Keithwcaniano's Blog

After unexpectedly seeing Transformers 2 last night, I walked away wondering why critics had roundly panned it.  Granted, it’s not Godfather II, but its not trying to be.  An audience looking for a CGI fest with plenty of explosions and a blaring soundtrack  that serves to remind anyone familiar with Michael Bay’s work that the summer blockbuster virtuoso is confidently at the helm.  The movie is fun, if you’re in the mood to have a good time and can excuse the liberties the filmmaker takes with geography, continuity, and common sense.

Something about the tone of the film, however, marks it as the residue of a bygone era.  Bond movies no longer celebrate gimmicks or gratuidous violence and Batman no longer makes us laugh or gives us one-liners.  Action heroes are now too self-aware and sophisticated to engage in hijinks.   Even the absurd Ironman paid lip service to collateral damage in warfare and the illicit arms trade.    Moviegoers, or at least critics, expect an action movie to concede to its audience that our heroes can no longer shrug off violence or social responsibity, that theprotagonist be at least two-dimensional.

Transformers does nothing of the sort.  In concept, it is the residue a bygone era where a manchiean Cold War loomed over the nation.   Earth is little more than the site of a proxy war between two races of alien robots: the Deceptigons and the Autobots.  The Autobots protect human beings from the irrepressible Deceptigons  (i know missspelling that, but it doesn’t matter) out of a commitment to the ideal that all beings are entitled to freedom and liberty.  The Deceptigons only want to exploit the earth for malovent purposes and care not for life.  Neither side is capable of compromise: all differences must be fought out and superior fire power seems to always prevail.  In other words, there is unambiguous good and evil and it is locked in a never ending struggle.  The good guys are individuals with personalities and quirks while the bad are mindless pawns.

With an amorphous “War on Terror” replacing the Cold War, very few action movies are still made with these assumptions in mind and I feel the critics of this film are reacting against this genre rather than assessing the film on its own grounds.

Ruthlessreviews.com, a unabashedly crass website that is probably Not Safe For Work to open, has catalogued a series of 1980s actions movies and attempted to measure them against an ideal “80s action” film.  I will use employ their rubric to assess this film to further my idea that Transformers 2 comes from another decade:

Homoeroticism: 1980s movies were notortious for their misogynist themes.  The protagonists found women distracting to the mission and only reluctantly embraced their affections, and only at the end of the mission.  The epic bonding that took place was usually between the muscle toned hero and his buddies (Think Top Gun or Predator).

The human characters of Transformer 2 are engaged in a slapstick romance that caricatures the overcommited high school sweethearts.  At one point, an evil robot incognito as an amorous coed attempts to seduce the title character, but is thrawted, first by the guy’s car, and then when his girlfriend returns.  If Shia Labeuf has learned anything from this episode, its that all women aside from Meghan Fox are only interested in him because they want to kill him – which is a variant on the 80s action theme that our singleminded superhero has no time for girls.

The robot characters conform much more closely to the Schwarzenegger/Stallone ideal.  They are giant robots with guns and power in lieu of muscles and they wrestle with other giant robots.  At one point in the movie, Optimus Prime (the boss good robot) combines with another robot and the audience is treated to a sequence of guns loading and parts meshing and Optimus getting bigger and bigger with a phallic bazooka gun attached to his shoulder.  It is very similar to a scene in Commando with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The robots also appear asexual, representing another ideal motif of the 1980s ubermensch.

Corpse Count: 1980s action films were notorious for high corpse counts, mostly in sequences of frenzied action where the hero takes out regiments of bad guys in minutes.  Hundreds of thousands of people die in Transformer 2, though very few appear onscreen.  Explosion after explosion after explosion in the middle of cities must kill thousands of people, but the damage is only implied.   An aircraft carrier is destroyed, as are several tanks and many soldiers apparently meet their ends, though the only bodies we see are in an obligatory funeral.   Lots of robots “die” or whatever happens when you kill a robot.  The closest we come to a classic rampage of righteousness comes when an outnumbered Optimus Prime furiously destroys about ten or so bad guys in thirty seconds.

In a soap operaish twist, everytime a major character seems to die, they come back to life, one way or another.

