Thread of Thoughts, Questions (and Maybe Even Answers) That Don't Deserve Their Own Thread

[Sabrblade]

EDIT: The post right before this one was added while I was typing, so there seems to be some disagreement between it and I about whether TF: One is the best TF movie or not. Agree to disagree and all that, I guess.

Make no mistake, I too agree with TF One being the best of a low bar. I just found Wadapan's review a very interesting take that I feel everyone should read even if we don't all agree with every opinion raised in the review, as besides the subjective points made, there are some moments in it that either made me laugh, made me go "Huh, I never thought of that,' or both.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

III. I did not care for The Godfather​

Sorry, I can't take anything this guy says seriously now.

 

[Sabrblade]

Well, I laughed.

 

[LordGigaIce]

TFOne is better than any of the Bay movies but it's still just like a 7/10 at best

It's fine but it's not OMG IT'S A GREAT AMAZING ANIMATED FILM HOLY jive like fans were hyping it up to be. Like I enjoyed it but past the hype? Yeah it's got tons of issues.

The more I've sat with it, the more I've realized it's a better movie if you go in with zero knowledge of Transformers. My husband's got surface level knowledge of the franchise at best, and he really enjoyed it. He was actually surprised to see that D-16 is who ends up becoming Megatron. As strange as that might sound.

Me though? I like it, don't get me wrong, but I could tell where the bulk of the movie was going five minutes in. It leans heavily on the Aligned stuff, which has been the backbone of the franchise for over ten years by now. Yes, they mixed it up a bit. Orion is now D-16's coworker in the mines instead of an archivist. The Thirteen seem like more of a united front. But all in all? It's all stuff that we as fans have seen before and could tell where it was all heading.

This isn't a bad thing in and of itself. It's a great primer for anyone who's not intimately familiar with the franchise. It's just that... well... almost no one but the fans of this franchise bothered to show up. It's a movie for an audience it utterly failed to attract.

 

[Rustron]

The friend I watched it with (who knows nothing about transformers) was surprised by D-16 being Megatron too! I do think fan expectations hurt it a bit, see my complaints about an unexplained Autobot vs Decepticon conflict, which a casual viewer might not latch onto so much because they don't take the civil war's existence for granted in the same way. I've read wadapan's review before, I agree with most of its points.

 

[LordGigaIce]

Make no mistake, I too agree with TF One being the best of a low bar. I just found Wadapan's review a very interesting take that I feel everyone should read even if we don't all agree with every opinion raised in the review, as besides the subjective points made, there are some moments in it that either made me laugh, made me go "Huh, I never thought of that,' or both.

It's a good write-up, and I don't think TFO is as great as some people say it is... I just don't particularly care for his critiques.

My issues tend to revolve around the fact that anyone who's been a fan of this franchise for at least ten years has seen all of this story play out in some form or another and could reasonably pick out where it was going within ten minutes of it starting. This is perfectly fine if the goal wasn't to reinvent the wheel but to get non-fans into the backstory... except none of them saw it so you're left with a movie that is telling the uber nerds the same basic story they're all familiar with.

He seems to take issue with both Hasbro's corporate culture (fair, but not strictly relevant to this movie) and the fact that Optimus is divinely appointed King of Cybertron, with a snarky comparison made to Arthur and sword and the stone.
Thing is... I LIKE fantasy literature, I don't think chosen one narratives are inherently flawed. They can be good. And sure we can talk in circles about whether or not Orion/Optimus should be a "Chosen One" archetype, but if we accept that he is for the purposes of this story and go with it...I don't think TFO handled it poorly at all.

He wraps it up with a critique of politics- that both Sentinel Prime and D-16/Megatron seem to embody aspects of Trumpism (the bs artist/salesman on one had, and the angry tyrant with a legion of dangerous followers on the other) and seems peeved that the answer the movie gives to deal with both forms of tyranny is that Orion got chosen by RoboGod to be an enlightened monarch.

I can't help put parse this complaint out to a logical conclusion, and I can't help but think that a scene where Orion is chosen to be the next Prime on the third ballot of the Autobot Party National Convention may not have been as narratively exciting, even if it did align with a more egalitarian message.

