Reviews

SPOILER ALERT! Did people in Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan ever look at the movies they were watching and recognize that they were watching propaganda? Similarly, will American movie-goers recognize military propaganda if they see it, despite it being dressed up with transforming robots and Megan Fox's substantial assets? Well, if you see this movie, you are in for a two+ hour test case in just such a scenario. Featuring all four branches of the U.S. military (amazing how they can spare the time when we are in the middle of a war on two fronts), the story of Transformers tries to fit itself around the central role of the military and disappoints entirely. Somehow, in between the shots of fighter jets in formation peeling off, troop carriers landing on the shore, tanks shooting their missiles, and enough aircraft carriers to make Ex-President Bush, Jr. weep with joy and want to cry out "Mission Accomplished!," this film asks the audience to suspend disbelief and "bah" like sheep. There is practically no plot line, little character development, and only that sense of unease that you get watching the army recruitment commercials that play before the movies start, knowing that there is nothing heroic about coming back a paraplegic or with arms missing, only to face a VA administration that couldn't give a rats behind about your well-being. Even further, as if to drive home the point of this recruitment video, they stage a great deal of the action in the Middle East (Jordan, Egypt), giving us glowing depictions of how the military forces fight in desert conditions. "Hoo-rah" indeed.

In fact, this movie did clear up my questions about the first Transformers movie in new ways, however. In the first movie, I had always wondered why the plot had seemed so disjointed, as if there were two stories at odds with each other. Now I understand that the issue was that there was one plot line with the U.S. military (which brings in some tough guys to balance out uber-dork Shia LeBeouf) and one plot line that actually had to do with the Transformers, LaBeouf and Fox. Sadly, in this sequel, the latter is sacrificed for the former, with the unsurprising result that the story gets whittled down to the plot line of a music video. A music video that lifted its soundtrack straight from, you guessed it, military recruitment commercials.

Even further I didn't believe that you could make robots racist, but somehow they have managed to do so again. Again, you may ask? Well, referring to the first movie, there was Jazz, the hip-hop robot, who is coded as African American, and who, true to movie stereotypes, is the only robot that gets killed. In this sequel, they introduce us to Skids and Mudflap, two robots that are also coded as African American, are continually fighting with each other (a metaphor for urban black-on-black violence), and are functionally illiterate in robot script. And they even have large ears as if taken from a caricature of Will Smith or dare I say, President Obama. I never thought robots could be racially offensive, but it just goes to show that anything is possible. Cheers to Michael Bay for an all time low! All told, the story if crap, the characters are nonexistent, the jingoism is on full throttle, and I am out of $15 and feel like my intelligence has been insulted in new ways. Hopefully, if you have read this far, you can save yourself the damage. Refuse to see this crap, see it on rental, or wait till it comes out on TV. You won't be missing much.

I've lived in LA for 13 years of my young adult life, on the Westside and also in depressed neighborhoods near downtown (Echo Park, home of the Rampart Division scandal and previously the precinct with the highest murder rate in the US) and I have to say that this is not the LA that I know. In watching the film it looks like some non-Californian's, non-LA person's perspective on race relations in LA. The characters are exaggerations, the overwhelming focus on black/white relations obscures the multi-racial fabric of the LA landscape, and the Asian characters (eg. one is smuggling Chinese illegal aliens, and another is screaming racial epithets) are the worst kind of stereotyping. The only portrayal in the film that is accurate is of the corrupt cops, which as anyone who lived through the Rodney King years 1992 will tell you are all too real. But then the film turned around and offered redemption for that bastard cop by allowing him to rescue the same woman he molested/raped? What kind of crap is this! That's not even counting the stylistic choices made in the film to try to make LA look like Chicago and New York, with people wearing scarves and such and having it snow in the city (as if that would ever happen!). People in LA rarely ever wear scarves, because it is rarely that cold, and the way they made the characters do this shows that this film is made about other cities in the US, and only used LA as the background because of the controversial nature of the 1992 riots.

I would have to say that based on my experiences in LA I have seldom seen people engage in outright racial slurs, because they know they will get beat down pretty quickly. Additionally, for Angelenos who have grown up in local multiracial high schools, the mere fact that people grow up living next to and learning with people of many different types encourages greater understanding of difference. If there are racial issues at certain local high schools, they are more often caused by gang conflict over turf issues than by internal prejudice. Maybe the racial dynamics mentioned in the film hold for people in other cities, but they're not walking the same streets, riding the same buses, and talking to the same people in the community as I have. In fact, I would argue that the biggest problems are caused by all the starry eyed hillbillies that move to LA from places outside of California and bring their prejudices with them. This movie is terrible, and the fact that people have made a big fuss about it is evidence of how out of touch people are with LA.