Life As Fiction

The tyranny of Transformers: Dark of the Moon

The Transformers franchise and its impresario Michael Bay have a dual gift: a way of making tremendous amounts of money, and a way of infuriating large portions of the population. The Transformers films manage to be so abhorrent that they spark analysis and criticism of such a high calibre that the existence of the films seems justified, if only as cultural objects to be critiqued. These movies either leave the audience embalmed in a neon, celluloid haze of dazed indifference, or provoke a fire-and-brimstone torrent of rage. Thus:

Walter Chaw (filmfreakcentral.net):

“[TF3] holds the distinction of being the first movie this year I’m actually ashamed of. In it, I recognize every failing of we the people, paraded before us as though they were virtues. The country represented by this film is bellicose and ignorant. Comparing the projected grosses of [TF3] and Tree of Life highlights just how clearly Bay and his legion see things as they really are.

It’s unspeakably depressing. “

Charlie-Jane Anders (io9.com) with an auteur interpretation:

“After a few hours of seeing Shia get dissed, overlooked and mistreated, the message becomes clear: Shia, as always, is a stand-in for Michael Bay. And Bay is showing us just what it felt like to deal with the ocean of Haterade — the snarking, the Razzie Award, the mean reviews — that Revenge of the Fallen unleashed.”

The Last Psychiatrist interviews Michael Bay in “My name is Michael Bay, and I just fucked your girlfriend”:

“…my movies exist because of women, because they’ve driven men batshit crazy into ‘man caves’ and Call Of Duty XI. Did they have giant robot movies in the 1930s and 40s? No, all of those movies had dance numbers. Back when a guy could punch a dame for overcooking a chicken there was no shame in watching some fool tap dance his way through WWII. Now these bitches expect you to change a diaper and shave your balls? Fuck that. Giant robots.”

Movie review: How to train your dragon

Today, over lunch, I decided to preview “How to train your dragon” so that I could decide whether to watch it over the weekend. I usually preview a movie for ten or fifteen minutes randomly picking two or three scenes in a bid to get an impression of the overarching themes and delivery.

I ended up extending my lunch by one hour and watching the entire movie.

I think the movie is brilliant. I would even venture as far as to say that it is the best movie [of its class] ever made. That’s not too bold a statement. Animated movies leapfrog each other with German consistency. More bold perhaps is to say that I think this is the best story ever told.

The story itself is not new or unique: A boy-hero living in his great father’s shadow has to find himself and his niche, learn a deep truth about the world around him and bring that truth back to his people to become a man, a leader, and of course, to get the girl.

Teenage angst plays a part in the story but is handled without too much fanfare, and avoids the repellent over-indulgence of movies like, say, Twilight.

What the movie does well is how it manages to handle important relationships in such a confined space but without being dismissive about the crucial elements. The diminutive boy’s name is Hiccup. His father is the broad-shouldered, Atlas throwback, chief of the village with the imposing name of “Stoic The Vast”. With that we have the driving force of the mythology, that is, “Every man is trying to either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes.”¹

The bulk of the story is then about this young man going through a journey of self-discovery, and of discovering the world around him. It is an ecologically friendly story and it depicts the aspiration we all share of one day reconnecting with nature. Unlike, other movies that handle that lofty ideal with overflowing, cloying, righteous zeal, this story simply describes the domestication of a wild beast in the form of a union that strikes one as historically credible, and seems more natural and fitting than the usual antagonistic stance ascribed to man and creature.

The story is a miracle of technical excellence with every single piece of the standard formula tweaked to perfection and parred to the bare, most-effective minimum. Every word in the movie is functional and serves to provide a meaningful link or set-up to another scene.

Early in the movie, the acolytes are talking after training. In response to their instructor’s war stories, one of them says that he will chop of every dragon’s leg as revenge against the one dragon that tore of their teacher’s unlucky foot. The teacher responds that they should instead cripple the wings of the dragons because “a grounded dragon is a dead dragon.” Later, in the pivotal battle scene, it is precisely that strategy which Hiccup adopts in order to slay a volcano-dwelling leviathan. Such economy and utility of expression is a thing to behold.

The mistake that most writer’s make in building a mythology is to give the hero incredible gifts by default. “It is usually some kid revealing himself as stronger, wiser and braver than older people, and a quick learner when it comes to discovering or mastering a new form of warfare.”² This sort of thing as seen in “Star Wars” (with the Jedi force), Matrix (Neo is The One) and more recently, Harry Potter (with his natural immunity to The-One-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named), all test our credulity and water down the story.

A hero must be transformed by learning. Hiccup tames a dragon in a season but we never feel that his educational calender was in any way accelerated or truncated. He studies diligently late at night, has been an inventor of sorts for most of his young life, and fails numerously in his attempts to connect with a terrible, fire-breathing beast. His path is nothing short of inspiring.

It makes me wonder how the writers of the movie achieved all this character development. I’d wager that a quarter, if not a full half of the movie is expended in action sequences with flying, mid-air battles, and other adrenaline-pumping cinematography being used to dazzle the audience over and over. Somehow, they still managed to fit an entire story into a small container without in any way deforming the tale as they did so. So effective is their delivery that I found myself justifying all the time spent flying around by viewing it as a metaphor for freedom.

“How to train your dragon” builds a strong, coherent mythology with nary an error and only one or two moments of heavy-handed story telling or gratuitous hand-holding. It is a triumph of literary skill on a silver screen that rarely shines this bright.