The Energon Pub

With the current round of complaints about the movies plot and or writing do you think that Paramount’s rush to get the sequel made or the writers strike hurt the movie?

This is not a thread to bash Bay’s directing of the movie, there are plenty of those threads already out there.

So many people say Orci and Kurtzman got it right with Star Trek but now there are complaints of plot holes and such with transformers. I have yet to see the movie myself and as I said before I will take it for what it is, a “popcorn fluff” movie. I was just curious of people’s thoughts that won’t specifically target the directing of the movie.

Do you feel that it was rushed by Paramount or that with the strike the writers just didn’t have the time they needed to craft it as good as they could have?

It could be a combination of both, but once you see the film you'll see that the pace of action and how Bay tried to "fill" the plot holes suggests it was clearly the writing that's at fault.

To me its like the whole premise of the first movie is pretty much null and void with what this movie's trying to tell you. You can almost look at these two films as two complete separate entities with "tie ins" rather than a sequel.

They said they were locked in a room for four months working on the script. They obviously did not have a copy of the original film on hand as a reference point.

Robinson wrote:With the current round of complaints about the movies plot and or writing do you think that Paramount’s rush to get the sequel made or the writers strike hurt the movie?

Definitey hurt it. Even the 2 hacks...ahem...writers admitted they rushed it because they couldn't do it due to the strike so they gave very vague scripts to Bay and Bryce and let them work it out.

This is not a thread to bash Bay’s directing of the movie, there are plenty of those threads already out there.

Actually, I think Bay was a positive this time. He tried to dress up a poopy story as best as he could, trying to cover it up with as much flash and boom as possible. And I love him for it.

So many people say Orci and Kurtzman got it right with Star Trek but now there are complaints of plot holes and such with transformers.

I am one of those people. I am not a Trek fan, but I saw Star Trek in theaters twice, it was a lot like Transformers, action packed, lot of laughs, and the story was pretty good. I think the main difference was that with Star Trek they tried to make a movie of the TV series, and they kind of had fresh ground to break because they were doing a prequel. With TF, they had to make a movie of a cartoon. This is where my biggest complaint comes in, because if they made it out of the comics stories, they would have had a better story, because let's face it, the comics were a bit deeper than the cartoon.

Do you feel that it was rushed by Paramount or that with the strike the writers just didn’t have the time they needed to craft it as good as they could have?

Absolutely. But at the same, time, I'm not giving a pass to Orci and Kurtzman. They suck.

Strike.

Kurtzman and Orci have demonstrated that they can write - if they were hacks Star Trek would have been awful. Given how choc full it was of clever little references, the writers have the ability to put out a good story. There were some good ideas in the film - though they could have been organized more economically - which a longer scripting process would have allowed for.

On the other hand, while I found TF II a bit long, but my six year old (who has the attention span of a mayfly with ADHD) came out of the cinema and couldn't stop talking about how cool it was. His attention drifted at times, but even though there are hundreds of transformers in the house, he wanted to know why we didn't have JetFire and Skids (apparently the five or so other JetFires and at least 2 Skids that we do have don't count - he wanted ROTF JetFire and Skids).

The main point being he laughed at the bits he was meant to laugh at (especially the balls), wants to know why we don't already have it on DVD and wants me to buy new toys (not that I have a problem with that either).