Do you hear that faint tink-tink-tink noise of violinists plucking instead of moving the bow? That’s the pulse of the piece. THAT IS OPTIMUS’ SOUL. That sound is present throughout the entire song. It’s the first thing you hear and the last thing you hear. It’s there, even when other instruments almost drown it out. It is still there.
Then you get this flute to establish the melody. I think it’s a flute, but it could be an oboe. They sound very similar to me. Anyway, why is it so sad? Because his Spark is sad. He watched his world die, and he’s part of the reason it had to die. He’s watching his war spread to another world that is totally unprepared. He can’t let that world die, too. But he feels alone, because who do you look up to when you are the one at the top? To be a Prime is to feel alone.
And suddenly that flute changes. Now there’s strings and brass playing the melody and voices come in as a bit of “coloration” that makes me think of light. That is the courage coming out. That is the Prime in Optimus Prime. That is where he is looking ahead and deciding he will do whatever it takes to protect other worlds from the same fate as Cybertron. That is hope. That is Optimus standing up and saying “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.”
Here comes the percussion. The same melodic line played in the previous section repeats, but now it has percussion behind it. What is that? It’s Optimus charging into battle. It’s his determination to protect, to sacrifice and to fight for what is right. The voices rise and that is glow of his Spark brightening into his optics as he stands up for what he believes in.
Even Optimus’ beliefs can be shaken. Sometimes he loses sight of his goals. But, in the ruin of his doubts, he always rises again and again to fight for freedom.
And THAT is what is in his Spark and THAT is what his theme sounds like.
It’s pretty obvious from what we saw in Transformers: The Last Knight that their Earth is well and truly fucked. You don’t even really need to see this scene featuring Hong Kong, a city of seven million permanent residents, being scraped away by Cybertron’s anchors, to know it. Watching the anchors make a mess out of southern England hammers home the point pretty well on its own. However, what the Hong Kong scene does is indicate just how widespread the damage is━━at a bare minimum, we now have a swathe of destruction running from Southeast Asia to Western Europe, where the sky has been replaced by a million-dollar view of an alien planet and if you’re really unlucky your corpse may hitch a ride hundreds of kilometres from your home on one of those titanic scrapey bits.
I wanted to know exactly how fucked we all are… so I put together a loose projection of the contact zone, assuming that Hong Kong and Stonehenge are the two farthest-flung locations affected by the anchors.
it was around this time (late June & early-mid July), 10 years ago in 2007, when the first live-action Transformers movie made it’s big debut on movie screens around the world!
whether we hate or love these movies, there is one hugely important thing that the vast majority of us can agree upon: this movie changed our lives.it’s what got us into Transformers. we owe a great deal to the people who brought this movie to life. who knows what state the Transformers franchise might be in otherwise? without it, we’d probably have no TFA, no TFP, significantly fewer comic series, and we wouldn’t have met all our wonderful friends through the fandom!
this is one birthday I’m glad to celebrate. this movie completely changed my life, and it’s been (mostly) a great source of happiness over the past 10 years. so Happy Birthday Bayformers!! thanks for everything! 😀
Cybertronian Database 