Michael Bay Hates Pink, Spoils Character Death in Transformers 2
The following post will contain spoilers for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Normally for something like this I’d say MAJOR spoilers, but apparently Michael Bay would disagree with me.
The sequel to 2007’s hit film based on the toy and cartoon franchise won’t actually hit theatres until June, but Michael Bay apparently felt the need to share some news with fans very early. And not just “Optimus Prime is awesome” sort of news, but news about the death of a character.
If you don’t want to know any more? You should stop reading right now.
Apparently, Bay choose to kill of Arcee, an autobot that turns into an adorable pink motorcycle (in the original series, she was a pink sports car). Arcee was known for being one of the major female Transformers, first appearing in the 1984 animated Transformers movie.
Yes, she is a female Transformer. Yes, the robots in disguise have gender. I am not sure why exactly they need gender. Were they programmed with gender or did their AI evolve to the point of recognizing gender? And how do you KNOW if you’re a male or a female Transformer? Are there any transgender Transformers? And how the hell would THAT work? And apparently, I’m not the only one to find this concept a little weird, screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman had planned to put Arcee in the original film but replaced her with Ironhide when they had issues wrapping their heads around the boy robot/girl robot situation.
Anyway, robotic gender orientation aside, the important thing here is this: Michael Bay has announced he’s killing Arcee off.
Like I said, normally this would be considered a major spoiler and the information would result in much wailing and gnashing of teeth from fans who wanted to experience the film in a pure and unspoiled fashion. Or something. But according to reports from Bay, Arcee’s death doesn’t matter. At all. The death isn’t for emotional impact, it’s not a plot point. It’s simply, as he puts it, “This is just ‘get it out and get it over with.'”
So why kill the character, then? Well, because Michael Bay just doesn’t like her. No, really, his actual quote is “You know what? I didn’t like Arcee so I kill her later, all right?” This was said quickly and defensively during an interview where he didn’t appear to want to let the interviewer get a question in edge-wise:
However, Roberto Orci has seemingly debunked the idea that Arcee goes out like a bitch. In a post to a forum about the situation, he said of the conditions of Arcee’s demise “You will have to be the judge! :)”
Now, normally, I’d be a bit more upset by all this. After all, Bay basically said he killed off a female character just because he didn’t like her. And the death is apparently fairly meaningless and glanced over, which seems to be kind of odd for a major character whether they’re male or female. Also, Bay goes on about not liking the character despite the fact that, well, the character hasn’t even had a voice actor cast yet, so he’s basically saying he didn’t like the performance he got out of a CGI rendering of a robot. And I’m still wondering a little bit if he would be so likely to do this to a male character.
But to be completely and totally honest? I’m more hung up on the concept of robot genders.
What do you think about this reveal? Does anyone out there remember Arcee from the series? Why can’t I have a pink motorcycle that turns into an awesome robotic friend?
