Transform Into A Revenge! .. what? (part1)

~Optimus don't revenge no body~
Two years have passed since the first ever live action Transformers film hit big screens and raised the standard for photo-realistic cgi. It was received with very mix reviews, but that's what happens when a series has had 20 years of re-imaginings and thematic alterations. Overall, it was a great effort to revitalize eBay. Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, seems to have a different effort: all-out robot dismemberment.

After seeing the first flic, I wrote a little about how the reason Transformers gained a diehard fanbase, half-decade of reruns, and has existed for so long because the characters could be mortally wounded. Unlike heroes in other shows, Transformers actually can die. Part of this was to create new toys (Transformers is just a huge Hasbro commercial), but it ended up making us care about the characters. The Autobots became more human than any other superheroes because they lost battles, they lost friends, and so often their struggle to find fuel, win a war, and save humanity looked so hopeless, but .

But with time, worried mother's realized their peanut-allergic children were thinking complex ideas and questioning established standards so the robot mayhem was dropped (only surviving in two or three series shown only in Japan because Japanese parents all secretly wish they could transform into cars instead of having to cram into subway trains), replaced by small casted, light hearted series like Beast Wars and Transformers Energon: Gotta Catch 'Em All!, with Hasbro spewing out lines of toys that never appear in the actual show because they really were that desperate.

Skip to 2007 and the world is looking a lot more like 1986 than it ever had before. Now, the whole planet was facing an energy crisis, tearing itself apart, and cold wars have become full out onslaughts against privatized organizations. Obviously, giant alien robots slugging it out is the perfect parallel for kids to understand what's going on. The thing for the now-20-somethings-that-know-all-the-lyrics-to-“You Got The Touch” didn't realize was that Transformers was a children's movie. Thanks to '90's and 00's Transformers series, it has a small cast of 'bots (which means no epic old-cast wipe-out battles featured in the first 30 minutes of Transformers: Apocalypse! Matrix Forever), and thanks to Spielberg the questions of whether or not it's okay to take some planet's energy and how a soldier's answer to that question changes the entire war is replaced by the simple black and white definition of: bad guys trying to take allspark, good guys trying to stop them, bad humans doing crazy experiments with cell phones and vending machines, good humans making out on car. However, I ended my review by saying that the film left the Transformers franchise in a good direction; really cool cgi, some pretty good battles (Optimus vs Bonecrusher), and a reminder for everyone to keep selling their Transformers toys on eBay.

LUCKILY Revenge has lots of robots. Previews have shown Optimus battling squads of Decepticons armed only with badass righteousness. It is also Act II of a trilogy, so it should exist as the dark middle climax towards an epic, galactic-shuddering resolution. There is a great chance Optimus will once again become the full-force leader of the full-hearted side in a no-one's-winning-war, instead of a scrawny guy who says, “My bad” when he steps on your yard. The only way to know for sure is to see it.. today.. stay tuned for part 2. . .