*SPOILERS* Freedom is the right of all sentient beings...

[Ode to a Grasshopper]

But then... I suppose that if any Decepticons were coming to Earth as refugees or not wanting to partake in the war any further, then they could either defect to the Autobots (as Jetfire and Wheelie did) or declare neutrality.

*cough*Sideways*cough*

Jetfire and Wheelie's defection illustrates that it's not a 'racial' thing but, as Jetfire put it, a conscious choice to be Autobot or Decepticon.

JMO but this is why I like the determinist G1 cartoon Quintesson civilian/military hardware origin story better - as well as the potential for both 'races' to complement each other ('cons go out and gather resources through conquest, 'bots stay home and keep the planet running) and avoiding the IMO hamfisted 'divine/supernatural origin' BS, also allows for more interesting moral questions: can the 'cons be blamed for being warlike if that's their basic nature? It also means that those who do defect will have greater impact due to the comparative scarcity & going-against-their-nature bit a la BW Dinobot, and that the Autobots' conscious choice to fight becomes that much more impressive (as well as giving a logical reason for the 'cons being more powerful, since the bad guys are generally supposed to be more powerful from a story POV).

Two buildings fell down about 10 years ago and we still haven't heard the last of it... <runs>

...

I mean if Bay actually cared about the characters he was portreying...(snip).

Bwahahaha! Fun drinking game idea: every time you see a lame d**k/fart/balls/drug joke take a swig...just make sure you don't have to drive afterwards.
Seriously, how much did he and the writers get paid for this again?

Prime gestures to the fallen and helpless 'con. "Ironhide remove his spark and put it with the others." (or something to that effect, written by someone who could actually write.

Ironhide: "Aww, Prime..."

There, easy. Wouldn't take much to write it into the story, and It would actually have had Prime in character. Some simple dialogue and no whining fandom. Or alternatively they could have gone with what's in the comic and again no one would be complaining.

Even simpler solution: have Mr "we could kill the humans/I accidentally blew up a planet" Ironhide kill him, then have Prime tell him off for it. Both Prime and Ironhide are still in character, the 'bots are still shown to be badass/acting within the realities of war, and Bay gets his gratuitous death jollies. It's not like they didn't already have an established boticidal maniac to use, but noooo...Prime's not hardcore enough!

+ Acquiring land to construct this prison. I don't think the Autobots own any land on Earth - they appear to be wards of the U.S. government and I don't know if they'd be able to hold real estate in order to construct a gaol -- again, would probably involve land ownership by an Earth government who would oversee its construction (and thus gain an insight into Cybertronian technology).

A secret base in an abandoned warehouse. And they could use the bodies of their fallen foes to construct a spark-holding machine like the Prime-corpses-hide-the-Matrix or let's-harvest-dead-Jetfire bit.

[Tiby]

Guess what a courier ferries? Intelligence. Intelligence on your defenses, your troop disposition, your positions. His information lets his superiors form a strategy to kill you and yours, and the Decepticons are clearly not going to limit themselves to military targets.

Defenses etc in the middle of Shanghai? The Autobots are clearly based in the US. Also, this does not fit with Demolishor's bio.

[Tiby]

I'm not seeing it as self-defense. Demolisher attacks first by smacking the concrete cylinders which land on a few military personal. I can't remember at this point if the military started firing yet, but they should of, if they didn't. He starts swatting black hawks out of the sky and then making a mess of Shanghai.

All the suggestions of interrogation assume that these guys are subject to torture. Otherwise, why would any Decepticon talk. And torture is arguable as nasty, if not more, than any of the other allegations being made here.

Demolishor is completely surrounded by Autobots and the US military before he does anything. He is parked in a construction site doing nothing. He then lashes out when he is surrounded and swats the helicopters as he makes a run (or roll!) for it.

I do not equate interrogation with torture. From the rest of the movie is looks like Jolt has some special skills, and Blackout, Frenzy and Soundwave have shown they can download information using other means.

[FFN]

4. Intelligence: Demolishor says the Fallen is coming. What an opportunity to find out more! But instead, he is executed.

I do agree with you here that they should have interrogated him, though I tend to think Decepticons aren't the sorts to be giving up information short of a spark extraction.

Defenses etc in the middle of Shanghai? The Autobots are clearly based in the US. Also, this does not fit with Demolishor's bio.

