Nerd Processor
Stop Putting Humans in ‘Transformers’ Movies
The case for movies exclusively about giant robots fighting each other
Please imagine what Star Trek: The Next Generation would be like if Wesley Crusher had been the main character. Or if Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom followed only his sidekick, Short Round. Or Friends, seen entirely through the eyes of Marcel the Monkey. None of these sound good or even make sense, right? So why are the stars of the Transformers movies humans instead of, you know… Transformers?
If you only know the franchise because of Michael Bay’s five incredibly popular yet truly awful films, which all have humans in the leading roles, it might never have occurred to you to consider a Transformers movie without a bankable Hollywood lead like Mark Wahlberg or Shia LaBoeuf (okay, well, previously bankable) as the main character. In fact, I bet some of you are trying to imagine Bay’s movies without the human characters in them and having a hard time figuring out how the movie would be more than 45 minutes or so.
This would be true, but it doesn’t have to be. The Transformers don’t take the back seat in their own movies because they are inherently bad characters. It’s because Michael Bay has never understood or even particularly liked the…
