10 Movies That Weren’t Brave Enough To Kill The Main Character

8. Optimus Prime - Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen

One of the most maligned films of the last fifteen years (perhaps ever), Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen severely dropped the ball in several key areas; one of the biggest being their decision to kill off Optimus Prime, only to bring him back two hours later. I'm not going to use this post as yet another sounding board for Michael Bay complaints, because enough of those exist already. What I will say, however, is that I doubt the man could have won one way or the other when it came to this scenario.

Yes, Optimus' death was cheapened by his ridiculous MacGuffin-led resurrection, but Bay would most likely have earned the same amount of flack for leaving Optimus dead. The problems pertaining to the film are so much larger than one character's untimely passing; and instead of killing off Prime (as exciting as that action sequence is) for a planned third-act resurrection, they should have saved his death for the end of the movie. What we were left with thanks to Prime going to that great junkyard in the sky was a huge blockbuster that lost its best character and biggest draw for the majority of the movie, leaving us with two racist robotic caricatures and a big pair of swinging robot balls.

By bringing him back to life so readily, it just feels like they shouldn't have killed him off at all, so that audiences could spend more time with the character they're actually there to see. If Bay and his writing staff wanted to kill off Prime they should've a) done it right at the end of the third act and b) stuck to their guns on it. Fans would have been angry, but at least some of them would've respected the conviction in the move and the emotion that naturally would've carried across in its execution (please pardon that pun). And we would've still had a sequel with Optimus Prime in it for the entire runtime.