With the Borg, considering their technological prowess, they could easily extract eggs and sperm from their own drones and develop test-tube baby borg. At least that's always how I figured they did it. I can't imagine borg drones having intercourse. I mean, they're just covered in all that tech junk.
Dominic wrote:
I like how the Autobots were willing to blow up a friendly planet with real infrastructure....but never once launched a "kill 'em all" attack on Charr.
Dom
-also recalls Rodimus feeling bad for the Decepticons in FFoD.
Ooh, good calls on both counts! Hadn't even thought of that. Seriously, if Rodimus were that concerned about the threat the Decepticons posed to the rest of the universe, why not destroy Charr? Especially considering how much death and destruction the 'cons had wreaked over the course of countless millions of years and also how disorganized and in tatters the 'cons were after Unicron's attack, why wouldn't he launch an all-out attack on Charr?
And it's not as though Rodimus didn't intend for Paradron's destruction to take out the entire Decepticon invasion force, because he didn't give any warning to the enemy. If it weren't for Galvatron's over-developed paranoia, the 'cons wouldn't have evacuated when they did.
Shockwave wrote:Heroes give us something to aspire to, a standard to set for ourselves. When the hero gets written in a way that falls short of that, it's disappointing. I would say that the Autobots are being portrayed a little more realistic, they are at war and killing does have to be a part of that for survival if nothing else, but it's not something we're used to in TFs. You can have a non lethal war in a 30 minutes Saturday morning cartoon, but that doesn't work for translating that into a "realistic" live action movie.
I will give the Bay movies credit for making the Autobots proactive for a change and going out to hunt down their enemies, rather than always reacting to whatever evil scheme Megatron has lined up. I used to always complain that the 'bots always sat around doing nothing, waiting for something bad to happen, when they should be out trying to take out Decepticons. So now we finally got it, but the portrayal seems to have left a bad taste in the mouths of some. I understand where the backlash is coming from though. It's okay to show the heroes being badass buttkickers, but we don't necessarily want to see Optimus Prime reveling in the bodily harm he's inflicting. The whole, "GIVE ME YOUR FACE!" line kind of screams of Prime crossing the line.
For me, the scene in RotF that was really handled poorly was the opening skirmish with Sideways. With Demolishor, sure, we can see that he's destroying everything in his path and mowing down innocent bystanders. With Sideways, all we're shown on-screen is a Decepticon sitting idly, not doing anything wrong at all, suddenly coming under attack by 6 Autobots and a team of NEST soldiers. Sideways flees for his life until he's killed by Sideswipe, who then quips about how damn good he is at killing Decepticons. No quips or verbal jabs from Sideways.
I understand that we're simply expected to know that, because he's a Decepticon, Sideways was most likely up to no good. But from a visual story-telling perspective, it does a poor job of establishing the good and bad guys. If the faction symbols had been reversed, we'd most likely be talking about how evil those 6 Decepticons were for ganging up on one lone Autobot who wasn't even fighting back.
David Slack, a producer on the Teen Titans cartoon, said in an interview that they have something called the squint test. It refers to how much explaining needs to be done. He said that when an episode opens and kids see some guy standing on top of a tipped over armored car with money spilling out, they know he's doing something bad. If you do the squint test on Sideways, he was just sitting there doing nothing. That's not good.
