3 movies and minimal Cybertron!

[MarvelManOz]

Hopefully this hasn't already been discussed.

So, besides the incredibly short clips from the 1st movie and the beggining of the 3rd, I'm finding it a little hard to get over the fact that Cybertron had hardly been shown in the movies. How they can seriously make 3 movies about the Transformers and have next to no footage of Cybertron and the great stories that go into making Transformers what they are.

I enjoyed alot of aspects of the 3rd movie but to just tease you like that at the start and have it stop so soon......When i saw the movie I walked out feeling like "great, another Transformers movie that had fight scenes in a city". Everyone goes on about how incredible the destruction of Chicago is....yet we got a similar outcome in the first movie...change it up guys. Sure there was some different scenery in the 2nd, but essentially the final act revolved around yet another overly long fight scene wrecking that environment.

I listened to the movie review podcast over at seibertron .com and it went for two and a half hours without even mentioning anything about Cybertron......you know, just the home planet of Transformers that's all lol.

IMO, a bit more depth into Cybertron and learning about how the Transformer were on their own planet could have added alot more depth to the movies I'm sure in 7 and a half hours of film, a half hour spot on Cybertron would have killed some of the other crap from the movies.

[MarvelManOz]

you would have all scene it....(War for Cybertron trailer)

but hey, imagine some actual decent action on Cybertron (in the movie style):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XinVIq8VN4s

Hell, i would take 10 minutes of dialogue on the planet.

[jameso]

I don't know if it was a budget concern, but I imagine that would play a factor. Otherwise I'd assume the film makers feel the audience will have a greater sense of drama that it is a human city in danger.

[MarvelManOz]

Yeah I do agree with that....but I still wish they gave a little more into Cybertron, being that it plays such a pivotal role in the history of the Transformers I don't think we needed the final battles to be there neccesarily, but just some deeper story into why they have departed their planet etc...not a 2 minute teaser.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

For all the films' flaws, in my opinion setting them almost entirely on Earth is not one of them. I am not in the slightest interested in seeing Transformers as they were on Cybertron on film - CG robots against a CG mechancal background. For me, it is the juxtaposition of the alien robots against the live-action element of our world that makes the Transformers great. The first year and a half of comics were set entirely on Earth with minimal flashbacks, so I wouldn't say that stories set on Cybertron were crucial to making Transformers what they are, even if they did have a few corkers set there as time went on. To be honest, I think Transformers would have been just as great had they never returned to Cybertron or set any stories there - for me its main purpose was just as a plot device for explaining alien machines stuck on our world with no prior experience of non-machine life.

I'd be more interested in seeing a Transformers movie that was a cross between Inception and Tron: Legacy, where we get to see the virtual worlds that Transformers' minds can create and inhabit - like those in 'Afterdeath' and 'Pretender to the Throne'. They could include scenes from Cybertron, but also much more exotic landscapes that are impossible in the real world.

Martin

[jameso]

