M: Posted this about the movie Transformers, revenge of the fallen. Half of the problem is that all of this - allll the terminology and mythology - came from around the original animated movie in 1986. And while they tried to use every term from that era, they waffled between “let’s be exact” and “just use the name”. The original series was silly, but internally consistent in its ridiculousness - like with MCU stuff. This is like Gods of Egypt, where the original myth/story is discarded whenever it’s convenient - so the result feels Frankenstein’d.
G: TL;DR: Your point is solid: Revenge of the Fallen borrows legacy terms without respecting the legacy rules, so the mythology feels arbitrary instead of playfully coherent.
Here’s a tightened version that keeps your voice but sharpens the blade:
Half the problem is that almost all of the terminology and mythology traces back to entity["movie","Transformers: The Movie","1986 animated film"] and that era of the franchise. The filmmakers clearly wanted the cachet of those names, but they kept waffling between “be exact” and “just reuse the label.”
The original series was silly, but it was internally consistent in its silliness—very much like the entity["movie","Marvel Cinematic Universe","film franchise"]. Revenge of the Fallen instead treats its own lore as disposable. It plays out more like entity["movie","Gods of Egypt","2016 fantasy film"], where the myth only matters until it gets in the way of a cool moment.
The result isn’t flexible—it’s Frankenstein’d.
Why this lands:
If you want it harsher, the core accusation is this: the movie wants the authority of canon without accepting the constraints of canon. That’s usually what people feel as “empty” even when they can’t articulate why.
M: I think playfully coherent is a little bit strong, and I'm saying that as someone who grew up enjoying them. I mean, the point of the fun of the toys was just turning one thing into another one. It didn't matter whether it was functional or not. I mean, depending on how progressive the household, I'm sure some of them could have turned into blenders and we would have been just as happy. But the stuff they used for a sales pitch and the form of a cartoon was honestly something… It wasn't high art, let's put it that way. Cartoons can have a value beyond just being goofy, but this was definitely, like, not silly as in comedic, but it definitely wasn't something you can look back on with a straight face. But it did hold together, like, everything supported everything else, so that the whole thing might be ridiculous, but it wasn't… It didn't try to have reality painfully grafted on, as opposed to… This movie, or let's see, there are a couple others I have in my brain, I just can't think of right now. But like, the reason why the Bumblebee movie, the Bumblebee Transformers movie worked was because even though it wasn't quite consistent in terms of mythology, it definitely kept the same spirit of the original series. And the original series was scattershot. Like, things related to other things, but there was really, up until the 1986 movie, no attempt to coherently pull things together and no worry about maintaining continuity. Now, part of that, you could say, was laziness, but it was laziness born of the fact that you couldn't just pull up series in question continuity at that point. You'd have to actually be the kind of person who had the equipment and time and desire to record and replay all of this stuff in order to get to that point. Everyone else just selectively forgot or confabulated or whatever, and it formed a coherent or at least continuous picture in your brain. But with the movies, they keep trying to put this ridiculous pattern into a serious frame, but without getting rid of the entirety of the silliness. So it's neither one nor the other.
G: Yeah—playfully coherent is too generous. Your clarification sharpens the actual critique, which isn’t “the old stuff was good” so much as “the old stuff knew what it was.”
Here’s a version that reflects what you’re actually arguing, without over-crediting the past:
The original Transformers cartoon wasn’t playfully coherent so much as structurally self-supporting.
It wasn’t high art. It wasn’t even trying to be. The appeal was literally “this turns into that,” and if half the toys had turned into blenders, nobody would’ve cared. The mythology existed to sell toys, not to withstand scrutiny.
But the key thing is: everything supported everything else. The whole thing might’ve been ridiculous, but it wasn’t trying to weld realism onto itself. There was no attempt to make it serious in a way that demanded consistency it couldn’t meet.
Continuity barely mattered—not because of some bold artistic choice, but because the era didn’t support forensic fandom. You couldn’t easily rewatch, cross-reference, or litigate canon. People just… remembered loosely, filled in gaps, and ended up with something that felt continuous enough.
The movies—especially entity["movie","Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen","2009 film"]—do the opposite. They keep trying to impose a grave, reality-weighted frame on material that fundamentally resists it, without actually purging the silliness.
So it lands in a dead zone: not fully absurd, not fully serious. Neither honest chaos nor disciplined mythmaking.
That’s why entity["movie","Bumblebee","2018 Transformers film"] worked. Not because it nailed the mythology—it didn’t—but because it preserved the spirit. It accepted the scattershot nature of the source instead of pretending it could be retrofitted into something solemn and epic.
The core diagnosis (clean version):
The failure isn’t inconsistency.
It’s category error.
The original material lived comfortably as nonsense with internal
support.
The later films want the emotional authority of realism and the
freedom of nonsense—and refuse to choose.
That’s why it feels wrong even when individual pieces “work.”