Transformers 4 Rumours and News Thread.

TURBO CHARGER · Post by **TURBO CHARGER** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 9:47 pm

Really? 3 Renegade Primes in a row?

numbat · Post by **numbat** » Tue Jan 24, 2012 9:07 am

TURBO CHARGER wrote:Really? 3 Renegade Primes in a row?

Sure, why not?

OK. On second thoughts, maybe a new approach is needed. A good solid villain would be nice, but I struggle to see a decent character being made of it, instead of a simple 2D cartoon bad guy, or a pantomime villain like The Fallen. Some decent motivation would be nice.

Vin Ghostal · Post by **Vin Ghostal** » Tue Jan 24, 2012 3:31 pm

Part of the problem is that the first three films, as much as I love them, follow a pretty simple formula:

1. Find something extremely powerful, located on or near Earth.

2. Activate something else extremely powerful.

Transformers: AllSpark, Megatron
ROTF: Matrix, Sun Harvester
DOTM: Sentinel, Space Bridge

They've at once got to deviate from this formula while staying true to the series. Honestly, how many more important talismans, objects, and dead/deactivated Transformers could be located on Earth or the Moon?

numbat · Post by **numbat** » Tue Jan 24, 2012 5:15 pm

Vin Ghostal wrote:They've at once got to deviate from this formula while staying true to the series. Honestly, how many more important talismans, objects, and dead/deactivated Transformers could be located on Earth or the Moon?

I'm guessing - as many as they need for the films...

But, yeah, you're right. However, I don't see any reason why you couldn't base a new villain in RID Scourge seeking Earth out because he wants Prime's matrix. That's a little different - it doesn't invent any new artifacts or connections with Earth.

Or you could just have the threat of Unicron coming through the Solar System and munching planets for no particular reason. Or maybe because the Matrix is the only thing that can defeat him. But that'd be very similar in plot, and I really doubt it would work in live action.

At the end of the day, the film will take place on Earth, and if you've wiped out the existing Decepticons you'll need an excuse for new bad guys to arrive here. Alternatively, if there are somehow still Decepticons, you need an excuse for them to want to stay and cause mischief. Frankly, Transformers never had the strongest of plots anywhere, and more and more films will almost certainly result in more and more weak or unlikely plots linking things to Earth. It's made worse by needing to have major disaster-level drivers that have to be resolved in a single film. That's why I'd be quite happy with the movies ending at DOTM, but I won't lie - I'll be straight in line to see TF4, and if the designs and toys are good, I'll no doubt buy a few.

Bountyhunter · Post by **Bountyhunter** » Tue Jan 24, 2012 8:41 pm

There are plenty of decepticons left untouched by Bay thus far that could be effective even if they were never the leader before.

Plus hundreds of decepticons came via the space bridge. There is a lot left they can do. Personally I am routing for Astrotrain as the decepticon leader. He could be very effective also they could do a story about something having been retrieved from cybertron because of the space bridge. there is a lot of life left if they keep Megatron dead.

numbat · Post by **numbat** » Tue Jan 24, 2012 9:20 pm

Bountyhunter wrote:There are plenty of decepticons left untouched by Bay thus far that could be effective even if they were never the leader before.

Plus hundreds of decepticons came via the space bridge. There is a lot left they can do. Personally I am routing for Astrotrain as the decepticon leader. He could be very effective also they could do a story about something having been retrieved from cybertron because of the space bridge. there is a lot of life left if they keep Megatron dead.

Do a lot of the Decepticons not end up getting sucked into the sky and lost with Cybertron at the end of DOTM though?

You're right, though, there are plenty of good Decepticon characters left if they can work out a good way to include them now.

I'd personally like to see G2 Clench as leader, if not RID Scourge. And I think Animated/RTS Lugnut would male a great looming presence, while Armada/Energon Tidal Wave would be about as epic as I think live action could handle. Plenty Seekers left to reuse Screamer's CGI model too...

horizon · Post by **horizon** » Wed Jan 25, 2012 4:10 am

Megatron's head got cut loose at the end of DotM, right?

Well, introduce headmasters.

An evil genius wants to control a robot like Megatron to take over the world.
But the execution is done more low profile then full out attacks.

Yes, not a big story, but I still in the believe a good Former movie does not need a high end story. I always laugh if people say the story in Transformer movie was bad. Because they weren't, even RotF wasn't megabad. It just had a dumb plot.