I think, even though I'm obviously a Transformers fan and it is their home planet, I've never been that interested in Cybertron. Like Martin says the Transformers story has been about their finding their way on Earth and that element is pretty strong in the movies.
Having said that, I don't know I'd want to discount it entirely, because, certainly in the original cartoon, there was a lot of romantic yearning for the planet, especially from Optimus, about Cybertron, and really it was the Autobots motivation. The Decepticons wanted the Autobots out of the way so they could dominate the entire galaxy, the Autobots wanted to stop the Decepticons so they could return home. Giving the good guys a motivation beyond a sense of duty they should stop the bad guys is always welcome, so if in the Transformers concept they were a group of space travelling aliens who had been at it so long they'd forgotten where they even came from that might not quite work for me.
I think the problem is whenever we went there in the comics it was largely a dull, grey, barren, featureless wasteland (in the comics it doesn't even look metallic), with no sense of scale, wonder, culture, accomplishment or lifestyle. What the Autobots do on there before the war? What do the miss about it?
I thought it was much better in the cartoon because when we went there there was a very good episode where Spike and Carly travel there and their own sense of wonder at being on an alien world, built for beings much larger than them is the audience's own sense of excitement at seeing the Transformers homeworld. By season 3 it's just where the Autobots happen to live.
I also think I've never really thought about it regarding the movies because I've just assumed it would be way too expensive. But, if we consider that it's not too expensive and the whole movie could have been realistically set on Cybertron, I'm not sure how much I'd get out of even a 10 minute prologue. I think it would just end up with the grey, all very similar looking Decepticons who can turn into whatever they want fighting a poorly described battle in dull looking landscapes of bridges and towers. The fight scenes in the movies are hard enough to get emotionally invested in on Earth in brightly lit forests and deserts without doing it in black space with no human viewpoint.
Having said that though, as DOTM was about Megatron wanting to restore Cybertron all of a sudden and Sentinel Prime was able to disregard everything we assume we know (mainly from other media to be fair) about the Autobots and their sanctity of life message when the chance to rebuild his homeworld came up, we should probably have known more about what they wanted to restore and what they had been fighting for the in the first place.

[legios]

Although there have been good stories told that were set on Cybertron I am not inclined to say that Cybertron is really necessary or vital to Transformers. Any more than having stories set in Smallville or on Krypton are necessary to Superman

Often Cybertron works better as a plot device to explain why the robots are here than it does as somewhere to go. That certainly seems to be the position that Hasbro are taking, going by the fact that they seem to have written into the brand binder the idea of Cybertron being abandoned as a default position.

In terms of the Live Action movies having any significant material happening on another planet would be counterproductive - given that the idea of the films is to have explosions and heroic folk fighting alienrobotmonsters in an environment familiar to the target audience, hence the use of urban America and the bits of Foreignlandia that tourists visit.

In many ways what Transformers are like on their own planet is mostly irrelevant to the central theme, which is that they are in hiding on ours. Arguably you can get everything you need to get from Cybertron by having characters talk about it and miss it without ever actually having to see it.

Karl

[The Doctor]

I'm massively interested in Cybertron and feel it remains the one big missed opportunity in Transformers media since 1984. It's a fascinating premise in its own right (never mind the robot chaps who live there), but has rarely been explored in any great depth other than as a diverting background or as a theatre for allegories for wars/holocausts (Marvel, early IDW) or as 'Earth Americaland but drawn with metal bits' (Dreamwave, later IDW). Just adventures on Earth is very boring to me: it needs the madness of the contrast of a nightmare ruined metal world (possibly alive) careening out of control through space to make the 'robots in disguise' concept in the least bit interesting to me.

I never expected the films to make much of the Cybertron concept, however. Partly because of the cost involved, partly because the film makers were trying to make 'things blow up' action films rather than intelligent SF flicks that bothered to explore the Transformers premise in any remotely interesting ways and partly because of the mad fear many licence holders have that if they actually show what they have the licence for then people will run screaming for the hills and have tea with badgers until the frightening thing that isn't Eastenders goes away.

-Ralph

[legios]

Jul 19, 2011 18:51:30 GMT The Doctor said:

a nightmare ruined metal world (possibly alive) careening out of control through space

Now that is an intriguing though that I have never had about Cybertron. The idea of the actual planet as an actual organism in its own right is an intriguing one, and one that would open up some interesting questions about the nature and purpose of the Transformers. Not something I can see the official media ever exploring but something that would push the whole thing in interestingly Banksian kind of directions.

Karl

[MarvelManOz]

Considering how much it costs for a film production crew to shoot and block off a city like Chicago, I'm not entirely sure how much more its going to cost to create parts of Cybertron in CG, but I'm guessing it has to be less. Lets not forget every other aspect of having that many crew in the city and filming. For that part of the movie at least, your using cameras only in your computer and can re shoot any scene without the use of expensive real world cameras etc. Render time would be one of your key factors. Afterall, many reviews rave on about how much of Chicago was actually CG in DOTM. Don't get me wrong, the digital production side of this movie would be massive too though.

