Vehicle Mode:
So, for once, we get a piece of TransFormers fiction featuring a character who transforms into a terrestrial fighter jet (albeit an entirely made-up variety, I gather) who isn't Starscream (who was destroyed in Dark of the Moon and, unlike Megatron, doesn't get himself resurrected for every movie)... or even Thundercracker or Skywarp (who have previously been Starscream repaints, only receiving new noggins for the first movie's toyline). What we have here is a totally unique character created for the movie... transforming into a totally unique jet created for the toyline. Had I not looked it up on TFWiki, I wouldn't have known that this wasn't based on a real-life jet, as it looks reasonably convincing apart from the massive jumble of its undercarriage. From the front and sides, the folded up legs look as though they could, conceivably, be bulked-up versions of actual jet parts, made larger to accommodate the robot. From the back, however, the illusion is broken entirely by the massive robot feet stuck to the sides of the plane.
Nitro appears to be molded largely in a slightly pearlescent grey plastic, with the nose section and stripes at the backs of the main wings and rear vertical fin painted matte black. The wings also feature thin red stripes, perpendicular to the black along with bold, black Decepticon insignia - no disguising this jet's allegiance. I find it a little puzzling that none of the black paint aligns with the sculpted panel lines, nor does it connect with any of the structural parts molded in black plastic, but that's just me being fussy. Aside from this, the only paintwork visible on jet mode is actually in service of robot mode, being detail paint added to Nitro's legs. The black paint on the nose doesn't extend into the body of the jet, so it comes to a very abrupt end just behind the cockpit and around the wings - they might have been able to get away with not painting the small intakes either side of the cockpit, but for a transformation hinge therein being molded in black plastic. Overall, it doesn't look bad... All very authentically military in its simplicity, but equally it does look rather minimum effort, particularly in that they didn't paint any of the frame of the cockpit's canopy. Large sections on each side of the transparent part have been left transparent - and are clearly supposed to be part of the nose and are only part of the canopy on the toy to ensure there's enough space to fit a Titan Master into the cockpit...
...Because, yes, Nitro is Titan Master-compatible in both modes. TLK Cogman features a Titan Master - representing the actual Cogman robot, as featured in the film - and the whole reason behind that was that, in one draft of the script, Cogman was supposed to decapitate Nitro and commandeer his body. This toy also reflects that intention, but Nitro himself wasn't made a HeadMaster/Titan Master, just made to accommodate them. The cockpit is actually surprisingly detailed, with sculpted seat details and a set of three (undecorated) instrument panels at the front of the cockpit, above the socket for a Titan Master's heel peg.
These days, one can generally safely assume that TransFormers jets won't have landing gear... They've always been bit of a luxury, and really not all that necessary in a toy, but Nitro does at least feature a couple of molded wheel-substitutes toward the rear of the jet, as well as a fold-out wheel in the bottom of the nose section. Naturally, this isn't a rolling wheel, but it at least serves to hold Nitro up above whatever surface one cares to place him on... Though he does also have a dedicated socket in the jet's underside/robot's chest, for plugging him into some form of flight stand. It's the same hexagonal port that has been added to every figure over the last few years/toylines... Puzzling that Hasbro don't market a suitable stand themselves, really.
The wings seem to extend a reasonable distance from the main fuselage, though less so if taking the robot's legs into account. They also feature what could - if we're feeling charitable - be a pair of VTOL turbines stuck to the undersides, which bulk them out further. The left wingtip on mine is either misaligned or distorted, such that it bends downward slightly from the outermost joint. It's not that the joint is loose, and the last wing section is sagging, it's that final plastic piece that's slightly twisted, as far as I can see. Still, given the choice between this copy and the one without a head, I think I made the right choice at TFNation...
Weapons-wise, Nitro comes packed with a pair of white-painted missile racks, each made up of three missiles. These plug into the traditional under-the-wing 5mm socket and seem to be about the right size for the jet, but they end up butted up against both the robot's legs and the turbine things folded up on the undersides of the wings. Not that they'd need to rotate, it's just a bit fiddly and tight getting them in or out. Upon closer inspection of the nose, it's possible he has a couple of sculpted guns right near the front but, to be honest, and for all I know, they could just as easily be retractable nozzles for aerial refuelling.
