I saw Tranformers: The Age of Extinction. In 3D, no less.
A reasonable person may be inclined to ask why. And to be honest there is a straight answer to that question. Frequently I will see a movie that I don’t expect to be, shall we say, a wholly convincing work of art. But I suspect it might contain spectacle or imagery that will inspire me in my own work. A good example is Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. It doesn’t really hang together as a movie, I don’t think, but is full of beautiful images.
And you know, Transformers. It’s pretty mad.
I mean, look at this:
Apart from the awesome opening credit music, the central plot device centres around a giant robot shark that leaps out of the concrete and eats your truck. How awesome is that? If there were a multi-million dollar movie about giant robots battling robot sharks while riding robot dinosaurs, that would be a good thing, wouldn’t it? I mean, I could get behind that. It’s only a Sunday afternoon, for God’s sake.
Anyway. I went.
Here’s the deal with Transformers: The Fall of Narrative:
- It went on FOREVER. 165 MINUTES of forever, like, first Harry Potter movie or Lord of the Rings type forever, oblivious to the huge disadvantages this brought it. It is not Lord of the Rings. It isn’t even the first Harry Potter movie.
- None of it made any sense. This was particularly true about anything to do with the Dinobots. It was like Michael Bay got a 7-year-old really ramped up on lots of E numbers and refined sugar and wrote down whatever they shrieked and then called that the screenplay. Job done – let’s hit the hookers and coke!
- The awesome sound design which made the first one and possibly two arresting is now old hat. You don’t notice it any more. And that is a huge problem, because without it to distract you, you are locked in a dark steel box of absurdity with live action versions of toys from Eighties.
- I was never into Transformers as a kid (always more a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe kind of chick myself). But while I might have been less, shall we say, culturally cognisant at that age, I still don’t remember the cartoon Transformers being quite that… stereotypical. Ken Watanabe’s robot’s opening lines are a fucking haiku.
- The best thing in the movie, by far, is Stanley Tucci. He plays this utterly spoiled, pretentious Steve Jobs-esque billionaire inventor. He then turns into the third act protagonist, and he is a joy to watch. In a film carpeted with stock characters and stereotypes, he was a tiny blast of pure fun.
I could rant on and on about how dreadful it was, and why is it that giant space robots not only speak only English but do it in adorable yet entirely disparate regional accents. But you’d just say “Then why the hell did you go see a Transformers movie?” And you know, you’d be totally right. You got me there.
But cheap shots aside, it’s actually been a while since I saw a movie that made me feel so uncomfortable. There was something about the way all of the female characters were objectified that was desperately weird and creepy and also… so Old School. There were times I thought the camera was trying to crawl up the back of the lead actress’ legs and into her crotch.
Not only that, but for a movie about transforming robots, a lot of script is spent on the character’s sex life. She’s supposed to be seventeen, and her twenty-year-old boyfriend carries around A LAMINATED CARD with some Texan law printed on it in case he’s ever arrested for statutory rape, which he shows to her father. Seriously, it’s in the movie, and it isn’t even a plot point. And this is in a movie where people do not do extraneous talking as a rule when things can be exploding instead.
There are middle-aged men and young men, and fat men and good-looking men in the movie. But in terms of women there are only young, beautiful women in very revealing clothes and ridiculous shoes and make-up who are filmed in this very exploitative way.
How’s this for cognitive dissonance – while I was watching it, it put me in mind of Bully, a Larry Clark film I saw years ago. Bully was all about thrusting the sexuality of its amoral teen characters in your face. You felt complicit in it, and it was uncomfortable viewing. Since it was a movie about the murder of the titular bully, it was an effect (and we could have a discussion based on whether it was a deliberately exploitative move by the director or not) that made you feel that complicity in a very compelling way. You came out tainted with this faint grubbiness.
All in all, a very strange thing to find yourself thinking in a movie that is allegedly for kids. Though didn’t see that many kids at my showing. Mostly it was twenty and thirty-something manchildren and myself, whatever you’d class me as. But c’est la vie. Ultimately it felt kind of hopeful, weirdly, because at one point lots of chauvinist movies got made, and you just didn’t notice the chauvinism. It was endemic. Now, when you see it, it’s actually quite striking to witness and you know immediately what it is. Hopefully this is a function of its increasing rarity.
