I just finally saw TRANSFORMERS on DVD

[xiphias]

Can someone explain something to me?

Okay, so an Air Force Combat Controller team has the All Spark, the MacGuffin that the Decepticons and Autobots are fighting over.

The team knows that giant robots are coming to fight over it. They've even fought against the bad guys.

So, they say, "Mission City is 22 miles away. We'll take the All Spark there, and hide it while we wait for Air Force backup."

Okay.

Got that?

A USAF Special Ops team decides that the best thing to do is to draw the giant robots INTO an American city on American soil, in order to have the massive battle in the downtown of a city, so that many hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people are killed. I mean, robots fly through skyscrapers. You've got to be talking 9/11 levels of casualties here. And entirely because the USAF knowingly chose that battleground.

Um.

What?

Comments

[ex-serenejo.livejournal.com]

Hee!

Geeks are so cute when they're trying to make schlocky science fiction make sense. :-)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The sad part is -- the Transformers cartoon tended to make more sense than that. . .

[dillonpuff.livejournal.com]

did it *really*?

I remember it being kinda silly at times ....

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

"More sense than that" is not a very high bar.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

They were choosing a hiding place, not a battleground. And, don't forget, the final battle looks cooler in a city. If you find yourself fighting a hopeless battle, and making decisions based on how the results will look, you may find out that you are just a character, not a real person.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

But it looked so cool...

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

Clearly, the USAF picked up, along with the All Spark, the Idiot Ball (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotBall).

[bimmer1200.livejournal.com]

Just your standard depiction of the military in s/f movies really. From zombie movies where the military can't handle them (Say that again, the world's best trained, best equipped military in the History of the world with a plethora of high-speed projectile weapons of enormous range can't handle shambling, virtually mindless, walking zombies that move in hordes?). It's just one of the tropes of the genre.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Sadly, though, other than this, the team is actually competent and useful. I mean, they call in various weapon systems against the Decepticons in the first part of the movie, until they find one that works, they research exactly what PART of it worked, and report back, and have the military load up on that exact type of ammo (HEAT sabot, I believe). And they keep two people lasing each target to mark it while they call in targeted airstrikes on specific Decepticons, and all sorts of other things that show competence and skill.

Except for choosing to fight in a city full of civilians.

[bimmer1200.livejournal.com]

True. I guess sometimes it just doesn't pay to look at the plot too close.

[dillonpuff.livejournal.com]

maybe it was a ... ghost city ... *coughs*

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Full of screaming people and populated office buildings and lots of traffic?