In the OVA, and comics, she was an agent working for Section 9, and had been a cyborg almost all her life, following an accident that left her body destroyed, and the doctors no choice but to attempt an experimental procedure of putting her brain in a synthetic shell. In this film, however, they went with the tired, cliche "secret" of her being not the first of her kind, even though they told her she was! They decided to make her a brainwashed political prisoner, whose mind was taken from a perfectly healthy body and stuffed in a bot. They decided to make her creators the bad guys, and the bad guy the good guy! How original!

And I hoped, I hoped, I hoped! That the bad guy was going to be project 2501. I mean, that was the whole point of the series; what does it mean to be human? With Motoko herself they played the Ship of Theseus angle, but 2501 was an entirely artificial intelligence. He was the main plot device that said you can be sapient without biology, and he was the original "villain," anyway. They would have to include him, right?

Ha! No, let's just replace that modicum of intellectual stimulation with a romance! Yeah! And lets make the bad guy her boyfriend, who was also a political prisoner, and made into the model before her, who, surprise surprise was defective! Yeah! Then, lets completely drop the whole point of the series, and replace it with a ham-fisted moral about our actions defining us, and not our memories. I'm not even going to touch how idiotic that "moral" is. Let's also not question what is moral, why it is, or is not, or any other of the extremely basic questions which leap to mind at such an absurd premise. That would be, like, hard for the audience, or something. FFS.

But at the same time it is fucking anything but what you'd expect ad is just a complete clusterfuck, and that's an understatement. The film feels so bloated with too many characters and too much going on it really needed to cut the fat, and there's a lot of it. It feels like there are multiple plots going on at once, and evil Optimus is barely in it. There are also way too many characters that just don't contribute anything at all in the film, they just kind of are there briefly then never seen again, or don't do anything.

Let me talk about Megatron, because he's my favorite Transformers character. Megatron had a great design, and it's awesome to have Welker back in the role. But that's where the positive aspects stop for me. Megatron is really weird in this film as he's around for the first 20 minutes and vanishes from the plot up until the last few minutes. The final fight with him is pathetic and actually annoyed me. He's seen fighting every single one of the Autobots, but the catch is the fight takes place in the background of uninteresting human shenanigans. Whose idea was that, no one wants to see that, they want to see Megatron's fight. And there is no fight with Optimus Prime and Megatron, Prime sorta jumps on Megatron, cuts off his arm, and tosses him outside and that's it, there's nothing.

Evil Prime is completely wasted, it's only like a single scene. It's like they got chicken and were afraid to use the concept. There's too much stuff going on and they drop a big bomb that Earth is Unicron several times in the movie, then say it in the end credits scene as if it's supposed to be a shock. Unicron being Earth is another thing I don't like, it's taken from the Transformersrime cartoon and it wasn't a very good concept in there either. The Decepticons are used a bit better but still completely wasted, and Anthony Hopkins is the only interesting human in the movie, he has a fun relationship with Cogman.