Less That Meets The Eye
Transformers 2. I saw it yesterday. Sigh.
One of the problems I had with the first one (which I mostly liked the first time, and I liked even more when I saw it again on DVD), was that I could rarely tell which robots were good guys and which were bad guys. At least they had a couple of roll call-type moments in the first one though. In this one they jumped right into the action without identifying all of the new robots that came to earth after the events of the first movie. During the first major battle I "rooted" for a silver Audi that was chased by a trio of motorcycles. When the Audi got destroyed I expected a moment of grief from Optimus Prime, but he all but high-fived the motorcycles. I should have known that the Audi was a bad guy since all of the Autobots are made by General Motors, I suppose.
The movie's blatant sexism and racism has been well-documented elsewhere, so I don't think I need to spend much time discussing the buffoonish, monkey-faced, gold-toothed, illiterate, jive-talking twins, and the multiple slow-motion shots of Megan Fox's bouncing boobs.
The movie has an amusing neo-con perspective. As the movie begins, the Autobots have joined with an elite U.S. Army unit to form a covert hit squad, hunting down and killing Decepticons around the world. (Shades of Munich, perhaps?) And the only bad human character is the U.S. National Security Adviser, who says the president would rather pursue diplomatic solutions to the Decepticon threat than let the Autobots go to war. (Shades of the EPA's Walter Peck in Ghostbusters, perhaps?) The movie is mostly careful to never say the president's name, but after the Decepticons start wreaking havoc in cities around the world a news story plays in the background saying something like "President Obama has been taken to a secure facility in the Midwest." Cutting and running, Mr. President?
The writers lose track of their neo-con-ness (if they ever had it; I could be reading more deeply than the movie deserves in the previous paragraph) when it comes to Middle Eastern geo-politics, though. As one of my colleagues pointed out on his blog, the creators seem to forget the existence of Israel. During the big climactic scene, the military guys cheer the arrival of the Jordanian Air Force (which was much more inept than the U.S. Air Force that arrived soon after, of course). I bet the Israeli Air Force would have been a bit more effective.
Michael Bay. He already owed me for Pearl Harbor. That debt keeps increasing.
One of the problems I had with the first one (which I mostly liked the first time, and I liked even more when I saw it again on DVD), was that I could rarely tell which robots were good guys and which were bad guys. At least they had a couple of roll call-type moments in the first one though. In this one they jumped right into the action without identifying all of the new robots that came to earth after the events of the first movie. During the first major battle I "rooted" for a silver Audi that was chased by a trio of motorcycles. When the Audi got destroyed I expected a moment of grief from Optimus Prime, but he all but high-fived the motorcycles. I should have known that the Audi was a bad guy since all of the Autobots are made by General Motors, I suppose.
The movie's blatant sexism and racism has been well-documented elsewhere, so I don't think I need to spend much time discussing the buffoonish, monkey-faced, gold-toothed, illiterate, jive-talking twins, and the multiple slow-motion shots of Megan Fox's bouncing boobs.
The movie has an amusing neo-con perspective. As the movie begins, the Autobots have joined with an elite U.S. Army unit to form a covert hit squad, hunting down and killing Decepticons around the world. (Shades of Munich, perhaps?) And the only bad human character is the U.S. National Security Adviser, who says the president would rather pursue diplomatic solutions to the Decepticon threat than let the Autobots go to war. (Shades of the EPA's Walter Peck in Ghostbusters, perhaps?) The movie is mostly careful to never say the president's name, but after the Decepticons start wreaking havoc in cities around the world a news story plays in the background saying something like "President Obama has been taken to a secure facility in the Midwest." Cutting and running, Mr. President?
The writers lose track of their neo-con-ness (if they ever had it; I could be reading more deeply than the movie deserves in the previous paragraph) when it comes to Middle Eastern geo-politics, though. As one of my colleagues pointed out on his blog, the creators seem to forget the existence of Israel. During the big climactic scene, the military guys cheer the arrival of the Jordanian Air Force (which was much more inept than the U.S. Air Force that arrived soon after, of course). I bet the Israeli Air Force would have been a bit more effective.
Michael Bay. He already owed me for Pearl Harbor. That debt keeps increasing.