Aw shucks. I mean, thanks and all, but I'm really not sure what I spewed out would be such a good movie at all. I just walked down to the corner store and back, and while I did I was thinking about where you could squeeze a human being and some conflict into that story. Cause what's in my head sort of depends on the alien robots being both alien and robotic. They're REALLY different from us, which has the potential to be interesting if you're into that sort of thing, but it doesn't make 'em relateable. Relatable? However you spell that.

So I'm thinking, okay. The President comes out and says … here, blah, whatever he says. The President can't take a shit without 30% of the country thinking it's the end of the world, so obviously there's a conflict there. There's the "We're harboring refugees" angle versus the whole "It's not our war" angle, and that's a story that's both relevant and (hey, bonus) easy to tell. But it's awfully cerebral, y'know? I don't mind that, 'cause those are the kinds of movies I happen to like, but that's not the only snack on the craft services table. What I think both the Transformers movies did well was to take a fairly relatable human character and put him in the center of the story. So much else was wrong, but props to them for that, 'cause that could have been on their list of failures, and they averted it. So yeah.

On the other hand, we could take a total War of the Worlds angle here, and introduce a POV character with absolutely no power in the story, and no large-scale goals. He just wants to get out of the burning city, he wants to find his kids, whatever. And the Big Story™ happens around him, or whatever. That's okay too, but that story has been told before, so I'm not wild about it.

I guess what attracts me about the Transformers concept — not the cartoons or the toys or the movies, but just the central concept — is this idea of mixing the utterly mundane with the ineffably incomprehensible. There's this giant robot from outer space who literally could not be more different from me, who I'd probably have a hard time even recognizing as sentient he's so different, and yet he hides out for fear of his life by disguising himself as a garbage truck.

That idea feels, like, sexy to me, or whatever. It's seductive. That premise is a great big sandbox, and there's a lot of playing you can do in it. I'm just pissed that what we've gotten instead is a decades-long series of kids' shows and stupid movies that exist for no purpose other than to sell toys and cars, respectively.

Anyway. That's how I see it. But I'm just some guy who listened to a podcast and got all typey.

No farting parachutes, though, right? Somebody tell me that there can be no farting of parachutes.

Sweet jeebus, the first justifiable backstory for the transformers I've ever heard. Nice.

One way to fix the problem of balancing relatable human characters and giant robots fighting, both so essential to a film like this, is to give the robots human allies. They don't have to be operators, because the robots can drive themselves. Maybe they're the people who rode in the vehicles to maintain the illusion all this time. Maybe they're some kind of technicians to change the robot's oil. Hell, maybe the robots just need people with tiny hands to pick things up from narrow spaces.

Now the alien robots can be as alien as they need to be, but their buddies have worked with them for so long, they've come to understand the way they communicate, like the way Luke talks to R2, or the way you can listen to your car's engine and know that it's trying to tell you something. Now the humans are providing the dialogue and mirroring the conflict which the robots can play out on a larger scale. Really, they need some way to tie the story back to experiences you and I might have, so the more like us the humans are, the better.

It could even add another point of conflict, where the decepticons would never debase themselves by taking these delicate little meatbags onboard, but then we lose the element of the bad guys also having someone to speak for them.

Hey, no cross-pollination, Hamil. We've got to keep these boards separate or things'll get messy.

Jeffery's rewrite is great, but he's also right that you absolutely need Shia to be integral to the story. Gregory's take on who is what is slightly better. No kid would want robot toys that transform into a locomotive, a turbine generator, an ICBM, or the Large Hadron Collider, but we might need some other alternatives to the Pentagon and the Utah Jazz. We obviously need an iPhone and a PS3 and whatever else kids think is cool. Jet boots or something. Electric toothbrush, maybe. Kids still think that's cool, right?

But if the Autobots are hiding from the big bad Decepticons, why would the Autobots kick ass when the Decepticons arrive? Maybe... the Allspark has been carried to earth by Bumblebee and Shia has found it and befriended Bumblebee, bringing Shia into the story and giving the Autobots the advantage they lacked in the prolog.

And Megan Fox is still the superhot chick. Only this time she isn't orange, okay? Seriously. Can we address this?

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It's important to note that I was 19 when Transformers (and GI Joe and also Australian rules football) was on TV, and I only watched it one time when I was sick and hopped up on four cold medicines.

This thread makes me miss Harrell.

Damn, Zarban's on fire this week.