Pure Military Propaganda, and Racist to Boot

Rating: Null/10 (24 June 2009)

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.