Separated at Filming Part 3

     Watching the X-Men movies in order, post seeing-DeadPool, and I am struck by how similar they are to the Transformers movies

     Pause to let the shouting die away to offended silence.

     OK, so those of you still with me are here to hear me out. Good.

     The X-men franchise has such a wealth of characters to draw on that to use even a fraction, there has to be a parade of characters on screen that get 15 minutes -or less- of fame and are never seen again. Off-Screen, they vanish, or die. Full of sound and fury, etc.

     Through it all, Wolverine dances like a Bumblebee, to draw in the crowds, with a parade of mutant cameos at his back.

     The Transformers franchise is also filled with characters with colorful skills, personalities, and paint jobs. If Bay had tried to just do the first movie with the G1 Ark crew, he would have ended up with 19-20 robot characters, an unmanageable number for a two hour film.

     I'm going to theorize, also, from watching, this: I don't think when they made the first movie in each series, they had a definite plan for an overall story arc. The Stories hang together, but loosely. The evil masterminds, Magneto and Megatron, come up with huge, sweeping plans which make in some cases limited sense, and may contradict other designs. In X2, Magneto tries to have Xavier exterminate all the humans with mind bullets, which will seriously limit bio-diversity and eliminate many potential recessive mutations from the gene pool. I guess sometimes sacrifices must be made...

     And Megatron- well, the genius of David Willis illustrates this the best- in his DOTM Spoiler cartoon.

     One thing that is definitely different, is the Combiners in the Transformers franchise- not multiple robots forming one, but multiple characters combined to create a sort of amalgam character- Jazz in Transformers actually comes across a lot more like Blaster- Hound in Age of Extinction is a lot like a mix of Kup and Bulkhead- Etc. Each of the mutants in the X-Men franchise comes across as them self, but they do not get the opportunity to show us their character over a progression of time- we get mutant cameo with power and effects that is intended to give us the Full Mutie-all the powers and personality with none of the development.

for prior entries into my separated at filming series...here and here