Either they’re machines fighting an endless war, and every resource matters, so they should make a point of recovering and repairing their fallen, or they’re people - supposedly the heroes, the good guys, the ones who have some semblance of empathy or altruism - and they should care when one of them goes through a heinously traumatic experience. The Autobot Jazz gets torn in half and tossed aside in the final battle, and the rest of the Autobots barely seem to notice. More or less the same thing happened with Michael Bay’s Transformers in 2007. We just thought we were killing off the old product line to replace it with new products.” Story consultant Flint Dille kind of laughs about it on one of the DVD commentaries: “It was a toy show. Apparently the filmmakers had no idea that was going to be an issue. Tasha: The people behind The Transformers: The Movie thought you should be invincible back when you watched it! That 1986 film, which pretty much casually wipes out almost all of the characters from the 1980s TV show, still stands out as a traumatic event for ’80s kids who thought they were going to get to see those characters have full-scale cinematic adventures with better animation than the TV show provided, and instead got to see them all ganked so Hasbro could try to get the audience to buy new action figures. And I paid Scholastic Book Fair Catalog Betamax Prices to see that with my baby eyes. I watched a shuttle full of my favorite Autobots get systematically, callously murdered in the first five minutes of The Transformers: The Movie when I was 6. Which is wild, because I should be numb to this by now. Despite generations of being yanked around by contrived narratives, sometimes I still get sad anyway. Image: Jim Salicrup, Frank Springer/Marvel ComicsĪnd yet there were nearly 40 solid friggin’ years of Transformers stories where they repeatedly beg you to get sad about dead robots. Stupid humans! Don’t get sad about dead robots! It’s like getting sad about a busted lawn mower! In response, Optimus Prime thinks to himself that Spider-Man is an idiot who doesn’t know he shouldn’t be sad, because robots can just be repaired. Usually when somebody falls from a great height, that somebody is Dead with a capital “D.” (Spider-Man would know.) And as Spider-Man is mourning his fallen (new) friend, he wonders why all Gears’ Autobot pals are crowding emotionlessly around his shattered corpse. Just three issues into the Marvel run, he watched the Autobot Gears die, or so he thought. Do you know who else shared your frustrations? Spider-Man! Am I being a jerk?ĭavid: No, I get it: Not knowing how exactly we should respond to a Transformer’s death is baked deep into the franchise itself. ![]() I just can’t get emotional about a dead robot that just needs a jump-start or a lube job. I know these quasi-deaths are meant to be important and frightening, to show that the stakes are high in the Transformers’ Great War, and that the villain characters are extremely dangerous.īut c’mon, you know when they kill off Bumblebee early in the movie that he’ll be back in action by the final act. Tasha: David, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Rise of the Beasts didn’t try to wring big-time pathos out of multiple Autobot and Maximal deaths, then quickly reverse some of them, but not others, for reasons that are unclear. Does life or death mean anything to Transformers? Given how Rise of the Beasts plays up some character deaths as big emotional moments while completely glossing over others, is the audience meant to take any of these beats or emotions seriously?Īs a casual longtime Transformers fan, I have no idea how to feel about dead Transformers anymore, so I asked the least-casual longtime Transformers fan I know what we can learn about Transformer life and death from the larger franchise - and how writers have used those elements to manipulate readers and viewers. ![]() At other times, the robot characters are so casual about their companions’ destruction that they come across as callous and uncaring. Just to make things more confusing, the Transformers movies sometimes play character deaths for big drama and pathos. Even superhero comics can’t compete with the death-and-revival cycle of Transformers media. That makes it hard to take any apparent character death seriously, especially given the franchise’s long history of killing off beloved characters and then bringing them back later. Most of its primary characters are living machines who can take seemingly fatal damage and then be repaired or revived later in the story. ![]() Like pretty much every story in the wide-ranging Transformers franchise, the live-action movie Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has an odd relationship with death.
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