According to the CDC, one million Americans now have the Swine Flu. They have based this estimate on 3000 hospital admissions for the virus. By using the same mathematical model, I have calculated that my I.Q. is now 51,000, after substracting 282 points for seeing Transformers 2 last night. In the spirit of the short attention span of today’s bearers of bad news, I will ignore the impending collapse of civilization and give you my analysis of this latest effort by Michael Bay to bludgeon moviegoers’ into a mindless stupor by alternately exposing them to siezure-inducing camera movement, chest-thumping bass, and eye-popping visuals so intense that the only brain cells remaining to them are too shell-shocked to ask any more questions. It’s a shame, too, because I would very much have liked to have tasked my grey matter to explain how it is you can exit the hangar door of the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. and emerge among the Boneyard’s rows of rusting aircraft abandoned in the desert near Tuscon, Arizona. But the gelatinous home of my precious memories and whatever remains of a squandered education was simply too overwrought to spare more than a handful of neurons, which only crouched quivering in some dark corner of my mind, whimpering. A few of them wandered out to catch a glimpse of Megan Fox, then scattered at the sound of more explosions.
It simply wasn’t a movie for your brain.
But that’s OK, because the really interesting thing about the Transformers sequel is not what it had to teach us about filmmaking, but what it had to teach us about ourselves. Because, in the tradition of hundreds of exploitive genre films before it, it had a lot to say regarding what it is that frightens us about the 21st century. And it’s not the Swine Flu.
It’s robots.
Science fiction movies have been playing on our fears since the silent movies, and the threat of the mechanical man has been with us nearly as long. In fact, one of the very first movies you could properly call science fiction was one that posed the still unanswerable question: does the creator bear responsibility for the technology that he has unleashed upon the world? The technology run amok in this case was Frankenstein’s cadaverous robot.
Other mechanical men followed, and even mechanical ladies, like the malignant Maria that terrorized Metropolis and served as inspiration for a somewhat less threatening C3P-0 later in the century. From the very beginnings of Sci-fi, if the bad guy wasn’t a robot, you could rest assured that he owned one.
Every film has a villian, and every decade of film has its villian of choice. Sci-fi films of the fifties assailed us with all manner of giant monsters, but all of their city-stomping mayhem was generally caused by one culprit: atomic energy, the bogeyman of the cold war that had every U.S. moviegoer ducking and covering. The sci-fi films of the sixties had less of a common thread, but while the threat of nuclear holocaust still lingered, many films saw those in authority as the new villians. Films of the sixties and seventies (like A Clockwork Orange, The Time Machine, Fahrenheit 451 and Planet of the Apes) served up dark dystopias where the established order had run wild, as if to echo the country’s disenchantment with its own scandal-ridden, protest-bashing government. Films released in the wake of Star Wars mirrored the polarized politics of the late cold war by drawing sharp distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys. The spectre of the evil robot resurfaced in the eighties, as well, in films like Saturn 3, Terminator, Wargames and Tron, in sync with the commercial rise of the personal computer. The ninties saw the birth of an interesting new paranoia, the fear that we may not even know who the villians are, and that they may have already won. The Truman Show, Total Recall, Dark City and the Matrix pulled back the curtain to reveal that all was not as it seemed in the land of Oz, perhaps observing that invisible corporate overlords now pulled the political strings in ways we were only dimly aware. A growing fear of mother nature punishing us for our technological hubris seemed to underpin a lot of disaster films of the late nineties and the new millenium, and that hubris was also often corporate driven.
And now, as we near the beginning of a new decade of sci-fi film, we may be seeing the killer robot unleashed again, in all it’s CGI fury, bigger and badder than ever. The villians in the Transformer movies are the sum of all of our technological fears: The irresitable might of high-tech weaponry, the magical chip off the mighty machine that imbues otherwise helpful household appliances with sinister intent, the ease at which the bad guys use our private communications against us and the unsettling realization that all the robots seem to know each other are easily recognizable resonances of our own terror in the face of cruise missles that can seek us out and destroy us no matter where we hide, tools that have become smarter than us with the simple addition of a microchip, cell phones that reveal our private conversations to prying eyes, eyes whose owners can instantly share their knowledge with anyone in range. It’s a scary machine world we live in, and it has grown much bigger over the years. There is nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, and our only defense is…a teenager. After all, if you need your PC fixed, you don’t call grandpa, do you?
Everyone has owned a junk car that seemed to have a mind of its own. Today, you can buy a new one that seems even more independent minded. What would you do if it got out of control completely, turning into a giant, death-dealing robot that could walk and talk and knew your name? Michael Bay’s summer action flick may not be destined to win any awards for best screenplay, but the film speaks to us on a level far beneath its snarky dialogue, conjuring up our fears and vanquishing them on a scale whose only parallel is the Japanese cinematic symbol of radioactive horror, Godzilla.
I sense that these giant robots may be with us a long time. Move over Gojira, there is a new King of the Monsters in town.