Robot Mode:
I've said many times before how much I've liked the bold new direction the movies took with their CGI character design - I certainly ain't one of those fans who insisted the robots should simply be upgraded CGI representations of the animation models from the 80's cartoon (probably the same weirdos who think the Masterpiece line is better now the figures look more like their cartoon counterparts). It's not that they were necessarily realistic - the transformations are clearly fudged, but in a way that is pretty convincing to the eye and, in any case, they're giant alien robots that can disguise themselves as other things - realism was never going to be a consideration. Part of what I liked was that the robots on screen seem to have mass and genuine physical presence, even if they lack decent personalities and, let's face it, adequate screen time. The designs have seemed contrived and convoluted to some, but they at least tried to look as though the robots were made out of approximations of the components of the vehicle they turned into, and with remarkably few exceptions, I reckon those giant alien robots have been represented very well in CGI.
That said, that hasn't always translated well to the toys, and certainly the figures from Age of Extinction onward have seemed oversimplified in comparison to those of the first three movies' toylines, with some being pretty much robot action figures concealed inside vehicle shells. That being the case, it's nice to see that Nitro isn't quite the stock 'robot folded up on the underside of a jet' and that, not only does he have a decent robot mode, but he actually makes better use of some jet parts - notably the wings - than almost any other TransFormers toy before him. On the downside, he does have a large flap of jet - featuring all the tailfins - hanging off his back, like a cape stuck between the turbine things, and it hangs very low, making it visible between his legs.
Nevertheless, and despite his obvious bulk, Nitro is an elegantly designed figure. The legs have a subtly digitigrade look thanks to their armour panelling, but nothing about the joints suggests they're supposed to move that way, it's just that his armour panels protrude forward and back at the ankle in a way that doesn't entirely align with standard, humanoid legs and the fact that the 'internal' parts of his legs are painted black makes them sink into the background. This faux-digitigrade effect is emphasised by the jointed top panel of his leg armour, which can fold down onto the thighs when his legs are bent.
Nitro's paint job could be one of the most disappointing of the most recent movie line. Robot mode is still mostly the same pearlescent grey, with certain joints molded in black plastic, and a huge amount of glossy black paint applied liberally all over the figure, soaking up much of the sculpted detail on his lower abdomen, arms and legs. Part of his left arm - the mounting for his wrist-mounted cannon - is painted silver, but almost every other robot part that isn't outer armour is painted black, with a few details on his belly, tubes on his lower legs and panels on his feet picked out in a dull brown. It looks as though they may have been aiming for either gold or copper, but whoever chose the colours needs to get a better handle on their paint options. I gather from articles online that Hasbro's spec sheets for their toys often reference Pantone numbers, despite these printing inks not fully aligning with the paints available for decorating plastic toys, so perhaps this is an example of that disparity. Whether it's poor judgement on the part of the Hasbro staff who specified the colours, or those at the factory who tried to match the spec, the result is a paint so unappealing, I'm almost glad its use was so limited.
It's a real shame that so much of the torso, arm, and 'internal' leg detail is just swallowed up by the excess of black paint... I mean, if they couldn't afford silver or gunmetal for all of that, a dark grey would have sufficed, and would have revealed more of the sculpt. Beneath the armour panels are tubes, cables, gears, etc. that now only show up because of the glossiness of the black paint. There's detail molded onto various transformation parts, and even on his shoulders and thighs - on areas normally obscured by the grey, hinged armour - as well as within the hollowed-out sections of his left arm. Someone really went to town, lovingly sculpting this figure, only for it to get the most basic paint job imaginable. Worse still, where black paint should have been applied - on the front of his shins, for example - it's utterly absent, and the finer details at the top of his chest, such as the 'tamper-sealed' circular details on either side of his main chest armour, are lacking any paintwork to highlight their presence.
And that's before even getting to the complete absence of graffiti - in the movie, Nitro Zeus has tags spraypainted on his shoulders, but all this poor fella gets is a '13' stamped in red on the left shoulder and either a '1' or a '7' in black on the right thigh plate. In some respects, I think I'd liked to have seen a black wash applied to all the grey plastic, but that may have just made things worse...
Weapons-wise, Nitro thankfully has more than just his jet mode's missiles. These are relocated to the top edges of his back-mounted turbine things (not sure if these are also weapons, but they look like they should be!), and can be directed to a degree, while the missile racks can turn on their 5mm pegs. Going by the CGI, I think the missile racks should have been mounted on the sides of the turbine pods rather than the tops, but they look OK where they are. Next, he has a honking great cannon mounted on his left arm which is created by extending jet mode's afterburner out from its mounting on the forearm, and this weapon reminds me equally of G1 Megatron's fusion cannon and DotM Shockwave's arm cannon. His right arm carries a jumble of jet nose parts, folded out into something that could be either a weapon - it does, after all, feature the two sculpted possibly-guns on the central section, as well as a couple of fold-out spikes that resemble the limbs of a crossbow - or a shield. Since I've not seen the movie, I'm not sure what it's supposed to be, but since Nitro Zeus seems only to have vaguely resembled the concept art, this particular bit of equipment may not even appear in the film. Somewhat concealed by the overuse of black plastic, Nitro also has a pair of fixed, stubby Gatling guns, one mounted on either side of his head, in case that extra little bit of firepower is needed.
