Current mood:

enraged

Leave it to the Michael Bay to completely rape a childhood memory.
Just finished watching the trailer for the new Transformers movie. I can only shake my head and curse the heavens that some fuckwit actually sold the rights to such a significant chunk of my childhood to a worthless hack like Bay. I'd wish his death but the movie is already in post so it wouldn't do much good at this point.

As a kid I was a tranformers fiend. I liked the toys a lot and the show was nifty but it's the comics that really took it home. I made my own transformers verse in my little playworld. I created an ongoing narrative inspired by the comics that I carried on for literally years as a kid. Progressively I'd form the chapters in my head and then play them out in my room in all their battled glory. Near the end of my great play the thermonuclear demise of Megatron destroyed the once great Cybertron and those who survived were left to fend their way among the metallic asteroids that remained. And what was left of Megatron still floated amongst these pieces of his planet, perhaps to one day reawaken and reign terror again.

I watch the trailer and I see Close Encounter reactions from us human folk combined with quick shots of robots who have a weird combination of shifting plates that are way too complicated to be necessary. I see a lot of slack jawed humies. What I don't see is a single distinct robotic face. No Optimus Prime trying to reach out to those he's determined to protect. No Megatron goading the military so he can fusion slag them for kicks.

In the transformer stories the humans inhabited the same world but their stories were either secondary or ran parallel to the plight of the machines. Mostly because the robots possessed all the range and depth the narrative needed. A misfit band the Ark had re-engineered so they could hide to survive on an alien world - none of them knowing if their old home, centuries since they'd left from it, even existed anymore or had self destructed in an endless war. The transformers had doubts, they had weakness, they had good and they had evil. The strange tragedy of their circumstance, their disconnection, their determination, despite their displacement, to continue on as who they were, either power hungry or doggedly protective, is part of what made their struggles so compelling and so human. Plus their changing shapes made them pretty flipping cool. I'm just so glad Michael Bay totally fucked that up making them appear like a bunch of godzilla machines.

Oh well, I guess I can always reread the comics and cross my fingers this one tanks so bad he's never allowed to make another movie again.