Transformers: Dark Side of the Xenophobic Sexist Pop Abortion.
As I drove home last night, my girlfriend wearily turned to me and asked if we could not see anymore sucky movies this summer. She is my co-pilot in my various adventures as I rocket into the goopy chasms of pop-culture suck. A fellow space monkey. I promised her yes, I wouldn’t bother her with such an endeavor.
She had crossed the Rubicon last night, watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon. A movie so utterly dreadful, xenophobic, sexist and frankly fucking boring that I last night bled myself and affixed leeches to my freshly shorn testicles. I felt infected. I had to purge.
A movie so bad that when people applauded I silently wished for a bomb to rage through the theater, claiming their lives, ending their DNA strands, preventing them from carrying on their contagion. But Caff, you would have died. Yes I would, an offered penance for participating in the Wunder-Suck.
I love pop-culture slop. I’m easily entertained. I love the Fast franchise, G.I. Joe made me giggle guiltily. I don’t have high standards. When I want to be, I can achieve a state of mouth-breathing senselessness that is one-half admirable, one-half frightening. For me to despise a movie so much like this is an achievement unto itself.
As well, I’m an easy going guy when it comes to taking cultural offense. I have a twinge of the feminist in me, but I usually supplement that with an unhealthy joy at seeing a pert ass. I try to be socially conscious, but I’m not beyond laughing at the well-placed jab at a certain social group.
In other words, I’m not an alarmist, sensitive asshole, or raging ideologue. So when I say that this movie is the most uncomfortable display of American Douchebag Syndrome I’ve seen in a while, take heed that I really roll my fucking eyes at the people butthurt that the Social Network was a movie about guys, or that the black dude dies in X-men: First Class. (He died saving everyone, perhaps he was the only noble one there.)
Foreigners Are Evil Pieces of Shit or Jokes.
Lazy writing for contemporary Americans is pretty easy. You just stuff you hand into a grab bag of Hate Tropes and see what you pull out. Michael Bag just emptied the fucking bag like a petulant little hack and gobbled them all up, violently vomiting them all over the screen to the general applause of the Obese Moderno-Roman-Rot-Empire that we are.
All the evil human beings in the movie are foreigners. Just like real life, obviously. America! Freedom! Fuck yeah! The duplicitous asshole that sold out the Band of Raging Robot Retards in the beginning was Russian. You have to appreciate Bay for going old school on that one. Cold War villains become modern day treacherous assholes.
It sort of makes sense then that the Autobots and Decepticons conveniently serve as analogs for not just one but two seemingly endless, nebulous wars. They arrive on the scene in the 1960s as obvious Lenin Fucking Communist Freedom haters, and then through the grace of The War On Terror transform (pun!) into the shapeless Jihadist bastards we’re going to be chasing for the next thirty or so years.
Speaking of Jihadists, there’s a scene in the beginning that has the American Flag Robotrons storming a gloriously stereotypical Middle Eastern Evil Hideout. The bottom right hand corner of the screen said something I shit you not, like this:
“Illegal Nuclear Place.”
The rest of us Mouth Breathing Cheese Fries fat fucks could fill in the rest. Sandy dunes? Check. Blazing sun? Check. Word nuclear? Check. These motherfuckers were clearly Afghanistan-Iraqi guys. The rest of the scene is utterly useless, and serves nothing for the narrative. Just cars blowing up what is clearly yet another Muslim Terror Planning Evil Base.
Fuck yeah! Splodey time all over those fucking terrorists!
The foreigners that aren’t evil pieces of shit — which is confusing because as we know all foreigners are evil pieces of shit — are relegated to punching bags. That Fucking Annoying Asian Guy from The Hangover and Community plays the role of “Deep Wang.” He knows karate obviously and acts all sorts of peculiar and not right.
Then there’s The Guy from Firefly, who serves as a German butler. When he’s not making fruity remarks, and being subservient to the crippled American (how’s that for a power structure?) he’s prone to violence.
And since I’m really just getting annoyed and worked up, all the Decepticons speak in guttural noises save for the main characters. I assume these is because even Michael Bay, in-between huffing bags of his own feces sprinkled with Megan Fox’s pubes, realized he needed some bad guys to partake in heavy handed exposition. Meanwhile, the Autobots all speak perfect English, English, while lighting up those dreadlocked, animalistic, guttural sounding piece of shit Decepticunts.