Politics are a weird thing. And fantasy, be it traditional fantasy like Arthur, Beowulf, or their modern descendants like LotR and GoT or science fantasy like Star Wars or Transformers, can dabble in that space, but there also is going to be that... fantastical element. Gods are real. Chosen Ones and prophecy exist.
Again, I love this stuff. And while it CAN be bad or cliched, it can also be quite good. Orion Pax's story in TFO was nothing groundbreaking, but I would call it good.

As to the complaint about people caring too much about financial success... I also disagree. No doubt, he has a good point that Hasbro firing 100 people out of the blue, including veterans on the artistic end of the toy design process, sucks.
Where I take issue is his lambasting of people who feel a connection to Hasbro's profits as being somehow foolish for following a scary movie jump scare sound CORPORATION

I don't think most Transformers fans in the online space are blindly following John Hasbro like corporate brainwashed sheep. Not at all. People are quite capable of agreeing that there are serious problems with how corporations function both in relation to their employees and society as a whole, while also having the intellect to realize that success in one field of a brand they like means more cool things for their hobby. The success of the '07 movie, whatever any of us thinks on a critical and creative level, ushered millions into the brand (probably billions when it's all said and done) that fuelled passion projects and cool toys and shows for years, if not a decade+.
I don't feel like someone is a corporate shill when they go "I hope this new Transformers movie does well... if it does, that means more cool things in the future."

Finally... he said Rise of the Beasts is the best Transformers movie... and that's a disqualifying statement It doesn't even crack the top five. Not even the top three live action affairs.

But it's at this point that I'm getting dangerously close to ranking them again, so I'll end my stream of consciousness here.

 

[The Mighty Mollusk]

My biggest problem is that it's clearly a prequel to a story that will probably never be told because it flopped.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

You really can't see things through someone else's eyes. I don't get what non-fans would see in this movie. I guess if you're not expecting a civilization-destroying civil war to break out, it looks like a complete story. There is an arc to it. By the end Cybertron is in a better state than when we found it. Yay they did it. Doesn't that completely kill the character drama though? I don't get how non-fans have any reaction to D-16 turning out to be Megatron. Without the war, who even is Megatron?

Without the war, ONE is broadly the story of Cybertron getting fixed, with the personal drama of D-16... becoming a grumpy person. He actually got what he wanted. He's just not happy about it. He got his cog back. He even got personal revenge. He got to confront the source of his anger and kill him with his bare hands. No one managed to rob him of that satisfaction. He got it. He did it. But he's still angry. And sure, there's stories to tell about a villain who got what he wanted but doesn't know how to stop because it didn't make him happy. But ONE isn't interested in exploring that, or anything else for that matter. It doesn't matter that he doesn't know when to stop because the movie almost immediately decides it's time for him to stop anyway.

 

[LordGigaIce]

You really can't see things through someone else's eyes. I don't get what non-fans would see in this movie. I guess if you're not expecting a civilization-destroying civil war to break out, it looks like a complete story. There is an arc to it. By the end Cybertron is in a better state than when we found it. Yay they did it. Doesn't that completely kill the character drama though? I don't get how non-fans have any reaction to D-16 turning out to be Megatron. Without the war, who even is Megatron?

Without the war, ONE is broadly the story of Cybertron getting fixed, with the personal drama of D-16... becoming a grumpy person. He actually got what he wanted. He's just not happy about it. He got his cog back. He even got personal revenge. He got to confront the source of his anger and kill him with his bare hands. No one managed to rob him of that satisfaction. He got it. He did it. But he's still angry. And sure, there's stories to tell about a villain who got what he wanted but doesn't know how to stop because it didn't make him happy. But ONE isn't interested in exploring that, or anything else for that matter. It doesn't matter that he doesn't know when to stop because the movie almost immediately decides it's time for him to stop anyway.

It's very much like the first Star Wars movie. Had it bombed, well... it's still pretty self contained. You could ask "wait what happened with that galaxy spanning empire? Surely blowing up one base didn't topple it" but it's a complete story on its own regardless.

We're not getting sequels to TFO. The box office stank. But I feel like, as a result of using a lot of what's been established since 2010 or so, TFO can slot neatly into most versions of the franchise as a sort of evergreen prequel. Funnily enough, it started as a Bayverse prequel and absolutely does not work as that, but you could pretend like it's the origin story EarthSpark, as an example, and it mostly flows well enough.

