This seems like a good time to post this, with the release of Avengers on Blu-Ray.
[ul]
[li]At the start of the movie, bad guys retrieve a powerful object deposited long ago (pillars in Transformers, tesseract in Avengers)[/li][li]This object is used to open portals[/li][li]From rooftops in a city during the climax[/li][li]With the help of a former good guy (boss in Transformers, scientist in Avengers)[/li][li]Bad guys are aliens[/li][li]Who are gods on their home planet (the line “we are gods” or similar was used in both movies)[/li][li]Their aim is to enslave humanity[/li][li]By bringing in an army using the portals[/li][li]The attack is stopped by closing the portals[/li][/ul]
I think the final battles of the 2 movies are very similar, which is what started me thinking about this.
Yes, they were both big-budget popcorn movies about a group of extraordinary beings fighting off an alien invasion. Neither aspired to be high art, both aspired to be entertaining.
One movie had great action direction, decent acting, witty dialog, and interesting characters. The other didn’t.
I saw them both in a theater. That is about all I can come up with. One was an amazing and funny spectacle that I saw several times and can’t wait to see again on Blu Ray and the other was just insulting noise.
I liked the Avengers way, way, way better than I liked the Transformers and I thought it was clearly a better film. Of course there were similarities as described in the OP, but then again all mass marketed summer movies are all going to follow similar story arcs.
The biggest thing for me is that I just don’t like Michael Bay’s vision for these Transformers films. I concede that his Transformers are not supposed to be the G1 Transformers, the Transformers Animated Transformers, or any other preexisting universe of Transformers, but they still don’t seem right to me. The Autobots don’t seem very heroic and are just as prone to cause damage and wreak havoc across the planet as the Decepticons are. They only difference is that they say they’re good. In Dark of the Moon, Optimus Prime let a bunch of people in Chicago die in a contrived plan to teach the humans how they need the Autobots. The Autobots also caused a lot of needless damage when they landed on Earth in the first movie.
Now add the fact that Bay’s vision of clever character moments include giant balls clanging under Devastator and a heroic arc of redemption for Sentinel Prime where he redeems himself by… getting his head chopped off by Optimus Prime. He didn’t redeem himself. It was handled like an after thought. “Oh yeah, guess we’ll kill Sentinel.”
Compare that to the Avengers. Whedon gives us quiet character moments like the early scene with Stark and Pepper, but he also delivers bigger action moments that also feel true to the characters and credible in how they should behave.