One reason for this may be that this film is PG-13 while most of the 80s canon is R, and the rules for violence are very different.  The intended audience also differs.  Nonetheless, our heroes kill without cognitive dissonance and bad guy deaths are seen as good and collateral damage for humans are regretable, but acceptable losses in the fight for earth.

Novelty Death: A novelty death is one where a character dies in an over-the-top manner or comically gratutious manner and were a staple of the 80s action genre.  Transformers 2 appears free of these, save in the opening sequence where the bad robot smashes some of our hunter gatherer ancestors with his foot, consciously summoning images of a human today dispatching an unwanted bug.

Post-Mortem One Liner: In 1980s movies, the hero always delivered some witty remark while dispatching a foe, especially in a novelty death.  Optimus Prime “curbstomps” a bad guy in the beginning of the movie and said something very 80sish ubermacho kind of way.  There were a few others, but nothing memorable.

Was There A Stupid Chief?: A stupid chief in a 1980s film is the bureaucratic wimp in the suit who doesn’t trust our hero or believe that violence is the best way to deal with evil (Think Die Hard).  He exists mostly to be proven wrong by the hero, or provide background plot information.  There is a stupid chief in our film, the national security advisor.  He rails about how diplomacy can work, blames the autobots for the whole war, threatens to shut down the U.S./autobot alliance, and misreads every situation.  He is invariably a bespectled white middle aged nerd who our noble troops dispense with by shoving him out of an airplane (they give him a parachute first).

Stupid Political Content: 1980s action movies were often filled with latent and not-so-latent right wing, anti-government, anti-liberal messages that often celebrated vigilantism, Vietnam revisionism, and reaffirmed faith in American arms and noble purposes.  Transformers 2 seems to lack any overt political messages, though it could be used as a recruiting film for the U.S. army in the way Top Gun was used by the U.S. Air Force.   The audience sees submarines, air craft carriers, destroyers, numerous planes, tanks, noble men in uniform fighitng with grace under pressure, and lots and lots of weapons, all while a blaring soundtrack tells you that a weapon firing is “cool.”

How Bad Was It Really?: I think it works if you go with it.  I was never on the edge of my seat, but I found myself appreciating the film for the confidence its director displayed.  A fair critique of the film could be that the plot only serves to lead one from one special effects scene to another and that the film’s humor is sophomoric, but this film never attempts to do more than be a special effects fest, and these it does very well.

My biggest  issue with the film is one anyone who knows me well can predict.  CGI battles are visually stunning and wonders of technolocial achievement, but they sacrifice much of the drama and gritty realism that combat in older films possessed.   It is difficult for me to grasp how an audience can become invested in anything save the outcome of science fiction battle where all of our combatants move like video game characters instead of human beings.  For example, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vadar swordfought and the outcome on the battle rested on compsure and character.  Obi Wan and Anakin, or worse, Yoda and anyone, jump around and move so fast that one can never tell what blow means what or who is winning or losing, except from cues from the soundtrack.  Transformers is even worse because the fights in the film are entirely devoid of human participation and were more or less a robot lunges and another and one of them eventually dies.

Indeed, watching the film, I was struck by how little agency the human characters had over the outcome of the fight.  While the fate of the world ultimately rested upon Shia Labuef making the right decision, our soldiers and our fighters could do little more than deliver long range aerial strikes at the combatants.

I never watched the show Transformers, but a running theme throughout must have been the destructive power of modern technology if not in the hands of  zealous guardians committed to preserving human life.  Transformers the film only glances this issue, threatening to remove from this action fest any redeeming value, yet I’ll give Bay the benefit of the doubt and suggest that his blockbuster can be viewed as a commentary on mass society’s lack of participation in the struggle between good and evil.  Men must increasingly rely upon mechanized warfare to achieve their aims, and this overspecialization leaves the bulk of our population intellectually and emotionally alienated from the struggle between good and evil  – if such a struggle still exists – as Bay might be suggesting any uneasiness with the ideologically rigid combatants in his film reflects our own unnatural insecurities aboud the world we inhabit that we cynically masquerade as a “nuanced perspective” on life, which conforms very closely to themes from 80s action films.

Okay, working the rest of the day.

For the record, I don’t think Michael Bay was making any kind of statement on society, save this is what he and his producers thought would make money.