Remain in Love

Found an angry blink-and-you-miss-it Prowl in TF One

Ok don’t get me wrong I LOVED Transformers One and I am super entertained by an unrepentantly and obviously evil Sentinel Prime (he ended up being my favorite because he’s awful) BUT there is a tiny part of me that wishes they made the minor adjustments needed (seriously I mean like just one or two dialogue changes) to make him a more obvious narrative foil to Orion.

Like when Zeta Prime asks him why he betrayed them he says: “For all the power of Cybertron”

Ok??? Dramatic ass edgelord BITCH

What I wish he said was something along the lines of “To decide my own future” or. to forge his own path, make his own choices, seize his own destiny, you get the idea. Because:

1. I don’t think that’s super far out of the line of plausible kid movie villains motives. Even then I think kids deserve some complexity

2. He already implies it himself!!! The movie literally already sets you up like it’ll explore this but then doesn’t!! Example: When Sentinel is questioning Alpha Trion he says he saw the opportunity to take control of his own future… “anything to get out of working for the Primes”

All they needed to round out his character is already there!!! Sentinel could have been a more intentional dark echo of Orion Pax’s desire to be more than what others think / say he could be (even though Sentinel already had power and prestige and “more” in his case is “literally becoming god/king/a Prime”).

He would have ironically defied D-16’s resigned notions of being a “bot with limited options” (seizing what he wanted through force, even though Sentinel still likely would have had more options than the cogless caste he goes on to create, and his means of taking control was to betray a whole planet).

Villains see themselves as the hero of their own story and I wish Sentinel acted more like it, because that one scene has the only line that almost explores this.

I wish the movie played up his potential of being a dark mirror, one that distorts the spirit of Orion Pax but reflects the ruthless and violent pride that D-16 will grow into as Megatron.