In an older age of blockbusters, Jeff Goldblum offered this wisdom: “What you call progress, I call the rape of the natural world.” Moments later he was clocked on the head by the roof of an imploding restroom – a cogent point on the ineffectiveness of criticizing darker, natural forces, marauding behemoths who slumber and destroy. Picture an inverted Washington Monument finding its purchase in some sunny, sacred meadow.  I approach the future with a concealed stiletto.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is totally beyond the ongoing cycle of tiresome fucking summers and the angry crowds and the all-inclusive promotional convergence and 60-year-old tastemakers interpreting what amounts to shifting wallpaper for an hour or two in sticky air-conditioned rooms.  It is more primal and unsettling than that. It has come slowly to this last, flailing beast, this massive hemorrhage in our collective unconscious, this loathsome, lumbering, mewling, intolerable ogre to be cornered, corralled, and perforated with pitchforks. Birds frolic in their filthy baths – babies scream like bleeding dogs. Grim times are upon us.

And so the time is at hand for reflections of a fundamental nature, in the way that hobos are led to ponder youth and possibility in the throes of malts and vermin. Let us all remember the sobering power of such moments, and talk quietly and without hyperbole.

When did we allow what comes to a commercial for tits and a 30-year-old line of plastic dolls to cost more than 200 million dollars? No rational human can justify that number in comparison with the costs associated with the conceptual elements of this film: breasts, for example, are a very cheap commodity, and I’m sure that Hasbro’s fine line of Transformers dolls retail for about $7 apiece. So then surely a superior, yet comparable, film could be made by squeezing that toy robot between a woman’s heaving bosoms while a parade of animated gorillas stormed past, shouting incomprehensibly.

Muse for a moment on your own bank account, look a paragraph upward, and at the sheer scale of that price tag in comparison. Films made by men and women of modest means used to occasionally enjoy a theatrical run – Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, as far as I can tell, exists for no other purpose than to bully that era out of existence, to declare that summer films have become as jealous Gods, trampling the idolatrous and answering to no man. Cue thunderclaps and megaphone sermonizing. And given the U.S. Military’s involvement with the whole project – consigning personnel to act as extras, providing land to simulate the whooping obliteration of Egyptian relics, etc. – were I an intolerant  man given to paranoia, I might find it kind of despicable that someone in our government apparently has no problem financially assisting projects like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which preach classic American values like the synthetic sexuality of women, or the destruction of monuments as aphrodesiac, or the effortless humor of uneducated blacks, and requires an inordinate amount of slick American Machinery, built for the defense of God’s chosen, to be gleefully smashed like a Arkansas teenager hucking florescent lights at concrete.

A moment of silence while we reflect on the fact that the government is now subsidizing the year’s most democratically popular piece of art. I imagine China is jealous.

There will be no discussion of plot, of acting, of cinematography or editing — the film itself acknowledges these as entirely beside the point. Only questions remain: why did I see this movie?  Why did anyone?  Right now I am eating a packet of M&M’s emblazoned with the Transformers brand – each bite is potently metaphoric and tastes like strawberries and acid rain. I am left with the vague hope that someday, a more active man might lead a company of men – strong, thick men, able to say no to abjuratory chocolates – to wall off these studios, these scrofulous hamlets, hurling in sick animals and scriptwriters with a mighty trebuchet. And as night fell we would sing (I would show up after the bit with the trebuchet, for legal reasons), we would sing new hymns of a new era, of a time and place where art invigorates and entertains and, above all, isn’t willfully cretinous. The nadir of junk culture has been reached, and an empty void has consumed the bottom. Apparently Steven Spielberg thinks this movie is “awesome.” The man made Jurassic Park, and so the world is insane.

I refuse to believe that I am alone on this.

0 out of 5 stars

Q: Michael Bay has more films in the Criterion Collection than Martin Scorsese – does this mean that Bay is a more important filmmaker?

A: No necessarily more important, but with the success of this “Transformers” movies, he is very good!