 

[Sabrblade]

It's a good write-up, and I don't think TFO is as great as some people say it is... I just don't particularly care for his critiques.

Let me preface this by saying, regarding the rest of your post, that was a good breakdown of the review. Excellently phrased with strong rebuttals carefully crafted. You sir delivered on the kind of responsive engagement I was looking for, and then some.

With that said, there is one point Wads brought up that I want to zero in on, as it was one of the ones that actually took me back on how I now think about the movie's story. It is very true that much of it was inspired by he Aligned backstory for Optimus and Megatron, and so it treaded ground very familiar to us longtime fans. But what I didn't actually pick up on regarding the movie's story until after reading this review was how much of it felt so copied from the second Bionicle movie. I've seen all four direct-to-DVD Bionicle movies, but haven't watched them in years. So when I was reminded of the second one by this review, it really dawned on me just how similar TF One's story is to it.

You've got basically an identical premise of a corrupt tyrant (Sentinel Prime, Makuta Teridax) running a seemingly utopian society (Iacon, Metru Nui) under false authority (Sentinel is a fake Prime, Makuta masquerades as Turaga Dume) and with his own personal squads of law enforcement (the Gold and Silver Trackers, the Vahki) and assassins (the Death Trackers, the Dark Hunters), the main leader of said assassins even being spider-like (Airachnid, Nidhiki), a past generation of heroes who fell to the treachery of said tyrant (the Primes, the Toa Mangai), with the last survivor of this group (Alpha Trion, Toa/Turaga Lhikan) setting the new generation of heroes on their course to rise up against the tyrant and liberate their society from his rule by giving them items of great power (the Primes' T-Cogs) to evolve them into more powerful forms (Transformers, the Toa Metru), the main hero of which starts out as a naive young idealist (Orion Pax, Vakama) who ultimately becomes chosen to be the new leader of the heroes (Optimus Prime, Toa Vakama) who uses a sacred object to help him win the final battle in the end (the Matrix, the Mask of Time). The new heroes even receive help from those who dwell in wastelands outside the false utopia they seek to liberate (the High Guard, the Kikanalo). Some of them (D-16, B-127, Starscream, and other High Guardsmen; Toas Onewa, Whenua, and Nuju) are even captured by the tyrant's machinations and need to be rescued by the remaining heroes and their outside help (Orion Pax, Elita One, and the rest of the High Guard; Toas Vakama, Matau, and Nokama, and the Kikanalo). One could even draw easy parallels between Primus and the Great Spirit Mata Nui. It really makes me wonder if someoneon the writing staff had seen the second Bionicle movie back when it first released in 2004 and had subconsciously pulled inspiration from it when writing the plot of TF One.

 

[LordGigaIce]

Let me preface this by saying, regarding the rest of your post, that was a good breakdown of the review. Excellently phrased with strong rebuttals carefully crafted. You sir delivered on the kind of responsive engagement I was looking for, and then some.

Thank you! I occasionally find a nut by accident.

With that said, there is one point Wads brought up that I want to zero in on, as it was one of the ones that actually took me back on how I now think about the movie's story. It is very true that much of it was inspired by he Aligned backstory for Optimus and Megatron, and so it treaded ground very familiar to us longtime fans. But what I didn't actually pick up on regarding the movie's story until after reading this review was how much of it felt so copied from the second Bionicle movie. I've seen all four direct-to-DVD Bionicle movies, but haven't watched them in years. So when I was reminded of the second one by this review, it really dawned on me just how similar TF One's story is to it.