Bountyhunter · Post by **Bountyhunter** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 6:17 am

Do we really have to have true decepticons as the bad guys? I mean its obiously based one g1 in part but the characters are not quite the same could they do something a little different like uncover Grimlock and the dinobots or shrapnel and the insecticons or some beast wars characters and have them run amok and have that as the basis for the plot? the is a lot of possibi;ities if we step out side the box and play with it a little. It doesnt have to be decepticons per sec'

Summerhayes · Post by **Summerhayes** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 10:44 am

Although that could make for a superior film, i suspect it would be too risky for the studio. Autobots fighting Decepticons is what people have been paying the big bucks to see and anything else would feel like too much of a side story.

Red Dave Prime · Post by **Red Dave Prime** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 2:44 pm

I like the idea of a decepticon assassination squad looking for revenge on Optimus. You could have the combaticons fill the role as onslaught would make a good opposite of prime. Have Prime and Bee cut off from the rest of the bots on a clean-up mission in south america and one part of the movie is the other bots trying to locate the missing robots (sat recon can be knocked out by blast off) and Prime and Bee (with some humans) trying to out smart the pursuing Combaticons. The smaller cast could help with the cost and the idea of the cavalry arriving just in time to take on bruticus would make a good finale.

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 4:19 pm

I like the basic idea, but the problem is all three films have had fairly sizeable segments where Prime and/or Bee are separated from the rest, and the result has invariably been "the others get very little to do".

My ideal film would be one that would actually play up or create specialities for the likes of Dino, Sideswipe, Ratchet etc. beyond having them fighting in the background, even if it was something relatively simple like the Wreckers getting sent to do a side-mission while Optimus & co battle someone else (to use DotM's storyline, I'd have moved the spacebridge to a location other than Chicago and have the Wreckers trying to destroy it while the Autobots held off the invasion force, or vice versa).

[TF Prime-related]

SPOILER! (select to read)
Though having finally got around to watching the last three or four episodes of Prime, I'm totally converted as to how they could do Unicron. Ace stuff.

Summerhayes · Post by **Summerhayes** » Wed Feb 01, 2012 11:41 pm

Well, now I know this phone can't hide spoiler text. Still, thats reminded me to go online at the weekend and Deliberately Order Well-Notarised Legal Official Authorised Dvds all the eps of Prime I haven't seen.

With no Sam, Bumblebee will probably have a reduced roll. A good plan might be to, instead of introducing Hotshot or someone, just have the main fleshling befriend Optimus. That way they'd kill two birds with one stone and free up screen time for the other autobots.

Bountyhunter · Post by **Bountyhunter** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 4:39 am

Two other bots that could fill the void would be introduce either Hound or Tracks. Either could take up the void of bee and free up other bots as the interact with the humns and are introduced

praetorian · Post by **praetorian** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 4:06 pm

With the popularity of Bumblebee for younger audience members, and the sales on Camaros, I sincerely doubt they would reduce his role in a new film. It seems more likely that many audience members would *expect* any new human character to be attached to Bumblebee.

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 4:23 pm

Bountyhunter wrote:Two other bots that could fill the void would be introduce either Hound or Tracks.

Mmm, well-known franchise buttresses Hound and Tracks.

We could well see either name-slapped on Autobots used to fill out the ranks, but new Autobots are likely to be picked pretty much at random depending on whether someone likes their name, so there's as much chance of seeing Gearhead and Roadhandler. That the either semi-obscure or made-up-on-the-plot likes of Roadbuster, Topspin, Leadfoot, Jolt, Skids, Mudflap, Que and Dino have jumped past the bulk of the early cast suggests they don't particularly give a toss about following the Sunbow cartoon's rankings.

TBH, if Bay isn't tempted back, whoever takes over is going to be briefed to copy his films as much as possible. DotM took a billion dollars (not to mention better notices than ROTF, even if they were more along the lines of "Okay, okay, you win"); Hasbro/Paramount are not going to want a huge change. The best case scenario is that whoever does the job can ape his strengths and work on some of the weaknesses. There's not going to be some wet-brained reverse in direction to clone some computer game normal people are never going to play.

FWIW I think Bay's largely done a good balancing act across the three movies. How many films can you name with a dozen well-developed characters in them (and no Trek/Wars fancruft where they feature characters who were made interesting somewhere else and get three lines in the actual movie - Bev Crusher and Boba Fett are not well-developed film characters)?

Red Dave Prime · Post by **Red Dave Prime** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 7:39 pm

FWIW I think Bay's largely done a good balancing act across the three movies. How many films can you name with a dozen well-developed characters in them

Honestly? Or do you mean just over a trilogy? Either way, there are plenty of films that do multiple characters better than Transformers 1-3. Credit to Bay, he does the action scenes well but nothing is tied together especially well as a plot or even scene to scene in some cases. After the first one, things follow the way most hollywood blockbuster trilogy set ups go. Everything gets overcooked and the main characters lose their appeal.