After reading all the comments, I do agree with alot of the points too. By the end of DOTM though I just felt like a battle in a city had already been done and getting really stale. If we look at the recent marvel flick THOR as an example, that war was set between Earth and a home planet mostly made of CG elements, and it looked and felt believable in many resepcts. Afterall, the Transformers do have a space bridge very similar to what they were using in THOR now! I felt the cg was at a level in DOTM that I could watch digital robots on a digital background for a bit longer than what they show to give a bit more depth in story.

The "largely dull, grey, barren, featureless wasteland" might be a constant in the old comics but I think ILM could do a pretty amazing job of brining Cybertron to life and then destroying it all during the great battles

[jameso]

Yeah, thinking about it, they did a really cool Asgard prologue in Thor, and Asgard looked amazing. So maybe it wouldn't have been much of a stretch to do it with Transformers.

[Shockprowl]

I too am very disapointed that we've seen so little of Cybertron. I too would have loved to have seen a large scale battle, close-up, involving the characters we've met in the films. I very much enjoyed DOTM, and the battle in Chicago, but it did have a been-there-done-that feel to it, more 'cos of the over abundance of humans characters. I don't want to get into the too-many-Humans-not-enough-Robots topic here, but perhaps a film actually set more on Cybertron would have allowed more Robot characterisation. I think viewers, being so used to Transformers being on Earth, would have appreciated a totally alien environment.

[Bogatan]

Transformers has always been robots in disguise, that has always suited earth more. I can't imagine the full film or the majority set on Cybertron (not because it would be bad but the technical challenges, creating a story set within the bayverse parameters and in 25 years I can't think of many stories that have successfully straddled Earth and cybertron in equal measure. It's usually 75% one or the other.

I'm sure I'll now be bombarded with examples, so I'll amend the statement to say the cybertron setting was required.

Also on a purely visual level I found the Transformers engaged in full scale warfare in a Human city far more interesting that I would have done on Cybertron where everything was to their scale.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

I think I'd be more interested in seeing Cybertron if they managed to find a way to make it beautiful, or at least convey what makes it attractive to the robots who live on it. It has to be more than just what Earth would be like if we totally urbanised/industrialised and got rid of all the nature and colour on it (and then blew it to bits for good measure). If all it is is a metal wasteland, when we've seen one bit of it we've seen it all.

There are worlds in science-fiction and fantasy I would like to personally explore - Middle-Earth, the Labyrinth, the Star Wars, Star Trek and Babylon 5 galaxies - and there are others that I would never want to set foot in for a minute - the 'real world' in the Matrix films, for example, which is just bleak and soulless. No-one has ever attempted to show Cybertron as a rich and magical environment with something new and interesting around every corner.

But they could do!

Martin

[Shockprowl]

Aw, really freakin' good points, Martin. I totally agree with you!

[Grand Moff Muffin]

It's funny, Bob Budiansky created many worlds for the Transformers besides Cybertron:

Nebulos
Multi-World (the virtual reality universe from 'Afterdeath')
The Cosmic Carnival
Grand Central Space Station

I'd love to explore these worlds at leisure. But Cybertron - as portrayed in the present day by both Budianksy and Furman - just strikes me as depressingly boring.

The Cybertron glimpsed in the flashback in 'The Flames of Boltax' looked richer, mind you (with its bubble minefield, cable jungle and shifting surfaces)!





Martin

[Bogatan]

Thats going to be the problem with any modern day set Cybertron, its either the setting of a world wide conflict or the aftermath of one. If it's in the middle of the war then everything is going to be ruins, what little is being built is going to be for function, not beautiful. If the wars has passed, then based on Hull the rebuilding isn't much more pleasant and the ruins (Hull has the dubious honour of having some of the last undeveloped WWII bomb damage in the UK) just gets softer, flatter and boring.