Battleangel

After months of unsettling news tidbits trickling from the upcoming Transformers movie comes some solid concept sketches / art / toy prototypes. And it is even more unsettling. Trust Hollywood to completely ruin a concept by thinking it can miraculously refashion an entire franchise. The design of course is the usual overblown posturing that we have come to expect from the overblown Hollywood egos. They do get a lot of things right — the design taken at face value is just superb, biomechanical, very alien — but it’s not just what they should have been contracted to do.
It does feel very much like someone is trampling all over one’s childhood here. Now of course, to be fair, the design could be a moot point as it has been more or less confirmed that many of the Transformers will appear in both Cybertronian and Earth alt-mode throughout the movie. But regardless it is still a leap in design that isn’t sitting well with the fans.

Apart from the “imaginative design” the three other major flaws that have been indicated and that will surely kill the movie for many fans, and possibly the rest as well, are as follows:

1. Story line changes. Should have stuck with the G1 story line more or less. Has it strayed too far even and have the overblown egos decided they can in fact rewrite the entire plot?
2. “2 Fast 2 Furious” with transforming robots. Can it avoid the car chase cliche?
3. Too anthropocentric. Obviously, it has a long list of live actors. Lets just hope the robots themselves don’t turn out to be too human. That is the sort of flaw that IS in fact present in the comic book, but could become infinitely more bothersome in a movie.