Dark of the Moon Optimus Prime by Kazumasa Yasukuni

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Transformers: Age of Extinction is the first film in the series I've enjoyed. Previous entries fumbled an easy sale by changing million year old soldiers into uncoordinated idiots, basing the entire third act around racist robots and, in the case of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, a truly revolting performance from Shia LaBeouf. Implied domestic abuse aside, Moon did have a few cool beats. Fallen Autobot Sentinel was, thanks mostly to Leonard Nimoy's performance, at least a two-dimensional idea of villainy. Michael Bay's latest easily tops that renegade robot with a PTSD Prime coming to terms with the horrors that have been visited on his kind. Prime is no longer a background player, he's Extinction's dramatic engine. In this sense the film is the closest match to the multimedia brand that was pumped into my brain as a child. So while Extinction may be vulgar, blaring trash, it has enough consistent character ideas to conjure up a few cackles.

Extinction's villain Lockdown operates as an opposite to Optimus Prime, the swaggering mercenary versus Prime's rigid true believer. Lockdown has no allegiance to either the Autobots or the Decepticons. He's something new - a third path. Lockdown's name and occupation springs from Transformers: Animated, were he seemed an attempt to roll Marvel UK's Death's Head character into the Hasbro canon. Lockdown is Lamborghini grey and carries a sickle. He unpacks from a Aventador sports car, his body flayed and athletic compared to the new plate metal Prime. Like Sentinel Prime before him, Lockdown has a human face to stress cunning and duplicity. Lockdown's grasping anti-agenda opens up future conflicts beyond the strict binaries of Autobot and Decepticon. He's a cosmic character with a menagerie of violent, spiky things to command and the ability to reconfigure his face into a gun.

Lockdown, along with the rusting, cantankerous Hound, feels like he's been designed as a personality first and a toy second. He's a Spaghetti Western sharpshooter brought in to throw a spanner in the works. Riding shotgun is Megatron, resurrected as his upgraded form Galvatron. He's visually cleaner, resembling an ogre mocked up by Apple. There's none of the regal splendour of Floro Dery's original design but, like the 1986 Galvatron, he's immune to an outside force trying to rebrand him. As ever, the Megatron personality is persistent, looking for weaknesses in his prison. Extinction's Autobots are no longer hulking do-gooders, they each have own individual outline and colour scheme. Their personalities are violent and disagreeable. Two of Prime's soldiers are openly insubordinate when they think he isn't looking. Fresh recruits are battered into compliance. These kinds of ideas aren't new to Transformers as a property. Flick through Marvel's The Transformers Universe character guides and you'll discover the Autobot ranks are full of sociopaths. How else do you cope with a war that has lasted forever?

Simon Furman, Geoff Senior and Derek Yaniger's Transformers: Generation 2 comics featured Autobots seething with grenade pouches and belts of ammunition. Yaniger using the visual vocabulary of 90s X-Men comics to rejuvenate ailing ideas and characters, making them gritty champions of war that terrify the pacifist aliens they help. Extinction goes a little further, Hound's mek-nificent four are basically 2000 AD's ABC Warriors - a cadre of treacherous killer robots who only respect strength. There's a sense of truth in this idea though. Optimus Prime isn't Superman. He doesn't have a no kill policy when it comes to equals. He's a warrior general fronting an intergalactic establishment in a civil war. Since he carries a God artefact in his chest, he should probably be considered a religious extremist too. This ancient, punch-drunk approach to a Prime adds up. When Marky Mark finds him gathering dust in a devastated movie theatre he's literally decrepit. Peter Cullen's voice has a raspier register this time too, evoking a bone-deep sense of weariness.

