When I was a kid – like, 11, 12, 13 – and I first started becoming interested in movies that weren’t just Jurassic Park, RoboCop, Die Hard, or any other of the well-worn VHS tapes circulating my house, I’d rave ecstatically to my dad about things I’d seen: about how inventive, different, or straight-up new these films seemed. His response, every time, to all this unchecked adolescent excitement: “Sometimes you just want to be entertained.” At 11, 12, 13, hearts sink at this, of course. Delight curdles into bitterness until this very idea of nave entertainment becomes just another battle line drawn in the timeless turmoil of Son vs. Dad. Now, that I’m old enough to be a father but still impulsively knocking wood at the mere thought of it, I’ve come to appreciate the idea of being just entertained. Not naively, of course. Because now the simple pleasures of my youth have been refined; run through a decade-plus regime of acculturation. Elevated. Jurassic Park isn’t just a movie about a prehistoric theme park, but an allegory for the rapaciousness of Hollywood itself. RoboCop itself is both a robotic cop and metallic Messiah, pneumatically stomping through the temples of media sensationalism and Reagan-era corporate philandering. Die Hard‘s a movie about being hungover. Give me a satisfyingly cheap thriller or revenge flick and I’ll fart you out a studied allegory for American foreign policy post Iran-Contra. Or something. It’s a slippery slope, though. And soon that Agnes Varda box set you borrowed from a friend will enter its third week of collecting dust on your coffee table, lost in the shuffle of half-opened bills and crinkly old receipts. The race-to-the-bottom has to end somewhere, though. And there’s no better way-station to hop off at and recollect your bearings than that posed by Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which opens here and everywhere this week in IMAX 3D, Real-D, 2-D and any other dimension across which your eye can discern geometric shapes. Being a smart, sensitive, culturally-savvy person, you know these films are bad. But, admit it, something about you has to know exactly how bad. It’s enticing, forking over your 15-or-so dollars to see Transformers 3. But it’s not so weird. What person living in a developed, laissez-capitalist nation wouldn’t accept an invitation to see what $195 million looks like? At some level, we all want to hold snug stacks of tightly-wadded hundreds in our hands, to feel it’s heft and see how much space it would physically occupy and smell its distinctly moneyish musk as we flit through it like a deck of cards; to belly-flop into it like Scrooge McDuck and back-crawl across it as it brushes coarsely against our sinuous, too-human flesh. But don’t do it. It’s also tempting to indulge the trumped-up, enlightened philistine tendency of “Well shit, I know it’s dumb, but I’mma see some robots blow each others up!” Don’t rationalize it like this. Many have. Even wily, typically top-shelf critics like A.O. Scott at The New York Times, who not only faintly praised the film as “by far the best 3-D sequel ever made about gigantic toys from outer space,” but out-and-out acknowledged that this was faint praise, i.e. that he was just being snarky. Do not be deceived by the line that this is middle-of-the-road entertainment and as middle-of-the-road entertainment, hey, it ain’t half bad! It is half-bad. It’s whole-bad. Don’t think that, by not seeing Transformers 3, you’re missing out some cultural watershed. Because every terrible Hollywood blockbuster of the past decade-or-so has been positioned as such: as bellwether “event” that is merely the presentation of the conspicuous spending of money. Though Transformers 3 would like you to think so, you’re not going to miss anything at all not seeing. After all, one of the upshots of Transformers‘ vast, depthless incomprehensibility is that you couldn’t talk about it if you tried. Imagine slinking over a co-worker’s cubicle divider as you both take turns stammering “Oh man and that scene where the guys like fly though Chicago, somehow, and then the thing from the robot comes out and then the other thing, the other robot, he shows up, and, and, and…” Foolish. Great blockbusters, like most great films, are defined by their indelible images: a jetlagged New York cop stealthily tip-toes barefoot across broken glass; cadenced ripples in a glass of water portend the arrival of a theme park T-Rex; just when the good guy’s looking away, the man-eating shark we’ve heard so much about pops out of the water. Michael Bay’s greatest deceit as a filmmaker and purveyor of popular entertainment is that he’ll give you nothing like this. Instead, he’ll only bombard you with the indelible’s opposite: stuff. In a film defined by its wall-to-wall plenitude of stuff, it’s hard to find anything to clasp onto. (Is it the scene where the one guy does the thing? The one where the good robot turns into a truck and flips around on the bad robot and is all Pew! Pew! Pew!? Will it be when the wiseass robot almost swears?) This isn’t a contest between populism and elitism, either. It’s not like you have to go see Tree of Life or catch some light symphony in lieu of buying a ticket to the third alien-robot-car-movie with your Friday night. It may feel like it at times, but you’re not caught between brows of different elevation bullying you one way or the other. But you do have a choice. A very fundamental, very human choice. It’s a matter of making a conscious decision to support something that is actively ruining the mainstream cinema, and that is rightly regarded by plenty as the nadir of filmmaking at its most shamelessly, out-and-out entertaining. It’s the kind of thing that could be conceivably called “Evil,” if that word didn’t carry so many grandiose connotations that you probably can’t sensibly apply to a movie about warring car-robots from outer-space and the popcorn-hocking bad man director who gets paid zillions of dollars to make them and still be taken seriously. But its effect on the culture, and cinema as a medium, is doubtlessly, unproblematically Bad. Seeing Transformers 3 is essentially casting a dollar-vote in favour of more dead-eyed, stuff-filled summer cinema. And if you don’t think that how you spend your money has any effect on these larger operations, which whir perplexingly like the spinning space-gears of so many Decepticons, then you should have serious misgivings about your role as a citizen, even as a sentient, free-thinking, motivated human adult. Rest assured that the ballot boxes are already overstuffed without you. So do something else. Literally anything else. Go fishing or pet a dog or have a beer with a friend or wash your grandmother’s hair. Because worse than being stupid and obnoxious and bad for you, is that no matter how valiantly you try to salvage it, Transformers 3 will never ever be anything but the third alien-robot-car-movie.