You've got basically an identical premise of a corrupt tyrant (Sentinel Prime, Makuta Teridax) running a seemingly utopian society (Iacon, Metru Nui) under false authority (Sentinel is a fake Prime, Makuta masquerades as Turaga Dume) and with his own personal squads of law enforcement (the Gold and Silver Trackers, the Vahki) and assassins (the Death Trackers, the Dark Hunters), the main leader of said assassins even being spider-like (Airachnid, Nidhiki), a past generation of heroes who fell to the treachery of said tyrant (the Primes, the Toa Mangai), with the last survivor of this group (Alpha Trion, Toa/Turaga Lhikan) setting the new generation of heroes on their course to rise up against the tyrant and liberate their society from his rule by giving them items of great power (the Primes' T-Cogs) to evolve them into more powerful forms (Transformers, the Toa Metru), the main hero of which starts out as a naive young idealist (Orion Pax, Vakama) who ultimately becomes chosen to be the new leader of the heroes (Optimus Prime, Toa Vakama) who uses a sacred object to help him win the final battle in the end (the Matrix, the Mask of Time). The new heroes even receive help from those who dwell in wastelands outside the false utopia they seek to liberate (the High Guard, the Kikanalo). One could even draw easy parallels between Primus and the Great Spirit Mata Nui. It really makes me wonder if someoneon the writing staff had seen the second Bionicle movie back when it first released in 2004 and had subconsciously pulled inspiration from it when writing the plot of TF One.

I think The Wadapan hit the nail on the head regarding TFO as pre-Spider-Verse movie narratively speaking that got pulled into a Spider-Verse direction visually. And I find stuff like that fascinating. I love seeing how pop culture trends, stories, brands, etc... shift over time. How things used to be presented before major revisions changed the popular perception. And finding projects that fall between the "cracks" of changes like that is part of it, kind of existing in both a pre and post state relative to a major genre re-defining piece.

The Bionicle franchise has justifiably been lauded as the apex of corporate-owned franchise lore. Whereas Hasbro had the right idea with the GI Joe Real American Hero relaunch, Transformers, etc..., Lego took it to the next level. Hasbro was content to let Marvel Comics and Sunbow take the same cast of characters and do whatever with them, and only cared about trying to reconcile these different takes on their properties later. Leading to messy lore that has arguably been made worse by attempts to consolidate.
But Lego? Lego knew what they wanted from jump, hired creative people, and mapped out a pretty extensive mythology and narrative. There's a thirteen hour lore video on Bionicle on YouTube. I don't know if I could make it thirteen hours talking about Transformers. And if I could? It would be incredibly disjointed.

All of that is to say that Bionicle was, for a long time, the gold standard of how a toy company-owned IP could still apsire to tell good stories and a rich mythology. It doesn't shock me that there'd be a lot of inspiration pulled from it from it as Hasbro attempted to flesh out their own brand's mythology. Be it consiously or subconsiously.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

I've seen the first two, and yeah I agree. ONE is hilariously similar to Bionicle 2.

Maybe that's why Megatron's story is such a dud. They didn't have a template for that part.

 

[Sabrblade]

Maybe that's why Megatron's story is such a dud. They didn't have a template for that part.

Heh, yeah. That's the one major element that wasn't cribbed from Bionicle 2, since that movie didn't have one of its main heroes decide to become the new main villain by the movie's end.

Now, Bionicle 3, on the other hand, did have a main good guy go bad in a "Palpatine manipulates Anakin" sort of way, but was restored back to sanity and righteous mind by the end of that movie, unlike either Darth Vader or Megatron, so TF One didn't copy that subplot either.

 

[Princess Viola]

>be D-16
>lack enough character development to suddenly decide to let your best friend ******* die
>you still suddenly decide to let him die (at least you think he is gonna die)

absolute cinema

 

[LordGigaIce]

Maybe that's why Megatron's story is such a dud. They didn't have a template for that part.

Another thing I agree with The Wadapan's write-up (maybe I was too harsh) is that both Megatron and Elita are carried by their performances.
I've always liked Brian Tyree Henry, but wasn't sure if he was a good choice for Megatron. And ScarJo is someone who, while she's done good work in the past, has just kind of sleepwalked through the MCU. So I didn't exactly have high hopes for either.
Still, they're the highlights of the VA side of the movie, along with Jon Hamm hamming it up (ha) as Sentinel.

Neither Megatron or Elita are written in particularly interesting ways (it's more egregious with Megs since he in theory has more to do) but BTH and ScarJo both really excel in their roles and make some lacklustre scripting work.

>be D-16
>lack enough character development to suddenly decide to let your best friend ******* die
>you still suddenly decide to let him die (at least you think he is gonna die)

absolute cinema

I think the answer to why Megs gets so pissy at the end even though he gets everything he wants is hidden in the Aligned backstory, which TFO was heavily based on. TFO streamlines a lot of that lore, and excises bits, but you can still find the DNA here and there.

