Felon said:
Well, while they weren't "necessary" per se, but I did feel that each one those characters added to the plot. You've got Spike (or "Sam") as the everyman hero; you've got the love interest; you've got the brainiac who figures things out and makes plans; you've the tough take-charge boy scout; and finally you've the pain-in-the-neck bureaucrat who's there to provide the protagonists with something they can overcome without relying on the robots.
They could have collapsed the brainiac with her buddies and the black guy (which, as an African American, I thought his inclusion was actually not forced or strained). Heck, they should have had her be one of the analysts working in NSA, not some hire. That would have eliminated one character. The same for the Sector 7 guys. Gone or have them show up from the beginning... This would have eliminated the need for Tuuro's character and/or Voigt's character if they made him a high ranking agent. That was an extra level of plot that was utterly meaningless.
I mean, you could say Star Wars didn't need all those characters. Could've dropped Chewbacca or the droids. And Lord of the Rings, geez, talk about superfluous characters...You can easily collapse skills and roles in order to create fewer characters, but a big cast feels epic. The Day After Tomorrow, Armageddon, Independence Day...think about movies like that and how many extraneous characters they had just to add a little flavor.
Chewbacca and the droids provided a bit of levity in the proceedings and their characters didn't take up much unnecessary space/scenes (arguably the droids do near the beginning, but my thought on them is that they're there to get the audience from the Blockade Runner to Tatooine and Luke... They kind of drop out after we meet Luke). And in LotRs, most of those characters are actually featured prominently in relatively important scenes... Furthermore, they're characters adapted from a book and it's difficult to excise them without drawing fan ire; such is not the case in
Transformers since we're dealing with no more than two prominent human protagonists from the cartoon or comic miniseries who (sort of) make it to the flick.
As for your other examples, I hated all of those movies in part because of the large casts (
The Day After Tomorrow gets something of a pass since the effects were so cool).
True, the Decepticons never even muster. Their interactions pretty much consist of briefly talking over radio about getting the ball rolling. Barricade was the face of the Decepticons early in the film ("To Protect and Enslave"...gotta love it!), but then he falls off the radar.
Apparently, Prime was written to have killed him but that portion was edited from the script. To me, the face of the Decepticons was initially Blackout and then Frenzy, so -- although I noticed that Barricade disappeared -- I wasn't too bumbed out about it.
More than anyone else, I missed Starscream playing a more prominent role. Of the Decepticons, he's my favorite after Soundwave (well, he actually like him as much as Megatron), so I was miffed that he didn't speak more.
OTOH, there is very much a "less is more" element to rock'em sock'em robots. Heck, even in the cartoon, the fights usually weren't protracted. Generally one solid hit from a blaster would take a bot down.
But the 'toons were 20 minutes or so with five minute fights, usually two a piece for 10 minutes. That's have the show of fighting. This didn't have that. Now, I'm not saying that I wanted a bunch of fighting, but more interaction between the Decepticons would have been nice.
Did prime even have his giant exhaust-pipe gun?
Yes, and Megatron did create a canon, although it wasn't like the big, honking thing he used in the cartoon series.
