DOTM - not excited? [possible spoils]

[GoktimusPrime]

The movies are getting over-analysed and compared to old-school TF. 90% of the audience probably haven't seen G1 so they don't care if Prime doesn't have a heart.

But even if you'd never heard of Transformers before seeing the movies, ROTF Prime still has a contradictory character shift from TF1 which doesn't seem to make sense.

Kids these days want tough good-guys, not by-the-book heroes.

I don't agree. You have your archetypal heroes (e.g. Superman, Captain America etc.) and you have anti-heroes (e.g. Batman, Wolverine etc.). Optimus Prime is traditionally meant to be a hero -- the Messiah Archetype. The movie universe retained a lot of this aspect with Prime's repeated compunction to sacrifice himself (e.g. wanting to merge the Cube with his chest, sacrificing himself to save Sam in the forest). So in many ways the movies establish Prime as a hero, not an antihero... yet what he did in Shanghai was more of an antiheroic act. Now if movie writers want to establish Optimus Prime as an antihero in their universe, okay... just do it. The issue I'm raising here is that MOVIE Optimus Prime (ignoring all other Optimus Primes) is heroic in the first movie and for most of ROTF... then he decides to execute Demolishor. Right.

We don't what prime went through in-between movies. Maybe he was tortured by Demolisher so this was payback,

Cos revenge is such a heroic trait. For the record, DemolishOr never tortured Prime. Demolishor certainly was a mass-murdering terror during the Cybertronian wars as he was a shock trooper who specifically set out to slaughter settlements of Autobot refugees. One of the few (if only) survivors of his onslaught was Sideswipe.

or maybe there was a bounty out on his head for his death.

Not as far as we know.

All this shows us is that Prime is serious and wants the Decepticons gone or dead.

Yes but the Optimus Prime we knew from the first movie would only kill if he felt there were no other option.

Yes he's changed since the first movie but that's life. Move along.

Unexplained/illogical character change = BAD story telling.

You can have characters change, but they need to explained to the audience. For example:
1: Anakin Skywalker.
Phantom Menace = selfless innocent child... separated from mother
Attack of the Clones = frustrated gifted youth who has feelings of greed (re: being held back) and attachment (re: mother)
Revenge of the Sith = feelings for attachment (re: Padme) and feelings of impotency lead to his fall to the Dark Side

2: Frodo Baggins
A naive and innocent youth whose contact with the One Ring gradually instills him with greed (it could have eventually made him like Gollum if he'd kept it long enough)

If they want to change Optimus Prime from being a hero (as seen in the first movie) to an antihero, then the audience deserves an explanation. It's just basic story-telling.

The Autobots are clearly the bad guys, they remorselessly kill many, many Decepticons over the course of the films.

There's a big difference between killing an enemy combatant in the middle of a fight, and executing a P.O.W.

The Decepticons only kill Jazz and wound Jetfire. And to be fair, Megs wasn't thinking straight when he killed Jazz. He just woke up after being frozen in ice for years, and probably had one hell of an ice-cream headache.

Jazz was attacking Megatron when he got killed. Jazz presented Megatron with lethal force and Megatron returned in kind. Jazz was KIA as a soldier... he was not an executed captive.