That, three films in, nobody seems to have figured out the basic concept behind the Transformers franchise must really piss Michael Bay off — and it shows in every frame of the latest installment Transformers: Dark of the Moon. This isn’t a film you watch; it’s an experience that happens to you, like being in a car wreck, only instead of deploying airbags, these cars talk and are from outer space. It is an all-out assault on Mid-Western America in both literal (Chicago gets creamed) and figurative terms, but it’s also a relentless assault on the audience.
Watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon will activate your latent Cro-Magnon lizard brain and liquefy it into motor oil. It’s the kind of the thing they force detainees at Guantanamo to watch as part of their interrogation techniques. Like Moloch slouching towards Bethlehem, it’s a movie that presages the end of days, if not for human kind, then at the very least for cinema. And yes, it’s a fucking masterpiece.
What critics and audiences keep missing is that Michael Bay is making a movie that is a Transformer. It’s the perfect artistic response to the imperative to direct a movie about robots from outer space that turn into cars. One minute you are watching a secret history political thriller, the next a teen romance. One minute you’re watching a pro-America war film with slow-mo flags waving in every shot, the next a Dr. Strangelove-esque farce starring Frances McDormand and John Turturro (who, like Strangelove, rides around in a wheelchair shouting at everyone about imminent catastrophe).
In Dark of the Moon there are explosions, John Malkovich, cars, robots that are cars, gay ex-Nazi’s, explosions, fat Americans, Chernobyl, explosions, racism, robo-racism, explosions, a Leonard Nimoy-bot that quotes Spock, Barack Obama, Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, the real Buzz Aldrin, perfect buttocks and more explosions. It is every kind of film you have ever seen and it is all those films all at once.
It’s a little bit like those “Will it Blend?” videos for the Blend-Tec blender, with Bay tossing the detritus of late stage capitalism into a giant mechanized cyclone, pulverizing our collective subconscious and splattering it on the screen in glorious (and impressively executed) 3-D for all of us to see. It is a Rorschach Test of our culture, which is why critics universally hate it. If it were playing on the walls of the Gagosian, it would be a sensation. That it plays on the multiplexes and that it takes for its subject matter hot babes, fast cars and explosions means that it will not and can not be loved the cultural elites.
Don’t listen to them, however. Dark of the Moon is art and often brilliant art. It is pop art, but more Lichtenstein than Warhol. There’s a moment where hot babe Rosie Huntington-Whitely stares out at the audience like a Playboy model in the midst of a decimated Chicago street while behind her robots tackle each other, jet fighters attack alien ships and explosions ricochet around her in slow motion that outdoes anything David LaChapelle has ever attempted. The robots are mechanized Pollack animations devouring up reality. If you stripped out all the special effects and performed Dark of the Moon on Broadway on a bare stage, you’d compare it to the absurdist plays of Ionesco and Brecht.
It is also something rare in Hollywood blockbusters — it’s a singular vision. Michael Bay has created the apotheosis of summer movies and while other films will be made from here on out that use CGI, explosions and vacuous speeches about good vs. evil, they’ll be pale copies of this, Bay’s very own Last Supper. It is simultaneously the Platonic ideal of what Hollywood thinks drives audiences to theaters as well a critique of the absurdity of these films, with their empty moral platitudes, jingoistic nonsense (there’s a great film school thesis paper on whether this film is pro-American or anti-American waiting to be written) and reliance on spectacle over storytelling.
It’s also a lot of fun, assuming you’re in on the joke. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a film everyone should go see, though once you see it, you will never want to watch it again.