Then what was he doing in (essentially) enemy territory? I would think the world's next super power would be an enemy worth scouting upon (from what I can tell, NEST is a US-UK [and if Bay had his way, other nations, but he wasn't allowed by those nations] military alliance sanctioned by the UN.) Alliance seemed to said the Decepticons were searching for *something*, the film suggests the shard and Megatron's location.

Whatever they were searching for, it was bad news for us.

[Lord_Zed]

Not to mention humans are guilty of the same atrocities as the cons, and yet Prime was willing enough to forgive and protect us. That is just his natural awesomeness.

Well that and the fact Prime effectively brought the war (back) to earth, in the movie universe just as in the cartoon and comic, Primes actions led to the Transformers war spreading to Earth, corrupt as Earth's inhabitants maybe they are innocents in the Transformers war. Were Prime to abandon earth just because he believed its inhabitants warlike he would drop down a few notches and become even more cruel and cold.

I have recently been watching the 90s Spider-Man cartoon and during the Venom 3 parter, Spiderman under the influence of the suit defeats Rhino and has him at his mercy. Spider-Man grabs an unhinged metal door and is about to smash Rhino dead with it when he stops and reflects on how immoral such an act would be and how he would have regretted all his life if he had executed someone in cold blood while they were defenseless.

Guess those moral values don't apply to movie Prime - Not much of a heroic Autobot at all.

Spiderman is a superhero and vigilante who uses his powers to pursue an capture criminals outside of the law where as Prime is a solider fighting a decalred war so I don't think that's a fair comparison. Prime is still heroic in that he fight for something greater than himslef. He is however not so compassionate as Spiderman it seems.

JMO but this is why I like the determinist G1 cartoon Quintesson civilian/military hardware origin story better - as well as the potential for both 'races' to complement each other ('cons go out and gather resources through conquest, 'bots stay home and keep the planet running) and avoiding the IMO hamfisted 'divine/supernatural origin' BS, also allows for more interesting moral questions: can the 'cons be blamed for being warlike if that's their basic nature? It also means that those who do defect will have greater impact due to the comparative scarcity & going-against-their-nature bit a la BW Dinobot, and that the Autobots' conscious choice to fight becomes that much more impressive (as well as giving a logical reason for the 'cons being more powerful, since the bad guys are generally supposed to be more powerful from a story POV).

The only problem with that origin story is it doesn't explain why all the TF's spontaneously get individual personalities with which they make those conscious choices. If the TF's were all just tools that decided the Quintessons were bad then wouldn't they be more like Skynet at the Quintessons are John Connor.

[Paulbot]

I agree with the concerns and I've had them ever since I saw friendly Bumblebee rip the spine out of a feline Decepticon and then rip the arms off another Decepticon and shoot him in the back of the head. I wanted to see the whole film though in to see that scene in context. The context didn't help.

Not with the first Decepticons we saw just sitting around doing nothing when they were attacked and seemingly killed (I'll come back to that). So if NEST had found Jetfire you have to imagine they would have attacked and killed him too, plus the other "Seekers" all across the United States.

I was going to post the same discussion topic but with the heading "Autobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons". Yes that's what the theme song says but it's not until these movies (well maybe the G2 comics) that we've seen Autobots doing this.

And also - because the US Government has problems with what the Autobots were doing, they were going to leave the planet? We all know Bay is one of the Manifest Destiny, "America, F*** Yeah!" types, but jeez, they couldn't have tried something like "Screw you, we'll base ourselves in Australia then!"?

Maybe the idea that the US of A != Planet Earth genuinely didn't actually occur to him.

I was saying the same thing to LCZ128 today, why is it up to "your president"? How about the United Nations or something.

The prequel comic (Alliance) show most of the Decepticons who came to Earth after the first movie, were killing a lot of people and causing a lot of destruction. It's only natural that those offenders needed to be neutralised, and strategically it is better to do it while they are inactive, by way of a surprise attack.

But only maybe 1% of people that see the movie will ever read that comic. Of the people on this board maybe only 50% will ever read the comic. In the context of the movie there's no indication of this, just that the Autobots have been hunting down Decepticons for the past two years

In the comic adaptation (which I suspect was based off an earlier revision of the script) Optimus Prime says, "I wish there was another way." as he shoots Demolishor - showing that while he is a realist, he still regrets having to do what he must

I wish that line was still in the movie.

Now because I don't like this portrayal I want to find a way to tolerate these scenes.

As far as I recall only one Transformer (Jazz) is clearly shown to be dead, while some others appear to be dead but are revived (Megatron and Prime).