The head sculpt is an oddity in that it matches neither the artwork on the box, nor the character's appearance in the movie. The former is simply due to the orientation of the spikes on the sides of his head - while it certainly matches one draft of Josh Nizzi's concept art, had they followed the version in the box art, they'd be sticking out sideways and getting in the way. The latter is one of the more curious elements of the movie's production design. Nitro Zeus' head in the movie appeared to be virtually a cut-and-paste from either Shockwave from Dark of the Moon or the two-headed KSI drone from Age of Extinction (both having been designed by Nizzi), with only minor amendments and a change of colour. Personally, I think this version was the better choice, though I'm not entirely keen on the paint job. It's sculpted so the 'face', such as it is, features the four 'eyes' of the box art, but those sections of the face are completely painted over in black, with only the single, central 'eye' picked out in yellow. Except that's not entirely true... Because the back of the head is molded in translucent grey plastic and, upon unscrewing his noggin, it transpires that the face does actually have five holes in it, and all five 'eyes' are painted yellow. Paint had seeped into the smaller holes rendering them even less effective but, had the yellow paint been left off, the light piping would have been decent enough for all of Nitro's optics to glow slightly, and I suspect the pin-pricks of light from the smaller eyes would have been quite cool to see. The 'horns' on the sides of his head are a separate piece of black plastic wedged between the translucent grey back of his head and the pearlised grey of his face. They're not so much outright wrong, just sculpted at the wrong angle - had they been tilted forward slightly, he'd have looked much more like his on-screen counterpart. The black piece can actually be fitted backwards, just about, to give a slightly different look... it's no more accurate, but interesting to see nonetheless. Given the 'wrong' head sculpt has been used for the toy, it's almost strange to see it painted in a way that brings it more in line with the character's movie appearance.
Of course, being Titan Master compatible means one needn't be stuck with the stock head...
Headmaster Gimmick:
Nitro's head is mounted on a ball-jointed block which plugs into a standard Titan Master socket, so it's not just Cogman that can take over his body - any Titan Master (or Prime Master) can be plugged in, with some interesting results... Personally, I'm actually surprised by how well TR Windblade's head works on Nitro's body, considering how butch its proportions are.
Along with a Reprolabels set, it's possible to use the Thunderwing head from the Titans Return/Siege on Cybertron boxed set to turn Nitro into a serviceable full-body Titans Return Thunderwing and, from what I've seen, it actually looks excellent - the semi-organic look of Nitro's body and the overall colourscheme suits the G1 Pretender very well. It's not exactly IDW-style, but probably as close as you can get with a contemporary figure... But, of course, with Power of the Primes revisiting Pretenders, a proper PotP Thunderwing may have been possible, had Hasbro not fixated on the idea of shutting down the Prime Wars trilogy early, so they could move on to the next new toyline...
While Nitro certainly isn't as complicated as some of the Revenge of the Fallen toys, he has easily the most complex - and fun - transformation in The Last Knight's toyline. At it's core, it's weirdly similar to the Titanium Series Jetfire, in that one arms forms the jet's nose, the other its rear end, while the wings fold out from the robot's back and the legs fold into the sides of the jet. What's quite interesting is that it's very nearly possible to successfully mistransform him due to the myriad joints connecting the arms to the body, and the minimal difference caused by rotating the hips the wrong way. The only thing that stops it working, in fact, is that the grey shoulder armour can only be fully accommodated within the body with these joints folded up in a very particular way, and also the wings don't align properly with the legs unless the hips are correctly oriented. The wings are rather frustrating, in that they have to roll up into a square tube, capped by the turbine-things, which are prone to popping off due to the minimal clearance for their connecting peg/socket. I've also found that the crossbar pieces of his right arm's shield/weapon thing are prone to catching on the edge of the slots they stow in when transforming him back to vehicle mode. Another clearance issue is present in the limbs on the right side, where the leg lifts out from the chest on an extra little dedicated hinge, but still doesn't quite get out of the way of the internal joints that transfer the arm back and forth between its positions at the shoulder and at the front of the jet.
