StarscreamToo late to influence the movie now, but WTF is the deal with these walking tribal tattoo looking robots? These ridiculous monstrosities look like brittle, delicate art pieces that would seize up and die from a few grains of sand getting in the gears. The amount of segmenting into small, sharp shapes would seem to preclude selling these things as toys for children. What’s the deal with Frenzy!?! Why not make that crazy abstraction into a Ravage-style panther instead? And I know Starscream is a villain, but how can we properly fear him with that orangutan/kite-shaped body and double jointed legs?

There is obviously money in the nostalgia business, but the people turning our childhood fantasies into 2-hour nuggets are doing a fair amount of revisionism too. The best current example is Spider-man’s black costume, the story of which is abridged like crazy in the movie Spider-man 3. In the comics it is a saga that unfolds across at least 50 issues — that’s over 4 years! It begins during the Secret Wars on another planet where Spider-man’s costume gets shredded and he mistakenly liberates an imprisoned alien symbiote that he takes for a high-tech costume. The story goes on to involve tie-ins with other heroes (i.e., assistance from Reed Richards), a battle between Parker and the alien suit pre-Venom, Parker defeating it and adopting a cloth black costume, Venom, huge battles with Venom, Mary Jane’s fear of Venom forcing Parker to retire the black costume, a Venom offshoot called Carnage, and I don’t know what else since that’s about the time I stopped collecting. The story of that suit deserves it’s own movie without the distractions of Sandman and Hobgoblin.

Where the TFs are concerned, sure it’s OK to update the vehicles to more modern ones. Ghetto blasters aren’t quite so popular anymore, neither are F-14s, original VW Beetles, bright green dump trucks, and Nissan minivans. I also realize it is important for the movie versions of the Transformers to look more complex than the boxy cartoon robots I grew up watching on TV. The new TFs should be more subtle than the toys I grew up playing with, too. (”Oh, that one’s feet look like a VW Bug’s hood. It must turn into a VW Bug.”) The creators of this new generation of the saga obviously want to get away from the Japanese origins of the series that resemble Tranzor Z, Robotech, Voltron, and Gundam. But when they transform into robots, how about making them look like robots with distinct arms and legs with discernible shins, knees, and thighs instead of postmodern metal scrap sculptures!? And what’s the deal with the insect-like faces. Traditionally they were very humanoid, giving the Autobots and Decepticons personality. Even the new Autobots look about as friendly as the Predator with its mask off!!

OK. End of nerd-boy rant. Despite my gripes I am excited about this movie. I think it’ll be every bit as exciting to watch as the animated movie was on opening day. Thank Christ Dane Cook didn’t elbow his way into the movie and get a fight scene with a TF (I guess that would have been against Frenzy!?). That makes me wonder how the physics of scale will work. Megatron is clearly a military vehicle and not a handgun, but based on trailer footage, the robot modes of the TFs appear to have more mass than the vehicle modes…And will they have different vehicle modes before they get to Earth!??! OK, done. If you read this far you need a life.