Femme-Bot Friday #89
I'm honestly still not sure what I think of TransFormers One.
While it was great to have a fully CG animated movie - and one that
looked fantastic, at that - if felt more like a series of
loosely-connected set-pieces than a coherent, considered -
or even valuable - addition to existing TransFormers lore. I'm not a
great fan of origin stories at the best of times, but the problem with
creating one for the cinematic TransFormers oeuvre is that the general
public will inevitably ask
"but how does this connect to Bayverse?" and, no matter how one tries
to convince them it's a new, wholly separate continuity, that's too
much for the general public to grasp, given the cultural impact -
for better or worse - of the Bayverse series movies. After all, each
attempt to reboot the franchise since the diminishing returns of those
five movies has met with failure - including TransFormers One.
On top of that, I've always been dubious of the concept of the T-Cog -
the singular component that grants a Cybertronian their capacity to
transform
- because it simply makes no sense. How would a race evolve with such a huge
aspect of their 'biology' reliant on a single 'organ', the removal of which
poses no significant problem for their function? And why should the
reintroduction of a T-Cog to their living anatomy -
particularly a T-Cog from another Cybertronian, as presented in this
movie
- trigger an instant increase in physical size, rather than simply
unlock the ability to transform that must surely have been already built-in?
All of which is, let's face it,
entirely beside the point for a write-up of a non-transforming 'model kit'
based on one of the movie's characters, so perhaps I should leave further discussion till I (can be bothered to) get round to writing up my full, unfiltered thoughts about the movie...
Perhaps after I inflict it on Courtney give it a second
watch. Instead, for now, let's focus on the supreme irony that is a
non-transforming figure of the transforming, upgraded form of Elita-1.