Transformers As Art (Or: Michael Bay Is A Genius)

I didn't think it was possible for someone to actually like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but I've been proven wrong. As this reviewer shows, Transformers 2 isn't just a good movie, it's post-modern art.

Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers' worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.

Since the days of Un Chien Andalou and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, filmmakers have reached beyond meaning. But with this summer's biggest, loudest movie, Michael Bay takes us all the way inside Caligari's cabinet. And once you enter, you can never emerge again. I saw this movie two days ago, and I'm still living inside it. Things are exploding wherever I look, household appliances are trying to kill me, and bizarre racial stereotypes are shouting at me.

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

You can read the full review here. I particularly like his breakdown of Shia LaBoeuf's character as "stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves."

An aside: twenty years from now, when we look back on the career of Michael Bay, will we still consider him the hackiest director that ever lived, or a misunderstood genius that was ahead of his time? I mean if Armageddon can warrant a criterion release, maybe there's more to this guy than meets the eye, no?