Right in the glowy red weak point of nostalgia!

Wow, and just like that they've got my eleven bucks. What am I talking about? I'll tell you, but first I'm going to say don't judge me. I mean, obviously you're going to anyway, I just feel the need to say so because I'm going to give the people who make the next Transformers movie eleven dollars. Again. But wait, let me explain!

The worst part wasn't so much how terrible Michael Bay's
Transformers movies were, it's that I kept going to see them.

"Arghhh! What evolutionary process would
leave me with such an obvious vulnerability!"

-Contra III's level 1 Boss

So first, some background. Obviously, I'm a grown-up adult with all the usual things that entails: a job, bills, a blog where I admit to having given Michael Bay money, but like many people in my general age range, I have a fairly exploitable weak spot. A large, obvious, un-shielded glowing red orb which, if attacked with nostalgia-based weaponry causes me to explode in a spectacular eruption of whatever disposable income I may have. Sure, it's not a lot, but the people who keep cranking out the thus far execrable live-action movies don't seem to mind. They don't seem to mind at all.

Above: Starscream...I guess?

I went into the first one without much in the way of expectations and it was ok. Just ok. It was fun to see gigantic, computer rendered versions of the toys I played with as a child kick the shit out of each other for a couple hours, even if they didn't really look quite the way I remembered them. Like at all...It was 2007 and I suppose everyone was just really excited about seeing the Transformers in glorious CGI to worry about details like whether or not Starscream looked like the character we remember or a blurry robot gorilla, but whatever.

Then the sequel came out and began a trajectory of aggressively terrible filmmaking that would make us all wonder whether or not we were stupider for having sat through each successive entry in the series.

If you remember this moment from the second
Transformers movie, then you know what I mean.

Pictured: Optimus and Megatron fighting
is somehow less than meets the eye.
Seriously what am I even looking at?

Also, and I know it's a lot to ask that a Michael Bay movie based on a thirty-five year old toy commercial to make sense and I can live with that but the characters, the titular robots in disguise, were unrecognizable. Which is weird since the entire film series is predicated on stimulating the nostalgia glands of the fans and extracting money. Optimus Prime and Megatron and the rest were rendered as blurry, overly-complicated assemblages of moving parts that the human brain is simply incapable of parsing.

It's not like he needed the money,
so I'm thinking...cocaine?

All in all, these movies are terrible and yet thanks to idiots like me who paid actual money to see enough of them that they kept making more. That is until they became less profitable as was the case with the fifth in the series: Transformers: The Last Knight. Yes, the one with Sir Anthony Hopkins for reasons we may never understand. Anyway, it was bad enough to warrant a soft reboot which brings me to my initial point: I'm probably going to pay to see another Transformers movie.

But before you judge me-huh? Fine, before you judge me even more harshly than you already are, let me explain with this single image:

Hey look, it's identifiably Soundwave!
Now was that really so hard?

Director Travis Knight is probably best
known for Kubo and the Two Stings
and for not being Michael Bay.

The new film, a prequel/sort of reboot, directed by someone who is not Micheal Bay, is called Bumblebee and has won me over with a simple strategy based on exploiting my childhood memories of watching Transfomers. The new trailer reveals that the film's robots are based much more closely on the recognizable designs from the 80's animated series and the tone-at least as presented in the trailer-seems to be a bit more subdued and character oriented rather than the incoherent hyper-violent shitshows we've come to expect.

The title and trailer seem to suggest that the movie focuses on Bumblebee, while the other robots we see seem to be confined to some flashback scenes from the Cybertronian Wars and-huh? Why yes, I am single, why do you ask? Anyway, like I was saying, it seems like classic Transformers are mostly just cameo appearances there to draw thirty-somethings back to the theaters, but it's working on me. Will it be any good? Who knows? The point is they know just where to hit us. Right in the nostalgia.

I...here...just take my money. Goddamnit...