I'M TRANSFORMING!

Keyhole wrote extensively about the Transformers movie a few days ago, saying some things that ended up sparking a pretty bloody AIM fight between me and a dear friend of mine from Oak Park. After that I felt obligated to actually see the thing, so tonight I did. Now some notes:

Going that extra mile. Shane's main complaint about this movie was that whoever wrote it refused to put any effort into fitting the story with any rich or even vaguely coherent science. "Quantum mechanics" somehow is asked to stand in for incomprehensibly advanced technology, references to DNA are thrown around carelessly, etc. The typical response to this sort of beef is "Who cares about that, it is just a cartoon movie," but Shane believes pretty fiercely that if it wasn't for this kind of complacency—if people didn't look the other way when they encountered such brazen lapses in effort, the world would be a much better place. I agree with him. That said, sloppy science was not the biggest problem in Transformers—not just because there were much, much bigger ones, but because it just didn't take up a lot of screen time. Apart from the one brief conversation about quantum mechanics and DNA, there were only a few instances of the sort of empty/showy/rotten gesturing that Shane is talking about: one at the very beginning, when Air Force command tries to ground an unidentified aircraft and addresses it over the radio as "unidentified aircraft," and again during most of the computer hacking scenes, when you see lights flashing and things like "VIRUS UPLOADING" and "HACK IN PROGRESS" displayed on the monitors. Those aren't exact quotes, but it should be familiar to most people because that's what computer hacking always looks like in movies (see the new Die Hard, for instance, which was terrific). Besides those, I dunno! The whole third of the movie about trying to figure out what the robots are and how they work took up like 20 minutes total, and I actually thought the bit about how all modern technology had been derived from Megatron was pretty neat. It should also be noted that Shane was wrong to say that the "secret files" that were podslurped from the government computer on Air Force One were just New York Times articles. Most of them were classified papers about the discovery of Megatron; while there was one newspaper in the file, it was the New York Record or something, not the Times.

Everything happens for a reason. One of the "much bigger problems" I mentioned above has to do with the fact that there are whole stretches when the plot is advanced by way of characters making piles and piles of decisions without any apparent motivation. Why, for instance, do Sam and the girl try so hard to hide the robots from Sam's parents while they're looking for the magic glasses? Why is this an important thing to do? Why is Sam so mad at the girl when the mean Sector Nine guy reveals that factoid about her father's criminal record? Why would he possibly hold that against her?

The fourth wall. There are two movie references in Transformers: one to the 40-Year-Old Virgin, and one to Armageddon. I guess fundamentally this is just the "Smack That" issue—"he's the one singing the song that's playing!"—but I wonder how far movies/books should go toward convincing their audiences that they are occupying the same world as the characters. In Transformers it actually worked really well, since the ending is supposed to give us the impression that maybe, you know, THEY ARE LIVING AMONG US AND WE WILL SEE THEM WHEN WE LEAVE THE THEATER, but what about like, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud or The Third Brother by Nick McDonnell, both works of fiction that force their characters to grapple with September 11th. I wonder: is that really any different than throwing in a reference to the 40-Year-Old-Virgin, or loading your prose with references to actual brand names like they do in most chick-lit? I say no, which is what I was trying to get at when I asked Messud at an Advocate reading last semester why she felt so compelled to incorporate real history into her plot. She said something about how it was a really important event, and well, OK, I guess. But to me there is a qualitative difference between a work that situates itself in real history and one that ignores it or makes up its own. I won't use the word "topical" but let it be known that I'm thinking it.

"I know a guy who can help us." What does it say about the old zeitgeist that both Transformers and Die Hard featured a wise man-type figure in the form of a legendary master hacker who lives with his mom/grandma? In Die Hard this figure is portrayed by a curmudgeonly Kevin Smith who keeps a command center in his basement; in Transformers he is a young black boy who likes to play Dance Dance Revolution with his cousin.

White noise. By far the worst thing about the movie were the oppressive, hollow "glimpses of humanity" that were peppered throughout the carnage. You know: robots are stomping around killing stuff, explosions are exploding, then... cut to a little girl in her bed checking under her pillow for the tooth fairy. Or a boy turning to his mom and exclaiming, "Cool, mom!" as robots do battle in front of their car. After a while these interruptions start to feel like some version of a laugh track. There were tons of these little shots, and taken together they evoke a deep, cynical blandness, one that makes you wonder whether the world being portrayed is even worth saving.

It is funny when. It is funny when the girl refers to aliens as "an urban legend" when the secret police are asking her questions and she's trying to pretend like she doesn't know anything about the Transformers.