Star Wars *OT* (Off-Topic)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Monday, July 13, 2015, 19:14 (3424 days ago) @ General Battuta

Maybe! It's not a very pleasant movie, but I think it's a good expression of Bay's interests, so I respect it. It's all about how the ideas people usually think of as 'Bayhem' - money, men, muscles, cars, models - are actually toxic, vile attempts to cover up for insecurity and need. I think a lot of Bay's work is satire of this stuff.

Pain & Gain starts with Mark Wahlberg doing curls while strapped to a gigantic billboard bicep. It's pretty unsubtle, but pretty funny.

The Transformers movies are also funny (though I will never recommend them) because Optimus Prime is clearly a supervillain, and Bay seems to want the audience to see through the rhetoric about Freedom and Protection to realize he's a monster. Every movie he makes Prime more despicable. I wonder if it makes him sad that no one catches on.

edit: in Transformers: Age of Extinction, Optimus Prime beats up a fellow robot while shouting 'Let me lead you!', 'We're giving you freedom!', and 'You defend my family or die!' Afterwards he says 'Now we're going to prove who we are' and one of his followers says 'Man, you just want to die for the guy.' Bay is really angry at his audience.

There can definitely be value in that, but I think that still plays into the misgivings people have about adapting the property-- I'm pretty sure Transformers wasn't supposed to be nearly that deep or nuanced originally, and adding that in makes it into kind of a whole different thing. Also I thought something similar about Spartan Ops (it's self-parody at times) and people told me I was giving the writers way too much credit, so....