The Transformers movies are one long Optimus Prime villain origin story

polygon.com:

Can you really call a character a “hero” if they once yelled “Give me your face!” at their enemy right before going all Ed Gein on them? Asking for Optimus Prime.

The leader of the Autobots definitely started out as a good-guy robot in Michael Bay’s 2007 live-action movie Transformers. A common complaint thrown at the Optimus Prime of that film is that, in his quest for the all-powerful All Spark, he took the Autobot-Decepticon war to the streets of Mission City, risking countless human lives. But that decision was actually made by Josh Duhamel’s Captain Lennox, and as soon as Optimus arrived on the scene, he tried to get the All Spark and lead the fight away from humans. He even offered to sacrifice his life and merge with the All Spark to destroy it — that’s hero behavior right there.

And yet… even back then, there were some concerning things about Optimus Prime’s behavior.

For one, he allowed Bumblebee to be captured by Sector 7, sacrificing him to a shadowy, torture-happy government organization because he didn’t want to risk losing the All Spark. And when OP gets informed about the death of his comrade Jazz, who was ripped in half by Megatron, his reaction was little more than “Oh no! Anyway…” You can try and excuse this by saying that Optimus was fighting a war, which can desensitize people and robots alike. The problem, though, is that Optimus, an eternal veteran of the bloody oily war for Cybertron, is always in War Mode. And that makes some of the things he did in the live-action movies essentially war crimes.

In the 2009 sequel Revenge of the Fallen, the Autobots team up with humans to hunt down all remaining Decepticons on Earth, like Demolisher, who Prime executes with a point-blank headshot after he’d