Monday, July 6, 2009

Successfully Avoiding Transformers - Day 13


Yeah, so Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is coming up on closing out its second week in release, and it looks like it's going to make a fuckload of money. It seems this flick is going to join a very small club, namely movies that have made a billion dollars. A billion. I love movies all to hell, but even I'm not sure it's reasonable for a movie to make that much money. At least the studio should be forced to buy a few hobos a sandwich or a Rolls Royce or something.


But, even with all the box office popularity, I am avoiding this like the plague. Even though I grew up loving Transformers. Even though I'll go see pretty much anything. Even though I enjoyed Armageddon and The Rock.


The first Transformer film was some fun, though I found myself being mildly repulsed by the way it was a recruitment poster for the U.S. armed forces (I know propaganda is nothing new, but at least be a little subtle), and found my credibility strained almost every few minutes. Remember the gigantic robots sneaking around Sam's backyard and no one noticing? Stuff like that. I was also rendered nauseous by what can only be described as seizure inducing editing.


Bay's whole resume is a testament to excess in every way, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the sequel gets reviews like this, but as I saw the bad notices roll in and the money pile up, I thought to myself, are these the movies we want to make money? Let's face it, Hollywood has always been about selling a product, but do we as a culture really want our entertainment to be nothing more than a nearly three hour toy commercial sprinkled with tits and ass and delivered to us like the Lodovico technique from A Clockwork Orange?


Go see Moon instead. It's fascinating and its budget was probably equal to the catering budget of Bay's mess.

No comments: