Thursday, July 2, 2009
If Osama bin Laden is out there somewhere, perhaps imagining that now is as good a time as any to answer Dick Cheney’s prayers and try a comeback, both bin Laden and Cheney can count on an unexpected recruitment tool: Michael Bay’s summer release, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, reverently awaited by millions of military-age boys. At its halfway point, the movie switches from fantasy to an unrelenting military assault on Egyptian pyramids and villages. The movie even mentions President Obama, who is sent into hiding while white men in fatigues unleash every weapon imaginable on whatever lurks in the sand. Boys will leave the movie theater, happy that American guns have once again destroyed a part of the world to save it, and bin Laden can use the movie to prove that the American imagination is more violent than even he ever imagined. — Paul Cheuse