Given the weird look of the robot, he's surprisingly mobile, though the shoulder joints in particular are somewhat tighter than the transformation joints/clips intended to hold them in place. The right shoulder pegs into position slightly more firmly than the left, but either can slip in its mounting before the intended joint moves. There are no ball joints on Nitro - the shoulders rotate 360° forward and back on separate joints (or they would if it weren't for the turbine backpacks getting in the way) and 90° outward, with the grey shoulder armour hinged separately to ensure it doesn't get in the way. Both arms have full bicep rotation and elbows that bend about 90°, with the left hand also able to tilt at the wrist due to transformation. Remarkably, the large mass of jet nose on his right forearm doesn't hinder the elbow, though there's barely any clearance for the last couple of degrees. The hip joints, much like the shoulders, offer excellent range, the knees have a surprisingly deep bend, well beyond the standard 90°... and it's not even due to transformation, as the legs need to straighten out for jet mode. The feet are probably the biggest surprise, as they tilt back and forward quite a bit more than is required for transformation, allowing for good, dramatic posing and a fairly convincing 'walking' stance. The large footprint also gives the figure good stability in some crouch poses that would make other figures fall backward without a larger heel spur. He can't quite do the dancing poses he adopts during his Suicide Squad rip-off introduction sequence, but he can get quite close. Additionally, the turbine backpack is supposed to be poseable - each pod hinges left and right slightly on the transformation hinge, but they can also tilt so that the turbines and missiles point forward - unfortunately, both are rather loose on mine, so they're prone to slipping back to a more upright position.
While it's a shame more wasn't done with the Titan Master-compatibility gimmick, Nitro is nevertheless one of the best of the more recent movie line figures. It's disappointing that it has such a basic paint job - particularly in comparison to the gorgeous upscaled and upgraded version created by Black Mamba and released this year - but it's important to view Voyager class Nitro in context, and remember that Hasbro make kids toys, meaning Nitro is a toy made for kids to play with. The fact that it's an awesomely detailed model where most of the detail is rendered invisible by Hasbro's old favourite, infinitely frustrating trick of using black paint instead of silver, gunmetal or even just grey is disappointing to an adult collector but, frankly, easily predictable by anyone who remembers the Leader class Megatron toys from either the first movie or Revenge of the Fallen and highly unlikely to bother the target audience of kids. And you only have to look at any other toyline to see that this issue is not unique to TransFormers toys... Nor is it even a new phenomenon, really. Coupled with all the recent price rises, however, some fans seem to take it as a personal affront. Granted, Nitro set me back £30 at TFNation, when I'd have said the former £20-£25 Voyager price tag would have been far better value for money, but he's still remarkably good considering the engineering cutbacks and the average quality of toys in the Age of Extinction and The Last Knight lines, and the fact that he can be easily repurposed as a Titans Return figure just adds to the fun.
The biggest plus for me, personally, is how unique his look is among TransFormers jets - I like Nitro so much, I absolutely will not begrudge Hasbro any repaints, despite Nitro's uniqueness diminishing with each one. It's just a great-looking and very fun mold, far more deserving of reuse than any of the Bumblebee figures Hasbro is happy to churn out.
What I don't understand about Nitro is why, given the sheer number of TransFormers toys with jet vehicle modes we've had over the years, the creative team at Paramount decided to create a whole new character rather than introducing, say, Skywarp, Thundercracker, even one of the G1 Coneheads as actual characters in the movie franchise. While I've seen it suggested that Nitro was some sort of protégé of Shockwave - hence the resemblance of their CGI heads - surely it would have made more sense to feature either of the other G1 seekers, come to avenge their former commander, Starscream, following his ignominious demise in Dark of the Moon?
Considering this mold has now been reused - with a new head sculpt - as Studio Series Thundercracker, it feels as though the filmmakers have once again ignored what may have resonated with the fans, to create something the wider audience would in any case be ambivalent about. Given Starscream's display of aerial prowess in the original live action movie (sadly never to be repeated, as he became increasingly cartoonish in his incompetence in the later movies), I'd love to have seen Skywarp teleporting about, or Thundercracker unleashing his sonic booms in one of the battle scenes. One can only hope that a Studio Series Skywarp will follow, either using the SS Starscream mold (giving me an excuse to actually buy one iteration of that upsized and upgraded version of the DotM mold) or another Nitro repaint... Hopefully with another unique head, in either case.
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