Comments | talentedmrraber: One Shall Stand; One Shall Fall

talentedmrraber

One Shall Stand; One Shall Fall

Jul 09, 2007 22:31

I saw the new Transformers movie, and it predictably failed to live up to the 80s version. Sure, the effects were great, but the script was written by one of those folded-paper things that elementary school kids use to tell fortunes. The poverty of the script led me to rethink some of the things that made the original movie so classic:

( Notes Toward a Political Philosophy of the Transformers )

Comments 3

ithych July 10 2007, 19:40:26 UTC

the script was written by one of those folded-paper things that elementary school kids use to tell fortunes

Damn! I thought the previews looked less than promising, but I still held out hope that it wouldn't be completely rotten. The previews made it look like an Independence Day rip-off (and when you're ripping off Independence Day, you know you're scaping the bottom of the barrel). Too bad they failed so miserably to hold on to the social commentary of the original.

semioticist July 16 2007, 04:30:57 UTC

You could go one step further (n.b. this is also one step back) and notice that the Autobots are written to be the good guys and the Decepticons written to be the bad guys; therefore the Autobots will have the characteristics that will make them well-liked by young Westerners (loyalty, devotion to cause, at least a superficial concern for tolerance) while the Decepticons have all of the presumed "opposite" of these characteristics. Nowhere in 80's Transformers do we find positive models of independent actors who seek to understand before they act. We find, devoted to the good as they may be, Autobots who put loyalty before sensibility and devotion before meditation. Instead of providing examples of the kind of people we'd like to see the world populated with, Transformers relies on reinforcing the very ideals which utterly fail to capture the complexities of moral reasoning and actually functioning societies while simultaneously lending support to outmoded Elizabethan theories of government ( ... )

talentedmrraber July 16 2007, 04:56:17 UTC

It's true that we don't see any examples of good meditative characters, but we also don't see bad meditative characters. "Meditativeness" is not one of the axes along which the movie's themes travel. How would "meditativeness" manifest itself in the movie, if it were to do so ( ... )