Except Prime. I always got love for the Prime-man.

Post by **inflatable dalek** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 8:35 pm

Yeah, I think "Well developed" is pushing it for most of the cast. I'd say Sam and, perhaps surprisingly, Megatron (thanks to the films basically being his slow decline) are but that's about it.

Of the rest of the regulars, they, at best, tend to be what the Marvel comic did best, quick sketch characters who are a lot of fun but there's not much depth there. Simmons is nuts, Prime is stoic (a lot of his strength of character comes from Cullen's performance really), Bumblebee is psychotic, Ironhide is a badass, Que is Q and so on. I'd even say Lennox regressed over the films as the family man side of his character vanished after the first one.

I suppose you could argue the case for Starscream, but he always felt more like a one dimensional character where they kept changing their mind about what that dimension was.

I'd certainly say that, even ignoring the spin offs and prequels, the Star Wars films can manage as many characters with as much depth to them.

Cliffjumper · Post by **Cliffjumper** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 9:05 pm

I didn't say the TF cast were well-developed. I said Bay had done a good balancing act (developing 3-4 characters, and then giving a fair few others at least something to do that made them stand out briefly - with the exception of late addition Jolt, all of the Autobots and most of the named Decepticons get their show-off scene). Then I asked how many films people could come up with that had suceeded at coming out with a dozen well-developed characters. Feel free to misinterpret, though, whatever keeps people warm at night.

There are some, but not many, and few are by the sort of people who'd get involved with a toy robot film.

I mean, take The Wild Bunch. It's one of the greatest films ever made, fact. Pike, Dutch and Thornton are well-rounded characters. The Gorch brothers, Angel, Sykes and Mapache are decent sketches. Everyone else is pretty much a cypher. Or Star Wars (the first one, not all 15 or however many Lucas has shitted out now) - Luke, Han, Leia and maybe Obi-Wan, Vader and Tarkin are three-dimensional, the rest are largely flashy bit-part players in the way Ironhide or Leadfoot are.

SW probably comes off better through a slightly more equal division of screen-time. C3PO, R2D2 and Chewbacca don't really develop after their first scenes, but they're just in the rest of the trilogy a lot doing the same thing - which probably makes them about on par with Ironhide or Sideswipe.

The Star Wars films probably manage it, though some characters shuffle in and out of the rankings a little (e.g. Lando, pretty good in Empire, relegated to Generic Rebel Pilot in Jedi). But then the original SW films are generally held up as the classic action/adventure/science fantasy films, so TF getting out-pointed by them is nothing to be ashamed of, surely?

But most films, especially good films, concentrate on two, three, four, five main characters with the rest rendered in lesser detail. Any desire to have a film with 10-12 well-rounded Transformers characters, plus a few three-dimensional human allies, is borne out of a complete misunderstanding of the medium. How many of the Dirty Dozen can you profile off-hand? It's Bronson and Cassavettes, and then you're onto The Black Guy, The Big Dumb Guy, The Religious Nut Guy, The Donald Sutherland Guy, The Moustache Guy, The Guy You Can't Even Remember Guy, etc.

Red Dave Prime wrote:Either way, there are plenty of films that do multiple characters better than Transformers 1-3.

Plenty of action movies, yeh? Name some. Let's see how many you can come up with.

Red Dave Prime · Post by **Red Dave Prime** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 9:29 pm

Young Guns, First Die Hard, Aliens, Predator (granted those last two only really deal with the good guys), Robocop, Usual Suspects (not quite an action film but shows how to evolve stock characters), X-men 2 & X-Men First Class, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park (again mostly just the good guys), Kill Bill Volume 1, Dusk til Dawn, Terminator 1, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Snatch...

Now I'm not saying all those films have a huge range of fully rounded characters but all the above contain groups of characters who have either depth or at least very distinct traits, and in quite a few cases, both. And these means that all of the above films have characters which stand out much more than the characters in Bays movies.

The main problem with the transformers movies is that most are relegated to a line or two of dialogue with maybe an action spot. And even when we do get a main character they are mostly archtypes without any real distinguishing quirks to make them memorable.

Post by **inflatable dalek** » Thu Feb 02, 2012 9:33 pm

I suppose Lord of the Rings is the obvious one, but, thinking about it, generally action films aren't really interested in large ensemble casts are they? It's usually one or two loners against a single villain with a large red shirt army at his disposal. Of all the examples RDP mentions, very few come even close to having 12 main characters (hell, the first Terminator can only manage three).