly anyone actually transformed on-camera, which, arguably, is the (ahem) "money shot" of any given TF show.
Although this was the "best" of the trilogy's offerings, it could have been far better. Using the original/better voice actors, better sound mixing and voice recording (Soundwave, etc), a more streamlined plot, less mcguffins and better writing could have made this a contender. As it is, I enjoyed the recent "MOTU - Revelation" cartoon on Netflix more than this.
But then again, this IS a Hasblo production we're talking about here, so I'm not really surprised.