[lesser_satan]

Wow. Have kids today ever even heard of the Transformers? If they're going to dredge up '80s childhood memorabelia, I wish they'd bring back the Garbage Pail Kids.

[HitmanLV]

You seem to have really run with the 'Our world, their war' slogan. There's nothing notably liberal about that tag line. Wait and see the film.

By the way, did you see 'Munich?'

[Starter]

I think you're jumping at shadows here. Yes, there's political bias in Hollywood. A lot of it. But not every change made is due to politics. In the case of this film, I think it's simply a case of "trying to translate the source material into something that will work as a movie." Let me put on my Michael Bay hat for a sec and walk you through it:

"Okay, The Transformers. We've got a bunch of alien robots fighting here on Earth over energy. But we don't know that. To us, there's just a bunch of weird alien machines fighting each other and blowing stuff up. Yeah. Blowing stuff up is good. And even worse, they can disguise themselves as our machines. Okay, we've got the good guys, the Autobots. They're mostly cars. That'll be easy to work with. The bad guys? Let's see. They're, er, fighter jets. And a gun. And a boombox and tapes. And a train. Which also turns into a space shuttle. What the hell? Wait! Here's some that are construction equipment! Oh, but if I add them in, I'll probably have to add the Aerialbots in as well for balance, and dear lord, I've already got 20 of these robots in the movie already. Sigh.

Okay, it's going to be kind of hard to sneak fighter jets in. They're not really stealthy, and if you see on in a city, you'll ask 'Why is that F-18 parked next to the What-a-Burger?', so let's make some of the Decepticons into cars as well. Yeah. That'll make them more deceptive. And if they're stealing human vehicles for forms, why not have them co-opt the more 'authoritative' cars? I can see it now. The humans are being chased by a Decepticon. They're running around frantically, and to their relief, they see a cop car in the distance. They run over and… it transforms into another bad guy. Ooh. That's good. And then something blows up."

Look, sometimes Hollywood messes things up due to liberalism. (ex "Clear & Present Danger.") But other times they mess things up from the source material because they're trying to make a better movie. I think the filmmakers are going the latter route on this one.

[bcrt2000]

It's quite a coincedence I guess but yesterday I was thinking about the political implications of G1 after rewatching about the first 30 episodes or so of G1 again after about 16 years or so (and the movie as well). You may need to go back and rewatch the episodes and movie as well.

If you notice, Optimus Prime is extremely liberal. He never takes pre-emptive strikes. In fact, he goes out of his way in one episode to not hurt a robot ninja called Nightbird even though Nightbird is trying to kill them. Also, he prefers saving lives over anything else. That was evidenced in the episode where there were two Optimus Primes, where he orders everyone to save Spike even if the crystals in the chasm were unstable and about to blow. In the movie, he hears out Megatron's plea and he doesn't shoot at him when he grabs Hot Rod, even though it was his best chance to kill him. He has so much honour that he was ready to leave earth after losing a 1-on-1 duel to Megatron, and never even expected that Megatron cheated.