Litigious Dreams
(Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Michael Bay, US, 2011, 157mins)
The CIA should sue, CISCO systems should sue, The Mayor of Chicago should sue, The Democrats should sue, the parents of Rosie Fuckrington-Carstairs should sue, her agent should sue, Biffy Clyro should sue, the estate of John F. Kennedy should sue, Buzz Aldrin should sue, Neil Armstrong should sue, Shia should sue, the relatives of the 9/11 victims should sue, the port authority of New York should sue, NASA should sue, popular culture should sue, the second half of the 20th century should sue, Donald Trump should sue, Moscow should sue, the moon should sue, the estate of Richard Nixon should sue, John Malkovich should be sued, my mother’s name is Sue, Peggy Sue Got Married is underrated, Kazio Ishiguro should sue, Nicholas Meyer should sue, Trekkies should sue, anyone with a stigmatism in one or both eyes should sue, the Eighties should sue, architects should sue, the third dimension should sue, cinema chains should be sued and Paramount Pictures should sue themselves.
Megan Fox, the Republicans, Lockheed Martin and the US Military should be delighted.
Bring a book.
Further reading: Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen Review
Ed Whitfield – were you upset with this film because there was not enough pedophilia, baby killing, inappropriate genital flashing, and hatred for the American citizen in it?
Sorry, did not mean to give you a tingle up your leg by typing the word pedophilia for you to read.
You are a sick, twisted pervert.
Hey Ed – Do the world a favor, go pull a Ryan Dunn on yourself.
Now you come to mention it, it was a little deficient in those areas.
awesome, keep up the humor! i like the flow of thoughts,they are kind of truthful ,at least for a given moment
It’s okay Ed, you tried. It’s not easy writing reviews for movies in a dignified artists perspective. Sometimes people need the opinion of an angry bitter man caught up in politics to slam his views on a movie. Although I agree the movie was not good, you had absolutely no grounds for backing up that opinion. Its okay, practice makes perfect. Maybe next time you’ll do a bit better.
I think you tried very hard to write in English and although you failed, I thank you for the effort and your considered guidance. I’m going to look back on this as the day I came of age.
Why does it upset you that the movie was patriotic? There are more than enough movies that are extremely critical of the united states. Its good to be critical about ourselves but to never be proud of our country and our military would be a bad thing. Do you disagree?
I don’t understand the question.
Walked out on this fetid pile of shit an hour into it. The dialogue alone is proof that hollywood doesn’t even have to try anymore.
How many leg/bum shots did we need of pouty?! She drove me insane!
what a steaming pile of crap. i did enjoy the hot women for a little bit. john malcovich was great too
As I walked to the theater entrance, I thought to myself, “If I had brought a book along, I could let hubby go watch the movie by himself and I could wait in the car and read.”
Sitting in the theater I thought, “Damn it, I shouldn’t have let the lack of a book stop me! I could’ve just taken a nap in the car!”
What a stupid movie! Once again showing American excess and overkill: from Carly’s fat lips to the size of that worm transformer (gee, and yet it was “killed” so easily)…most of all the length of time it took to play out this simple-minded plot.
I can’t believe people clapped in the theater for this bullshit. I came into this movie expecting to laugh though it, but I never imagined the extent to which I would. I left with a good headache and plenty of material to joke about all the way home. Nothing in this movie made a bit of sense… and with the way people actually defend it, I’ve lost all hope for humanity’s future.
I definitely agree that Trekkies should sue.
I honestly dont understand why people seem to walk into these movies expecting a deep and engaging storyline in a movie about giant transforming robots. The cartoons were cheesy and Micheal Bay is well known for being good at exploding stuff and thats about it. I think man of the people who dislike this movie are either jumping on the hate everything popular bandwagon or just arent the target audience. Its like taking a 6 year old to see Inception. They arent going to enjoy it. Also what part does politics play in the movie and why is it so wrong for the military to be shown in great light? Transformers isnt a cinematic masterpiece but I doubt it ever aimed to be.
You’re right Petra, why should anyone expect movies to be well written and captivating? I agree that children should always be patronised.
Mind you, there’s a problem with that isn’t there? The childhood aspect I mean. After all this movie has been aggressively marketed at both children and adults. Only half the audience were under 25 according to exit polling. I suppose adults want to be part of that event movie experience too but you’d expect nothing less following a $30m promotional campaign. And the filmmakers were confused about the childhood aspect, weren’t they? I mean, there were giant robots but there were also predatory shots of the girlfriend’s backside and tits, jokes about fucking in toilet cubicles and words like “clusterfuck”. So you can understand why some older attendees might have thought this was targeted at infantile adults as well as the real infants.
Six year olds should see more movies like Inception, it will mean their tastes are less retarded in adulthood and they may, God forbid, develop a taste for plot and ideas. Can you imagine it? No? Well, don’t worry, neither can Michael Bay.
Politics plays a part in every movie, whether it “aims” to or not. Films don’t exist in a cultural vacuum. There’s always the culture of production and reception. It’s not the job of me or anyone else that writes about a film to just discuss a movie in terms agreed by the director and studio’s marketing department, it’s our job to tell you what they actually did.
The culture of production refers to the preoccupations and assumptions, subconscious or not, that the filmmakers bring to bear on the film. These change over time, naturally, and tell us something about the time the film was made. So in Transformers 3 for example, you can look at the final hour, which borrows the iconography of 9/11 to evoke a strong reaction in the audience, and you can ask whether it’s desirable to cannibalise a terrorist attack, in order to mine the patriotic fervour that followed it, in a movie that you say is for young children. Maybe there should be a junior 9/11 with alien robots instead of Islamic extremists, but I don’t think so.
The culture of reception is just another way of talking about how the messages embedded in the movie are received and interpreted by those they’re aimed at. Now we can’t know what percentage of the audience will take what they’re shown as red but it’s probably fair to assume that the younger the audience, the less critical they’re going to be. Well, you say the film is aimed at children so let’s talk about the military. TF3, made with the co-operation of the US military, presents it as a benign and liberating force, maybe even something you’d like to join when you’re older; its size being integral to internal defence. All movies made with the military’s help tend to do this. That is an unquestioned assumption. I didn’t care for that. That’s my view. That celebration of militarism isn’t an accident; it’s there, like most of the cultural gunk in the picture, on purpose. It’s therefore legitimate to question it.
I do agree with you on one point, though. I think that no one bar six years olds (or under) should attempt to see this movie. The only thing I’d add is that they should be told that they must pay for admission themselves.