Tear Jerker / Transformers: Age of Extinction

• Trailers have shown Ratchet getting shot at by humans. In the movie proper, the scene is heartwrenching because the humans hunt him down and succeed in shooting his leg off, then smirk as he tries to appeal to them, completely clueless as to why he's being hunted down by his former allies and limping around, shot at without mercy and then finally taken out by Lockdown with one well-placed shot and a cold, calculated stab that completely removes his spark. There's absolutely no sympathy given to him at all. Later on, we see his head being melted down into the metal the scientists so desperately want. It's understandable why Optimus pretty much loses it and initially decides to ditch humanity and Earth when he finds out.
  • Made Harsher in Hindsight once you realize that besides Bumblebee, all of the Autobots that fought by Optimus' side in the first film (Jazz, Ironhide, and now Ratchet) are all dead.
    • Similarly from the little we saw from Leadfoot's death, he keeps repeating that he's an Autobot to Cemetery Wind^note  Leadfoot's one sentence is reused from an earlier take of Ratchet's death scene , despite his pleads they refuse to listen and kill him.
  • Can we add one thing to this? The fact that this whole thing makes humanity look out to be monsters...but in the end, Attinger is lying to his superiors and is just one horrid person making humanity as a whole look like they're turning on the Autobots.
  • Something that makes this scene hurt even more is the soundtrack playing in the background, aptly named I'm an Autobot.
• Attinger ordering Savoy to kill Tessa if Cade refuses to cooperate, he tosses Tessa to the ground, points his gun at her as she cries, Cade pleads with them to let her go, as Optimus hides wondering if to stay hidden which could led to the death of an innocent girl or to save them knowing very well that he could be killed in the process.
  • Its very clear later on in the movie that this traumatized Cade, the fact he almost lost his daughter.
• Lucas being killed while trying to flee Lockdown and his body turning into metal. It shows that the main human characters have much to lose.
• Seeing Optimus, the one Autobot who never doubted humanity's potential and goodness (recall the "Were we so different?" speech from the first film), now lamenting how his former allies have turned on him. It reaches the point that he had every intention of abandoning humanity to whatever fate they brought to themselves.
  Optimus Prime: How many more of my kind must be sacrificed, to atone for your mistakes?
• Tessa getting turned down for financial aid. Anyone who's worked hard to get into college can understand how that would hurt.
• The lone surviving baby Psittacosaurus finding all his fellow dinosaurs and family petrified after hiding from the Seed's destructive power is heart-wrenching for any animal lover out there.
  • The Fridge Horror of it? All the dinosaurs on the planet are practically dead after the "Creators" used the Seed. The baby Psittacosaurus lived the rest of its life alone with nothing to commute with.
• Brains' position when we come across him for the first time since DOTM: Injured from the Bartle of Chicago, he's forced by KSI to help program their new line of Transformers; all the while, he can only watch from a glass tube as his comrades' dead bodies are melted down for raw Transformium. Having lost a leg, he's reduced to limping with a crutch, which would also imply that he can no longer transform (an innate function of Cybertronian biology). Whenever he starts to talk out of line, Joshua has him electrocuted and tortured, to the point he's lost much of his previous genial nature. His warnings that Megatron is Not Quite Dead also get ignored by Joshua, so he pretty much quits bothering. Given all that, it's not hard to see why he didn't seem to care that humanity was about to face a robot apocalypse at the hands of Galvatron and his army.
• Optimus when confronting Joshua after learning that KSI is melting the remains of the dead Autobots for their own needs
  Optimus Prime: They were my friends!
• Hound proving that O.O.C. Is Serious Business. He goes from his typical boisterous self to very solemn and very clearly hurting when Optimus asks if there's been signs of any other surviving Autobots. When he learns of his old buddy Leadfoot's death, he clearly breaks, and slowly takes his helmet off and puts it over his Spark, and bitterly calls the humans "savages".
• Just the way Optimus wakes up is depressing; shot to pieces, bits of his body falling off (including a chunk of his head), and loudly shouting that he's going to kill the humans before him while clearly confused and panicked. Poor guy's been through hell, and it gets a lot worse before things start to look up for him.
• While some may criticize Optimus declaring to Grimlock, "You defend my family, or die" as being OOC, consider it from Prime's perspective: He's probably aware time's running out for Bumblebee, Hound, and their human allies who are trying to fend off Galvatron's KSI drone army and as such, is likely desperate (even if he doesn't show it) for the Dinobots' aid. After losing so many of his close allies and brothers-in-arms over the course of the film series up to that point, you can't blame the Autobot leader for wanting to prevent the loss of any more of his comrades.

---