Image from WikipediaOn Sunday I wrote a little rant on “Transformers” (the movie) under the impression of just having seen it for the first time. Now a little time passed and I decided to watch the movie again with director Michael Bay‘s commentary because it’s probably the least immersive way to watch a movie.
There are basically two subjects to the commentary: First is about how thankful Bay is to have all this realistic military stuff and real military personnel on the picture. He brags about having a good connection to the poeple of the Pentagon, Army and Air Force because of his earlier projects (e.g. Pearl Harbor) so he could show the most state of the art killing machines and film on location at various military bases (of course he had to accept certain concessions story-wise as a counter-favour). Second subject is how he was bashed by the fans during production for probably not making a good movie or getting things wrong.
Well, as I said before Michael Bay does action movies and therefore little else than action in movies. What I completely overlooked is that Bay is fond of making military movies (Remember “Armageddon” or “The Rock”?) . And by that I mean completely-pro-military-and-not-deadly- realistic-like-Saving-Private-Ryan type of movies. For Teenagers. Full Stop.

And so “Transformers” boils down to being a 2-hour-advertisement for toys and the military services of the USA (which, as we all know, is in desperate need of some more soldiers). I’m completely disappointed by Steven Spielberg being a producer for this kind of crap. It’s so obvious: the movie is rated PG-13 in the US (12 in Germany) but totally made up as a ‘realistic’ movie (Bay states several times during the commentary that he’s very proud of the realism, the intense use of non-digital fx etc.) so that young people won’t have problems to connect it to the real world. That’s probably also the reason why unknown and imho untalented (at least in this piece) but young and good-looking actors are starring in that ad (quote from movie:”You’re a soldier now.”). If you look at some of the final scenes they very much look like “Black Hawk Down” but in a sci-fied, almost lightly we-cannot-be-harmed-although-everything-blows-up kind of way. It’s close to disgusting. I could have not disliked it better if it just would have been a bad movie.

Money quote: “I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime.” I wish it would be.