Extinction's Prime has been betrayed by the race he tried to help. His preferred team mates have been hunted down and horrifically murdered. So when he takes a moment to lay out the fact that he absolutely will kill a human now, it doesn't feel particularly extreme. If you accept Optimus Prime as a character rather than a special effect, why wouldn't he? Especially locked into this hyper-aggressive Michael Bay milieu. Extinction's Prime is past higher ideals. They died with his comrades. Three films have taught him humans will sanction his actions, attack him and his troops, and now dissect them in pursuit of a pay raise. Prime is a zealot from a world that has subsumed every aspect of their society into pure conflict. Currency is irrelevant to Prime, all he values is subsistence. He's used to total war. So when he brushes up against profiteering and the military-industrial complex why wouldn't he be revolted?

Prime survives in the company of Cade Yeager, a deranged possessive with a knack for engineering. Yeager repairs Prime and speaks to him like an equal. Yeager is also keen to use Cybertronian technology to join the fight. To a ruthless utilitarian like Optimus Prime Yeager is genuinely useful, he fulfils the same battlefield function as Prime's deactivated warrior-medic Ratchet. Sam Witwicky was always just collateral damage waiting to happen, a human germ who had his action heroics mapped onto a secondary character. In contrast Yeager tracks after Prime providing suppressing fire. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger repeatedly stresses Mark Wahlberg's character with the same old-fashioned masculinity as Prime. He's the Father God who plays with his children's lives but will ultimately die for them - when Yeager's government threaten him and his family, Prime is explosively angry, abandoning his disguise to immediately go on the attack.

Extinction stays entertaining because it's about an ideological clash. Optimus Prime is the supreme commander of the Autobot faction of Cybertronians. It's a position he's won through bloodshed and maintained with respect. Extinction also posits that it's a role run on fear. Prime is so terrifyingly powerful no-one dares challenge him. Even skyscraper tall Tyrannosaurs get their jaws broken trying. Prime is then the totality of a government state, a fascist ideal programmed to fulfil every executive role in an endless war. If he has found a use for Cade Yeager, who the fuck are Frasier or the American Government to disagree? Age of Extinction has bum jokes, a peeping Tom gaze and a runtime that feels like punishment, but it also features an Optimus Prime who is so absolutely fucking disgusted by the race he's found himself protecting that he's excited to blast off into deep space on a suicide mission.

BACK TO MIAMI

My major issue with Michael Bay films beyond The Rock is the director's obsession with comedic incompetence. Perhaps aware that his script sinew is deathly dull, Bay constructs films out of obscure, vulgar asides that reek of a harassed, impatient improv. There's an idea that Bay traps his actors in dreary scenes and forces them to act larger and larger in pursuit of maximum profanity. It's black comedy without the safety net of understanding; odiousness served up at face value.

So why can't I wait for Pain & Gain? Well, at least this time the nasty looks planned. Once you step away from heroic narratives and explicitly move into comedy, or tragedy, it begins to matter less that the main characters are moral paradigms. In the Transformers films it's important that Sam Witwicky is an insufferable little prick, his success is diluted by it. Frankly, Id' prefer it if he didn't win - I'd much rather see Megatron smear him across a fucking building, because that's a character I'm invested in and like. So what if the Decepticon leader is trying to crush humanity beneath his heel? At least he's put the work in. Anyway, I digress. Marky Mark is quite obvious playing another oblivious, Bayian twat, but the film is apparently constructed so that it's a given that he's a buffoon. Fine. Horrible morons doing dumb shit and getting punished / succeeding works as long as we're given some wriggle room to arrive at the idea of liking them, something Shia LeBeouf's awful, choking performances never allowed.

Concept Prime

This is an Optimus Prime I can get behind! Although colour correct, the Optimus Prime seen in the Michael Bay Transformers flicks is calibrated with male ideal dimensions. He's all tight waist, and booming chest. A truck cab vanished into fracturing layers of mechanical musculature. The design stresses organic, I'd prefer something a little more blocky, like the above idea. This design has playset flavours; the body armour synchronicity between Optimus Prime and his usually useless trailer compartment recalls the God Ginrai draft of the outline from Transformers: Super-God Masterforce. Head on over to Massive Black's blog for more anime slanted Prime conceptions, including a few spikey enough to resemble Evangelions.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

