[6.7/10] I don’t know what to make of this show in the early going. It’s fine, perfectly passable stuff, but it’s also plainly a movie that’s been broken up into chunks rather than a series of episodes or even chapters. More to the point, it’s so damn serious and dour and severe about everything, which I suppose is a necessary concession to try to appeal to teenagers and adults who want to enjoy their favorite childhood properties without feeling too silly about it.
But it leads to a weird tone in the piece. This basically feels like it wants to be an HBO prestige drama only with animated talking robot cars. That could actually be cool, but in the early going at least, so much about War for Cybertron: Siege feels generic.
Megatron is a generic bad guy dictator. Optimus Prime is a generic bad guy freedom fighter. And Bumblebee is a generic loner/non-joiner who will inevitably see the light. It doesn’t help that so many of the characters look and sound very similar (excepting Starscream and Elita), so especially in the dark lighting that is du jour these days, a lot of the faces and figures blend together.
Oddly enough, War for Cybertron feels a lot like the little-loved Beast Machines in the early going, with a quasi-apocalyptic Cybertron setting, Megatron in control of the planet, and the good guys scraping by in a hidden bunker and trying to right what went wrong. Seems unlikely that the folks making this show paid much attention to that one, but the similarities are amusing at least.
There’s hints of depths beyond the “Bad guy contingent in power wants to crush rebellious good guys” setup. The notion that Megatron genuinely wants to convert the other bots to his way of thinking and has even offered Optimus a treaty is an interesting note. The same goes for other autobots advising Optimus to take it, raising some questions over who really wants peace and what accepting the Decepticons’ offer would mean for Cybertron and their way of life. It’s all pretty surface level in the early going, but there’s meat there the show could bite into later.
Otherwise, this mostly exists as an introduction to the characters and the conflict, and on that front it’s fine but a little disappointing in what it serves up. We get a sense of the major figures and personalities, but few of them are terribly compelling in this opening salvo, instead playing into a lot of familiar archetypes. More to the point, all the male characters seem to speak in that same gravely action movie timbre which makes them seem pretty interchangeable.
Still, hopefully this is just some necessary throat-clearing from War for Cybertron and the show finds greater wrinkles to the struggle between Autobots and Decepticons, and more depth to the characters themselves, as it goes on.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-12-24T20:13:54Z
[6.7/10] I don’t know what to make of this show in the early going. It’s fine, perfectly passable stuff, but it’s also plainly a movie that’s been broken up into chunks rather than a series of episodes or even chapters. More to the point, it’s so damn serious and dour and severe about everything, which I suppose is a necessary concession to try to appeal to teenagers and adults who want to enjoy their favorite childhood properties without feeling too silly about it.
But it leads to a weird tone in the piece. This basically feels like it wants to be an HBO prestige drama only with animated talking robot cars. That could actually be cool, but in the early going at least, so much about War for Cybertron: Siege feels generic.
Megatron is a generic bad guy dictator. Optimus Prime is a generic bad guy freedom fighter. And Bumblebee is a generic loner/non-joiner who will inevitably see the light. It doesn’t help that so many of the characters look and sound very similar (excepting Starscream and Elita), so especially in the dark lighting that is du jour these days, a lot of the faces and figures blend together.
Oddly enough, War for Cybertron feels a lot like the little-loved Beast Machines in the early going, with a quasi-apocalyptic Cybertron setting, Megatron in control of the planet, and the good guys scraping by in a hidden bunker and trying to right what went wrong. Seems unlikely that the folks making this show paid much attention to that one, but the similarities are amusing at least.
There’s hints of depths beyond the “Bad guy contingent in power wants to crush rebellious good guys” setup. The notion that Megatron genuinely wants to convert the other bots to his way of thinking and has even offered Optimus a treaty is an interesting note. The same goes for other autobots advising Optimus to take it, raising some questions over who really wants peace and what accepting the Decepticons’ offer would mean for Cybertron and their way of life. It’s all pretty surface level in the early going, but there’s meat there the show could bite into later.
Otherwise, this mostly exists as an introduction to the characters and the conflict, and on that front it’s fine but a little disappointing in what it serves up. We get a sense of the major figures and personalities, but few of them are terribly compelling in this opening salvo, instead playing into a lot of familiar archetypes. More to the point, all the male characters seem to speak in that same gravely action movie timbre which makes them seem pretty interchangeable.
Still, hopefully this is just some necessary throat-clearing from War for Cybertron and the show finds greater wrinkles to the struggle between Autobots and Decepticons, and more depth to the characters themselves, as it goes on.