Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Michael Bay makes big, fat, boring movies. Sure, the latest has giant robots, obviously expensive special effects, grandiose explosions, and a nearly constant presence of delirious spectacle that can range anywhere from a nubile robot woman with a six-foot-long mechanical tongue to American combat units shelling the hell out of ancient architectural treasures. Nonetheless, the net effect on the moviegoer is a kind of CGI narcosis—instead of heart-pounding thrills, your head will be nodding on its stalk from an overdose of Bay’s six-year-old pleasure principle.
And that’s just the obvious problem. Besides all this stupid excess is the wholesale reduction of civility involved. Bay’s Transformer films take a relatively innocent—and somewhat clever—toy concept and turn it into an excuse for potty-mouthed exploitations of their target audience. Consider the gangsta robots who morph from ice cream trucks into moronic parodies of black culture. It’s an instant metaphor for what Paramount has wrought on American popular culture in this sequel to its 2007 nerve-jangling blockbuster. This time the tale travels from a Hollywood-clichéd version of a college campus to the top of a pyramid in Giza, wreaking and reeking all the way. No actual mummies were hurt in the making of Transformers II, but the obvious reinforcement of stereotyped American soldiers invading the Arabic developing world with impunity makes recent Bush years seem like a paragon of tolerance and peace.
You may not know it, but the average American goes to the movies once a year. Therefore, millions of impressionable kids think that Bay’s sensory overloads exemplify state-of-the-art American cinema. Surprisingly, Bay’s film was coproduced by Steven Spielberg, a junk-filmmaker who knows how to draw emotions from his audience. People who see mainly Bay likely will never experience movie awes like Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs or Close Encounters’ UFOs, because Transformers’ tawdry sex-and-mayhem filmmaking will leave them gorked-out in the aisles. Excess of happiness weeps, said William Blake, but this form of witless boredom makes only Michael Bay very happy and exceedingly rich.
For showtimes, check the Independent's movie listings, here.