Jazz was ripped in two. Is that what it takes to kill a Transformer beyond repair? We are so used to thinking that major damage to a Transformer head will kill the Transformer as their brain is located there. This anthropomorphic thinking may be wrong.

Perhaps in the movie-verse damaging the head of a Transformer is the quickest way to disable it. Perhaps in the head are the controls for motor functions as well as sensory inputs, but the mind/spark of the Transformer is located elsewhere? Blackout/Grindor whatever collapses quite awkwardly after Prime rips his face apart and maybe that's why. Prime's blast to Demolisher's head might stop him moving but not kill him. Being bisected by Sideswipe might do a lot of damage to Sideways but if the crucial part of Sideways' body is not affected perhaps he's fine.

What happens to these two Decepticons afterwards? Surely NEST doesn't leave Transformer bodies lying around. Do they burn/melt them like Sarah Connor and crew does to Terminators in her TV series? Or do they store their inactive bodies somewhere on that island? Or do they keep dumping the corpses in the ocean? If so wouldn't they be dropping them in the same place as Megatron and co where they are under constant surveillance?

The other thing I wonder about is: are some of these Decepticons actually drones in both movies? Is there a Blackout-type drone, a Bonecrusher-type drone. Maybe they aren't Transformers with a spark but just an unliving type of robot weapon only slighty more complex than the little insect bug that finds Sam in Egypt. Maybe Demolisher too is just another one like that with simple hide or destroy programming. They don't get much if any dialogue and perhaps Demolisher's line is just a recording programmed into the drone? If so these beings might not actually be "Sentient" and as such Optimus has no need to feel compassion for them.

It's not what we're used to thinking, and not supported by the toys that give these robots characterisations (that the movie doesn't), but it's a more positive way to look at IMHO.

[GoktimusPrime]

JMO but this is why I like the determinist G1 cartoon Quintesson civilian/military hardware origin story better - as well as the potential for both 'races' to complement each other ('cons go out and gather resources through conquest, 'bots stay home and keep the planet running) and avoiding the IMO hamfisted 'divine/supernatural origin' BS, also allows for more interesting moral questions: can the 'cons be blamed for being warlike if that's their basic nature? It also means that those who do defect will have greater impact due to the comparative scarcity & going-against-their-nature bit a la BW Dinobot, and that the Autobots' conscious choice to fight becomes that much more impressive (as well as giving a logical reason for the 'cons being more powerful, since the bad guys are generally supposed to be more powerful from a story POV).

The movie origin is kinda like that too - the Transformers who became Decepticons under the leadership of Lord High Protector Megatron were soldiers in Cybertron's defence forces and fought in the front line. Optimus Prime and the Transformers who became Autobots were relagated to more 'back seat' duties such as guarding the AllSpark and conducting excavations and doing scientific research etc. Ironhide was part of the advanced defence forces and would've been part of Megatron's Decepticons, but early on in the piece he felt morally conflicted after the Cybertronian military reorganised itself as the Decepticon army, and defected to the Autobots.

RE: Defiance.

[RageOnTheRoads]

Some problems with this idea:
+ Such a project would be costly - where would the Autobots acquire the resources and labour to construct such a prison without giving humans access to their technology? Optimus Prime clearly doesn't trust Cybertronian technology in human hands.
+ Acquiring land to construct this prison. I don't think the Autobots own any land on Earth - they appear to be wards of the U.S. government and I don't know if they'd be able to hold real estate in order to construct a gaol -- again, would probably involve land ownership by an Earth government who would oversee its construction (and thus gain an insight into Cybertronian technology).

Tis a valid argument, but this is the wonderful cracktastic world of Transformers,where any thing goes!

If you can have a semi truck turn into a 33 foot fully functioning robot, (despite incompatible mass and parts) a giant cube which defies pretty much every known law of nature, and a human boy communing spiritually/ psychically with the spirits of dead mechanoids in a parallel dimension, I think it's safe to say you can really go nuts and justify anything! Bay does it, and unlike you and me he doesn't even try to bring logic into the equation - not that that is necessarily a bad thing when imagination and fantasy are involved. On the contrary you can end up with something quite liberating and exciting.

Don't get me wrong, I do get where your coming from. But it would be just as easy to imagine that the highly advanced aliens could posses technology that removes the spark from the body, and then stores the raw energy and memory on a small device no larger than my thumb nail. If human kind is capable of creating sunglasses for a fly and a microscopic guitar that is still playable, the vastly technologically superior alien race must be able to create such a restraining/removal device. It's not like you have to lock the 60 foot D'con in a cell...Demolisher would probably dig his way out anyway.