In both the Exodus novel and the Prime cartoon, it's explained that Orion and Megatron were pals standing up to the corrupt system together. Megatron demanded the planet's high council make him the next Prime, but they chose Orion when Orion's more hopeful message swayed more people then Megatron's platform of "vote for me or I'll kill you" (it polled poorly with independents).
The break between the two is Megatron getting jealous that it was Orion who became the next Prime and later got the Matrix, and he leads his followers out to start the war and take the planet by force.

The high council stuff is entirely absent from TFO, and D-16/Megatron never tries to pitch himself as the next Prime, but you can still see echoes of this in TFO's story.
What happens after Orion is made Optimus Prime and returns after Megatron thought he'd let him die? Megatron mutters "That's impossible...Primus gave YOU the Matrix?"

It's actually kind of an odd thing. Megatron starts off wanting to find the Matrix to give it to Sentinel. Once he finds out that Sentinel is a fraud, he shifts to "I want to kill him." Hell, as far as he knows the Matrix vanished forever when Sentinel pried it out of Zeta's corpse. He doesn't aspire to get it, or be a Prime.
And yet he seems jealous and incredulous when Orion shows up both with the Matrix and the Prime title.

They paper over this by shifting Megatron into being against the Prime title entirely after Sentinel's shenanigans, and you could read all of this as him being upset that Orion would assume that mantle... but it doesn't really work when you consider that Orion-now-Optimus uses the Matrix to return the natural flow of energy. Like... bro... be mad I guess... but he literally fixed all the problems and got an endorsement from G-d I don't know what more you need.

It makes sense, however, when you realize the story they were working from had "Megatron is jealous Orion got chosen to be the new Prime over him" as a central plot point.

 

[Sabrblade]

Feel like there was also originally supposed to be more to D-16's story that got cut from the final version of the movie. Back when I was at BotCon 2025, director Josh Cooley held a nighttime panel where he showed off some behind the scenes content for the movie, including footage from a recording session with Brian Tyree Henry, wherein he recorded dialogue that didn't make it into the movie. Below is an excerpt from my BotCon 2025 report pertaining to the contents of that panel:

7:00pm was the Josh Cooley panel, for registered attendees only. This was a special NDA-type panel with no phones or cameras allowed. We were shown a private presentation Cooley gave at a VFX event in Italy. It showed a ton of behind the scenes footage, recordings, and other materials not included in the movie or its Blu-Ray bonus features. Among the things he showed us in the presentation were some behind-the-scenes recordings from the movie's production. The two I could best remember were a clip of Brian Tyler conducting his orchestra scoring the final pre-credits scene of the movie, and an absolutely chilling clip of Josh recording lines from Brian Tyree Henry that ultimately never made it into the movie.

These deleted lines included such moments as D-16 revealing to Orion (whose lines Josh read since this was a solo recording) his personal life goals and dreams that he had before finding out that his life was a lie: D-16 was happy being a miner, he had hoped to get promoted and work his way into upper management, and maybe even someday lead an expedition out to the surface (the way Brian Tyree Henry spoke this line made it sound like it was a pipe dream for D-16). But now that D-16 knows that his life was a lie, none of those dreams matter anymore and now he doesn't know what to do with his life. All he knows is that he wants to kill Sentinel, and that's the only thing keeping him going. As Orion continues to try to talk him out of it, D-16 comes to the dark conclusion that Orion is the reason D-16 has become what he is, and Brian Tyree Henry gave multiple chilling recordings of the words "You made me this. You... made me... this..."

And all of that D-16 dialogue was left on the cutting room floor because Josh realized that the whole speech had been overwritten, as in too long and too wordly. The scene needed to be more succinct and to the point, resulting in the much shorter version we got in the final movie (this speech was during the scene where D-16 has Sentinel at his mercy and Orion tries to stop him from killing him; some of Orion's dialogue from this made it in, like "This isn't you, D," and his line about a new world can't be built on an execution).

Cooley also confirmed something very important about the Trackers: They're "soulless". He described them as wanting to come across as robotic as possible, which from our more in-the-sauce perspective would strongly suggest that they're drone soldiers without Sparks.

