In the face of The End

Rating: 8/10 (31 October 2003)

Going into this film, I really expected to despise it.
I expected it to be the typical over-produced Jerry Bruckheimer tripe like TOP GUN (yeah....if Leni Riefenstahl make music videos...), but the end product proved to be one of the most emotionally overwhelming and spiritually uplifting films I have seen to date.
Sure if you look at all of the bits in the film as discrete units, sometimes, things don't add up. But as a whole, it clicks. I've read reviews complaining about how the film was edited, but if it was not editing in the manner it was, it would have been interminable experience to sit through. (It was a two and one-half hour movie. It did not feel like a two and one-half hour movie. That is a sign of...GOOD EDITING..)
Let's look at some of the bits in the film: you have a bunch of roughneck oil drillers who have commissioned to save the world. To take it a step further,you have the realm of society that people would call losers that world has ask jump into the void and redeem the world from darkness.
I could be wrong, but this kind of sounds like something from The Good Book....(actually, many Good Books...)
You know, despite of the ZA-ZOOM comic book surface, Director Michael Bay is doing some fairly deep stuff that is worthy of William Blake. I won't spoil how this winds up, but someone does something in this film that can be best expressed in one word: messianic.
I have seen this film multiple times since its release and each time, I find getting weepy each time. Why? I think because it goes beyond its surfaces and ask you something: what you do in the face of the end?
Well....?