We could sit and argue against, or justify Primes actions in the film as fans, and create no end of weird, wonderful and wacky scenarios but at the end of the day Prime did what he did because it was Bay's film. So naturally we got Mr Bay's own skewed perception of morality and heroism. And somehow our explosion loving, openly superficial director seems to think that Genocide is ok as long as the 'good' guys are the ones doing all the killing. okie dokie.

So lets see... in Mr Bay world we have the 'good' side committing genocide against the other side for being 'evil' in their genocidal ways.... yes, ok this line of distinction is starting to get a bit blurry

Originally Posted by Ode to a Grasshopper
Even simpler solution: have Mr "we could kill the humans/I accidentally blew up a planet" Ironhide kill him, then have Prime tell him off for it. Both Prime and Ironhide are still in character, the 'bots are still shown to be badass/acting within the realities of war, and Bay gets his gratuitous death jollies. It's not like they didn't already have an established boticidal maniac to use, but noooo...Prime's not hardcore enough!

Pure Brilliance! See it can be done! Everyone walks away happy.

Originally Posted by Lord_Zed
Well that and the fact Prime effectively brought the war (back) to earth, in the movie universe just as in the cartoon and comic, Primes actions led to the Transformers war spreading to Earth, corrupt as Earth's inhabitants maybe they are innocents in the Transformers war. Were Prime to abandon earth just because he believed its inhabitants warlike he would drop down a few notches and become even more cruel and cold.

Ah, yeah forgot about that. Good point.

[dirge]

Defenses etc in the middle of Shanghai? The Autobots are clearly based in the US.

Actually, they're based on Diego Garcia, which is nowhere near the US and not US territory, but hosts a US military instillation. It's mentioned very briefly in the film, and is so quick you'd miss it. I only picked it up because I already knew of Diego Garcia.

My 2c: it's a film built around giant explosions and little plot. Sadly, the Transformers mythos seen in this film is only there to support the summer film, which will be quickly forgotten by the majority of those who see it. The charcterisation is messy and sporadic because there's no distinct need for proper characterisation of the alien robots. I'm not saying I'm happy about it, but I've accepted it and moved on.

[Ode to a Grasshopper]

The movie origin is kinda like that too - the Transformers who became Decepticons under the leadership of Lord High Protector Megatron were soldiers in Cybertron's defence forces and fought in the front line. Optimus Prime and the Transformers who became Autobots were relagated to more 'back seat' duties such as guarding the AllSpark and conducting excavations and doing scientific research etc. Ironhide was part of the advanced defence forces and would've been part of Megatron's Decepticons, but early on in the piece he felt morally conflicted after the Cybertronian military reorganised itself as the Decepticon army, and defected to the Autobots.

RE: Defiance.

Really? Cheers, I didn't know/remember that. That makes the Movie backstory a bit more bearable IMO. Now if they can just dispense with the magical Allspark and include transformation as an 'evolutionary quirk' I'll be set. Oh God I'm thinking about this way too much again...damn.

The only problem with that origin story is it doesn't explain why all the TF's spontaneously get individual personalities with which they make those conscious choices. If the TF's were all just tools that decided the Quintessons were bad then wouldn't they be more like Skynet at the Quintessons are John Connor.

No Wi-Fi on Cybertron?
Seriously, I'd be going for a slow evolution of individual personality through acquired experience a la the Puppet Master (and to a lesser extent the Tachikoma) from Ghost in the Shell. Other examples would be R2-D2 and C-3PO (Children of the Jedi has a good example of this when C-3PO talks about his feelings towards memory wipes), or 'Andrew' from Asimov's Bicentennial Man. Prime retained his memories of being Orion Pax, as did Galvatron from Megatron, so it's quite possible the pre-Transformers would continue developing as they were recycled and upgraded by the Quints, and if I was being offlined and brought back over and over again 'cos my creators were too lazy to build more 'bots I'd get pretty ticked sooner or later too. Likewise, A-3 and Beta's group who started the rebellion were basically a small, rag-tag splinter cell of revolutionaries rather than there being a spontaneous mass uprising across Cybertron.

But it would be just as easy to imagine that the highly advanced aliens could posses technology that removes the spark from the body, and then stores the raw energy and memory on a small device no larger than my thumb nail.

Floppy disk or nothing!