The mistake I keep making with Michael Bay's Transformers films - besides actually paying to see them - is an assumption that anyone involved considers the titular robots with any level of interest outside of a CG prop designed to shill toys. Blocky 1980s favourites are recalibrated into sexualised insects complete with writhing mechanical muscles, then pimped like they matter in gasping, eye-catch teaser trailers. I am tempted to imagine the Transformers portrayed as characters, with agendas and interests, rather than the dull tech-demo mish-mashes they end up being. There's a brief brief joy in hearing Leonard Nimoy cast as yet another renegade Transformer, but that nostalgia bubble is quickly popped by a paucity of screentime and tone deaf Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan quotes. Unfortunately, in Transformers: Dark of the Moon it's not just the robots that operate solely as unthinking popcorn prods, the humans are unspeakable voids too.

Everytwat hero Sam Witwicky is a screaming, shaking mess. Every interaction is an impatient twitch masking his repressed, impotent violence. When not the direct target for his abuse, girlfriend Carly Spencer haunts the frame's fringe, avoiding eye-contact and smiling passively. Instead of any recognisable strain of comedy we get Witwicky convulsing and capering, flinging himself around in an agitated frenzy while statue still straight men patiently wait to say something stupid. In fiction, his constant ego vomiting must be endured - he's special. Who the fuck is Sam designed to appeal to? Sociopathic date rapists? Shut-in loners with a heaving sense of entitlement? Sam plays like a prank character. It's impossible to even imagine a moment were he was considered a likeable lead. There's a vague sense of fun trying to puzzle out who he's meant to represent. Maybe he's an unconscious collaboration between writer and actor to thrust their fuhrer think director into the limelight? Like Bay, Sam's all hissy fits and 'gimme' misogyny.

The character's withering expectation and total entitlement could just as easily be read as a reflection of the perceived audience - an Ain't It Cool News commentator dumped front and centre in a Summer blow-out feature. His only talent is to bitch and hate his way through proceedings, stressed that his superior narrative knowledge isn't shared by the peons bumbling around beside him. Either way, it's a vile performance, a concise demonstration of the emotional incompetence endemic to Michael Bay. As a director, and perhaps even as a man, he is utterly incapable of subtlety. Everything is pointlessly aggressive and hysterical, thus barely anything registers. You're beaten into submission. Civilians are vapourised, buildings topple, and my favourite childhood toy zips around like an angry wasp, but nothing lands. Nothing is exciting. It's all mulch. The film never sits still. No-one thinks. It's just more, more, more, more. Total excess, punched into your mind for nearly three hours. £15 for an IMAX 3D headache.

RAY-GUN

Only a few days until total disappointment! Shockwave's still frontin' in this clip length TV tease for Transformers: Dark of the Moon; at this stage he's still all about cool pose-downs and not much else. Looks like his mech-tentacle pet gets to have all the building slagging fun. 20XX's outstandingly optimistic hopes for Shockwave getting into a set-to with the entire established cast, regardless of allegiance, isn't looking too likely. Various merchandise plot leaks point to him being at best ancillary, with all this installments villainy wrapped up in a duplicitous Autobot playing spychanger. Oh well! Can't have anything.

All Hail Shockwave

Among the best Transformers world-building came from the UK arm of Marvel Comics. Published weekly, rather than monthly, the title needed regular content injections, a task that usually fell to in-house writer Simon Furman. Since all the big name characters were off having US authored adventures, Furman specialised in beefing up mid-card players, turning them into dangerous wildcards that drifted in and out of extinction epics. Shockwave was a particular favourite of Furman's. In contrast to the servile chump presented in after-school TV show, Furman's Shockwave was a powerful, calculating bastard, always angling to usurp the de-facto Decepticon commander Megatron. That's the vibe I'm getting here in this latest shill for Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Shockwave as his own entity, neither Autobot nor Decepticon, pursuing his own agenda and crushing everything in his path. Disaster Year predicts a Prime / Megatron tag-team will be required to terminate this cycloptic Caesar.