Women Are Totems and Bitches.
It is an empirical fact, forged in the science of the cosmos, that the only things almost as bad as Communist-Lenin-Jihadist-Guttual monsters are women. Bay has seen this divine truth, and I hope you’re ready to listen to his saccharine message. He presents it to you in such an obvious way, that I hope we all take heed. This message is important.
Important.
First there’s Disturbia’s new girlfriend. Fox called Bay a Nazi so they jettisoned her ass to oblivion and they replaced her with Rosie-Something-Such-Nice-Ass. See, there’s the pig in me. They introduce her with an ass shot, and the exploitation doesn’t stop there. It was a nice ass, by the by. I turned to my girlfriend and said “I love 3D. Again, see, I’m a pig. And this movie offended even me.
The rest of the time she’s an empty vessel. A tool to be fought for, serving no real purpose of her own. She’s a fulcrum for Sam’s stress. You see, she makes more than him and this is terribly emasculating. According to the divinations of the Cosmos, a REAL AMERICAN MAN is the fucking bread winner. Okay? Sam sucks because his beautiful girlfriend makes more than him. This is calamitous to him.
Later on in the movie she becomes a prize to be fought for between McDreamy and Labeouf. The only way that the Guy from Grey’s Anatomy can get the protagonist to do his bidding is by threatening to kill this Rosie chick whose character’s name I forget. Said threat is an uncomfortable allusion to rape, as she’s pinned in a car and confronted by a good half-dozen of metallic spiked tentacles which are about as rapey as you can without the movie cutting to some good, deep, hentai fucking.
There’s a point in the movie where Huntington-Whiteley is literally standing in the middle of the street whilst explosions boom and slam and kapow! behind her. That’s the best summation of her use in the entire movie. Oblivious, empty, useless sex object. Bay uses slow-motion during this scene and she glistens and the top of her tits and cleavage look admittedly nice, and nothing really happens but the camera lingers and half the audience gets a fucking chubby.
So let’s see, we have the empty emasculating shell, the powerless rape victim, we need the silver-tongued beguiler!
One scene. Only one scene in this movie does she do anything of worth to truly help her clan on the Call of Duty map of Chicago. Using the oldest trick in the book, she manipulates Megatron into a double-crossing. Fucking women. Even the hot ones with the stunning ass and nice tits are no better than Lady Macbeth. With a couple of annoying enunciated words, this broad convinces the pseudo-leader of an advanced civilization to sword-fuck the man he’s aligned with.
Don’t blame Bay though, that shit is science too.
The other prominent figure in the movie is a raging bitch female leader of the NSA. She riffs off of wonderful ideas that only douchebag women can be in power. Snapping lines and condescending. Her bitchiness eventually leads to the near downfall of the human race. Fucking women! And some people think Hilary Clinton could be president. This broad isn’t the President, and look at how bitchy and unresponsive she is! Imagine Clinton! And what if she got her period? Thermonuclear war! That’s what!
The entire movie is a barrel of shithead pig-slop that arouses the Freedom Fucking assholes in audience. The worst part is that amidst this sexism and racism — I didn’t even mention that Tyrese hangs out in the hood, obviously — is a movie that’s bland as fuck. Straight-up boring. I could have forgotten about all this bullshit momentarily and enjoyed a good fight or two. Ain’t there. Doesn’t happen.
For a movie called Transformers, the Autobots spend the majority of the time off screen. They’re probably off killing Arabs or something before they mine plutonium. When they’re not getting caught up in fucking ropes, they’re conspicuously missing from the action. I think Bay was so stuck on having Optimus storm onto the scene and save the day over and over, that he relegated his role to about three minutes of screen time.
When he finally shows up, he thrashes the bad guy in roughly four seconds, and lead me to wonder why he didn’t just drop the hammer like that two hours ago. I wasn’t happy that the good guys won, I was elated I could go home and eat my hate for myself in various ice creams and processed cheese power-coated bullshit.
The movie is a fucking disaster. It did the unthinkable and made me yearn for something that was merely a tepid, rotting, sugar-CGI-disaster like Green Lantern. I realize that by seeing it, I tacitly approved of it. I realize that even though I saw it just so I could review it, I perpetuated the problem more than anything.
I think I need to stop seeing shitty movies.