 

[CoffeeHorse]

Imagine if Sentinel's treachery wasn't conveniently recorded and shown to the world. The city would have no idea why Megatron killed their leader, nor would they have any idea why Optimus leapt in the way (and his reason would be different; he'd be the voice of reason trying to save his friend from his own shortsighted rage, not just a hippie). All people would see is a big hero trying to protect their leader from an unjustified raging maniac.

 

[Badgertron]

A lot of great points, but the only part of the movie I was dissatisfied with, really, was how many times they tried to force the "Badassatron" joke. It feels like they used it at least four times, which is a couple of times too many.

 

[Sabrblade]

There's kind of a darker tragic side to the way B-127 was portrayed. If you'll notice, B-127, D-16, and two of the security guards at the Archives building are the only four characters in the whole movie who don't have actual names, but instead just have numerical designations. It has been theorized that, in this universe, all Cybertronians might be born with designations instead of names, and acquire proper names of their own later in life when they decide to choose one for themselves and are able to convince all of their peers and the larger society as a whole to call them by their new name.

In that regard, B-127 trying over and over to get everyone to call him "Badassatron" feels like he's trying so desperately hard to give himself an actual name instead of just a designation, but it's such a silly, try-hard, edgelord sounding name that, combined with his overly-enthusiastic personality and short cutesy-looking stature, nobody is willing to take him seriously enough to call him that. He wants so badly to have not just an actual name but one that sounds cool, that he's completely oblivious to how annoying he is to everyone he tries out his name out on. With that in mind, his repeated gag becomes less obnoxious (granted, it still is) and more sad and pitiable to the point that you just can't help but feel sorry for him.

As for why D-16 still had his designation before renaming himself "Megatron", well, he's a stickler for protocol and tradition. He doesn't like change to routine normalcy, and seems to have embraced his "D-16" designation as his defining identity. It's the identifier he was given when he first came online (as the theory goes), and he's perfectly content with being "D-16". It's only after he finds out that his whole life and way of living was a lie manipulated by the guy in charge whom he looked up to and was spurred to incite a world-shattering revolution that he finally casts off his "D-16" designation (which now represented his old life that he hated) and gives himself a real name, one which everyone around him is ready and openly willing to accept as his new name (which also kinda adds to the tragedy of B-127's many failed attempts to give himself a new name, as D-16 renames himself once and everyone's just instantly ready to accept it, while B just can't catch a break from anyone).

As for the two guards at the Archives, who knows why they retain their designations over names.

 

[lastmaximal]

Again, this is fine and all as subtext, but if the movie's going to have any actual depth it should be text. It doesn't have to be spelled out in a lengthy speech, of course, but it does have to be explicitly part of the narrative rather than well-meaning headcanon from fans who understandably want the movie to be better than it is.

So much of the movie's arc felt rushed, carried by the knowledge that these characters were going to end up where we know they are. I think the character development kind of goes off the rails after Sentinel's treachery against the Primes is revealed, because so much is happening and the escalation has to be so steep to get where it should be in the climax.

...I tried reading through that review, intrigued as I was by the discussion here, but I had to skim it at best because parts of it were exhausting. Not even the length, but the pressure to try and be funny (and having to balance the kind of funny). And the drift into political commentary is... charitably, it's as clunky as it claims the movie's is; although Wadapan does sorta-admit that, it's in a sarcastic way that doesn't really. I did chuckle to see the Optimus Jumping Shot Reference Pose called out. And there's a lot I agree with, like the rushed D-16 arc (as far as his friendship with Orion goes). Ah, and that the performances generally carry the movie (although I can't ever watch an Orion Pax scene anymore without getting distracted by how you can practically FEEL the mouth shapes Hemsworth is having to affect in order to suppress his accent, which takes up 99% of his energy and leaves maybe 1% for actual acting). But this is at least equal parts movie review and venting over the direction the evil multinational corporation has taken the franchise in all this time. Even stuff that seems like it could be an interesting point -- the comparison to Spider-Verse -- ends up being a commentary on companies jumping on its bandwagon, and on production crunch. Pick one article and write it. But in terms of notable lapses in storytelling and characterization, we agree.