Making a lot of money does not equal making something of quality. And the live action movies are nowhere near as good as the 86 movie.
You really think so, because that movie was initially
panned by critics, and it made buttkiss at the Box Office. First of all, forget Bay, the 1986 movie callously killed off Optimus Prime which caused kids to cry in the theater. The reason: his toy was being discontinued. You want to talk about the "grand" plot? The first thirty minutes of the movie, including Optimus Prime's death have NOTHING to do with the rest of the movie. No seriously? Explain to me why that's
b-e-t-t-e-r than what Bay did? Because that entire sequence was MANDATED, yes MANDATED by Hasbro to tie off toys no longer offered in stores. The writers of TFTM didn't want to do it. They wanted Optimus to die a martyr at the end. The folks at Hasbro though were adamate the story not focus on characters who were discontinued.
Unicron never explained, just shows up. Great set up there.
The Matrix was never explained, and was basically retconned in. We'd already seen what Optimus' inards looked like and the Matrix was conveinently abscent. The MATRIX WAS NEVER PART OF THE SHOW. You'd be surprised how many people who hate Bay's take never knew this. In fact NONE of the movie was in the show. The moon bases? Nope. Ultra Magnus, Kup, Daniel, Hot Rod, Wheelie, The Quintessons, any of it? Nope. Not even Autobot City. They are all just there.
The connections are never explained. The Quintessons were supposedly agents of Unicron, but in the final movie they show up, unannounced, and serve no purpose in the general plot EXCEPT they make one huge plot hole: How did Hot Rod and Kup know where Magnus and the others were?
Also Magnus was never supposed to be randomly killed in the original. His arms and legs were to have been pulled off. You can see this is the repair sequence, and if you watch the death scene and listen to the audio. However the "draw and quartering" was deemed inappropriate, so instead we got a random exploding Magnus.
Let's see what else
Oh yeah
Hot Rod: "Where is Galvatron, where is he?"
Wreck-Gar: "And the answer is...Unicron"
(By the way scintilating dialogue there)
How the flying f*** did Wreck-Gar know this, at all, by any wrapping of my mind. He'd met Galvatron like ten seconds ago, and never talked or interacted with him in any meaningful way whatsoever
.
What else is wrong with that movie...hmmmm....
...Oh did you notice how many characters show up in two places at once: Hound, Sunstreaker, Dirge, Thundercracker and a few others. Thundercracker is reformatted by Unicron, and appears 2 minutes later at Starscream's coronation. By the way Starscream's treachery in that movie would mean literally NOTHING to someone who hadn't watched the show, neither would Soundwave's compassion towards Megatron. The movie does absolutely zilch to set up the characters.
Nothing is done to set up Hot Rod as the leader, he just fights Galvatron, gets Matrix, whoops leader. Why didn't it do that when he held it the first time? Never explained. Why didn't Optimus know it was him, he's carrying the damn thing? Never explained. The purpose of the Matrix is never really explained. Does the Matrix make you a bigger stronger robot? Why didn't Optimus revert back to Orion Pax when he passed it? Why didn't Magnus start calling himself Prime? Never explained
Also the dialogue is incredibly clunky.
But yes, it's a much better film than
Transformers or
Dark of the Moon
.
