Huh? That thing had plotholes big enough to drive Optimus through. And don't get me started on the shaky cam.
Plot holes are not the fault of the director, unless he's the writer-director.
It was called The Rock. But I honestly believe Sean Connerey brought a lot to that.
And Nicolas Cage took away from it. But I do believe THE ROCK is probably his best film. It came at a time before he developed a reputation for himself.
James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Neil Blomkamp. You know, guys that don't think that an intelligent non-human must be some sort of comedy routine.
Eh, maybe ... I'm not too familiar with Blomkamp's work, but I can't see Spielberg or Jackson helming TRANSFORMERS. Given the subject matter, it's only ever going to be light entertainment, and I think Spielberg and Jackson - even when they're at their most fun-loving - just wouldn't be the right fit. I think TRANSFORMERS generally worked because of Bay's kid-like approach of solving every problem by blowing it up, that larger-than-life quality that you're willing to suspend your disbelief for just to get a little bit more. REVENGE OF THE FALLEN had way too much of it, so it came undone. But I just think Spielberg and Jackson lack that nine year old's approach. That's what TRANSFORMERS really was, a film that was basically every young boy's imagination come to life and aimed at those young boys now that they had grown up a little.
Also, James Cameron would have been completely wrong for TRANSFORMERS. I find his films tend to feel a little empty, a little soulless. They're technical showcases first, designed to show off a director's prowess before being a vehicale for an actor. It happened in TRUE LIES, in TITANIC and in AVATAR (though I did enjoy AVATAR for what it was).
Pearl Harbor proved that.
To be fair, every director can have his dud moments. No doubt the studio thought they were onto something big when they got the final drafts of both PEARL HARBOUR and REVENGE OF THE FALLEN. There's a saying in Hollywood that you have no idea how good your script is until you've made the final film, because no film can be made until a production studio green-lights it, and the script is an integral part of that. A film is initially sold on the merits of its screenplay, so it has to impress someone first.
There are only a handful of directors I can think of who have never made a bad film. Christopher Nolan is the only one who comes to mind right now - not even Tarantino has a perfect track record (he did, after all, make DEATH PROOF). Taken on its own, PEARL HARBOUR could be evidence of a director just having a bad run - it's PEARL HARBOUR combined with REVENGE OF THE FALLEN that proves he just goes too far sometimes (I haven't actually seen BAD BOYS II and I've only seen the first half of ARMAGEDDON, so I can't really judge them).
Wait, what happened there? I saw some robots, then the camera got shaky, I saw a lot of close ups of things like Optimus' knee, and then the fight was over a Shia LeBouf did some of the worst acting I have ever seen from him. That was likely because it didn't involve saying Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Go! Go! Go! repeatedly.
"Right" is a relative term. It was the part he got right comapred to the rest of the film, but that doesn't make it perfect. I recall most of the critics pointing to the forest fight as being one of the few scenes where the film achieves something positive.
The Autobots and Decepticons didn't both just happen to find Earth by accident while searching for Megatron and the cube. Something pointed them in the right direction. Don't forget, Megatron was being studied by US scientists since Sam's great grandfather discovered him, and the cube was being studied for decades.
Okay, here's how I would have done the trilogy. You'll have to bear with me a little bit, because it might be a little long:
Thousands of years ago, there was a group of Cybertronians called the Primes. They seeded the galaxy with sun harvesters, making a pact to never construct one on a world home to intelligent life. The Fallen was one of these Primes, and he constructed a sun harvester on earth
before life came about. As the millenia wore on and each sun harvester was used, the Primes had to move further and further beyond Cybertron for new sources of energon. They found the sun harvester on earth, and, to their horror, the early stages of human kind. They believed that the Fallen had broken their pact, and cast him out. This explains the Fallen's hatred of humans: he believes they led to his downfall. This was the trigger for the Cybertronian civil war. The Autobot and Decepticon factions were born out of the belief over what the Fallen (supposedly) did, because with energon sources being at an all-time low, the Cybertronians were faced with their own extinction. The Autobots stuck to the old pact that no sun should he harvested if there was life in its system, while the Decepticons believed that any viable star should be absorbed if if meant Cybertron's survival. During this civil war, the cube was lost to the void - but it was drawn to the nearest sun harvester: earth.
The events of the first film would happen pretty much as they did. Megatron sought the cube and crashed in the Arctic; Archibald Witwicky found him, and so on. The second film, however, would be slightly different in a number of ways: with the cube destroyed, it fulfilled its final function - to imprint the knowledge of the Primes onto whoever touched it. This was only ever intended for a Cybertronian, but the Cybertronians never anticipated it landing in human hands. Mikaela, not Sam, would be the one to touch the shard of the cube, and in doing so, she would become a Prime herself, the first human Prime. Most of the film would have Optimus with the knowledge that a new Prime had been created, and he would largely assume this to be Sam. They would then have to spend most of the film working out what had happened and protecting Mikaela. Rather than simply want to kill the humans, the Fallen would want to kill all the Cybertronians. In his exile he had come to the conclusion that the Cybertronians had been parasitic. Their use of sun harvesters had killed worlds off before life had a chance to develop. He intends to use Mikaela to find the sun harvester on earth and activate it. With a new cube under his control, he would wage war against all the Cybertronians. Ultimately, he would use the cube to create life on worlds across the universe, essentially remaking it in his image and becoming a God. He wouldn't be so much of a villain as a tragic anti-hero. I should also add that, at some point, we would learn that when the cube comes in contact with a machine like the appliances in Sam's kitchen, it creates them in a feral, animal state, which is why they tend to attack straight away.
As for the third film, it would still concern the space race an the Cold War. We would learn that Megatron had discovered the knowledge that when cast into the void, the cube would default to the nearest planet with a sun harvester (throwing a cube halfway across the galaxy to hit a pyramid being an inexact science, the cube landed in the Arctic). He was not alone in his journey across the universe; he was followed by his first lieutenant, Shockwave, who followed when Megatron did not return. Shockwave landed in central Russia in 1908 - the Tunguska Event - where he was eventually discovered by the Russians. Unlike Megatron, who was kept in stasis, Shockwave was allowed to roam free in exchange for his knowledge. This gave rise to the Soviet space program. While Shockwave was initially friendly towards the humans (for a Decepticon, at least), probably because he knew a lot about killing as many people as efficiently as possible and the Soviets were interested in that, he turned on them when the KGB acquired intelligence on the Hoover Dam project. Realising that the humans had captured Megatron, Shockwave started the Cold War with a view to nuclear armageddon. With the humans dead, he could liberate Megatron and activate the sun harvester. Shockwave fell on April 26, 1986 when the Russians realised his plans and deliberately exposed him to radiation. The Russians built a containment facility similar to Megatron's, though it was really more of a tomb - the sarcophagus at Chernobyl. Shockwave remains imprisoned in the No. 4 reactor building, perpetually weakened by the radiation and unable to escape from under the iron shell over the complex. The film would deal with the consequences of the radiation steadily declining; the Russians had thought it would eventually kill him. As the area around Chernobyl steadily becoms safer, Shockwave's power grows and he is able to escape the sarcophagus (helped by the fact that it itself is weakening).
There's my afternoons browsing sorted 👍
