Anghus Houvouras on why Transformers: Age of Extinction is the smartest movie of the year (warning: spoilers ahead)….
Michael Bay is the personification of a pinata. He’s this bright, garish, candy filled monstrosity which people take way too much pleasure taking swings at. Critics might talk about how bad his success is for filmmaking, but they’re pleased as punch every couple of years when his latest sensory overload experience hits the big screen so they can whip out their bat and shine it up for a good old-fashioned beat down. I never found much pleasure in the mob mentality or standing idly by as everyone screams ‘crucify him’. It’s unfortunate because with the fourth Transformers movie he’s slyly delivered something deep and meaningful under the guise of a Summer blockbuster.
Mark Wahlberg’s Cade Yaeger is a down on his luck would be inventor trying to avoid being foreclosed on while finding a way to put his ridiculously hot daughter through college. Apparently in spite of being dead broke, she can’t get financial aid. While on a salvage trip he finds a busted up tractor trailer rig and brings it back to his lab. It turns out there’s more than meets the eye with this beat up truck and discovers it’s the head of the Autobots, Optimus Prime. Things aren’t as rosy as they used to be our favorite alien shape shifting robots. After they leveled Chicago in the third movie, the Transformers are now on the most wanted list. The American government has gotten particularly aggressive about the presence of these illegal immigrants on our planet and implement a secret agency to hunt them down.
America’s solution to effectively combat the Transformers is to make their own Government sanctioned copy-cat Autobots and Decepticons. I think Michael Bay was making references to the war on terror and the increasing escalation of arms that fueled the Cold War. In fact, the whole movie seems to be a well constructed metaphor for America’s fading presence in the world’s cultural landscape. The Autobots are cars and trucks which represents the American Auto Industry, which like our heroes has seen better days. They’re being replaced by better, more efficient models. The Decepticons always transform into planes, war machines, and weapons. They represent the military industrial complex that has been a great beneficiary of our wars.
Shia Labeouf’s directionless slacker, which represented shiftless millennials, has been replaced with a well-intentioned Yaeger, a Texan who thinks that one big idea will eventually make him a fortune. His attitude in atypically American. Even though he’s deeply in debt (a symptom many Americans face) and a single parent (another American malady) he still doesn’t seek out regular employment and believes that he can will himself out of his current predicament, that there’s one big idea he’s will stumble upon that will correct every bad choice in one fell swoop. He spends the first act of the film looking for anything of value in an old movie theater which represents the dreams of our society. The movie theater is where we went to escape our troubles and believe in a world beyond the mediocrity of our day-to-day life. Inside he finds a remnant of that dream in the form of an old truck which turns out to be Optimus Prime who turns out to be the one thing Yaeger needed to stumble upon to solve his financial woes and mend his struggling relationship with his daughter.
Writer Ehren Kruger has carefully crafted the role of Yaeger’s daughter which sees her on the precipice of adulthood, struggling with the temptations of youth while pining for a more exciting life in college. She wants to be smart and challenge conventions, but it’s easier for her to wear high heel shoes and shorts that leave little to the imagination. She’s the product of a single parent home, not by choice, but by tragedy. Her eventual transformation from eye candy to hero presents us with a strong heroine who can hold her own in a male dominated society.
Kelsey Grammer’s Harold Attinger character represents both the fear and the vigilance America has faced since the second plane hit the World Trade Center in 2001. Signage dots the landscape telling citizens to report Transformer activity and to not forget the terrible tragedy of Chicago. That metaphor is paper-thin and meant to be the easiest entry point for those looking for a deeper level of intelligence in a movie that hides it’s intentions with a sensory overload of action. Grammer does a great job of playing the heel, still believing that every evil action is justified because of some greater good that doesn’t really exist. It’s an ideology that the most conservative cling to in order to sleep soundly. Innocents can die, freedoms can be subverted, and deals can be made with enemies in order to ensure victory. No act is too reprehensible if it means protecting the status quo.
It’s no surprise that Attinger as his ‘Cemetery Wind’ black ops group teams up with a transformer who morphs into a gun. It’s the second most obvious metaphor in the movie after the 9/11 allegory. The evil Transformer Lockdown is a walking, talking representation of the second amendment. Our right to bear arms has an action figure. He wants to punish Optimus Prime for his beliefs. It’s also no surprise that in the final battle of the movie, Optimus abandons his gun for a sword while fighting Lockdown giving us a literal battle for the soul of America. Will the gun-toting avatar of appeasement defeat the sword wielding warrior of honor and virtue? Take a guess?
Optimus Prime has always been a walking, talking, transforming representation of American pride. He’s a selfless hero who will do whatever it takes to defeat evil. A relic from a bygone era who would sacrifice his own life to save the world, even one that isn’t his own. Like the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, Optimus Prime understands the value of sacrifice. The Optimus Prime featured in Age of Extinction is different. He’s bruised, beaten, and mirrors our own current sense of diminishing American Pride. He’s an old, rusted out ideological tin-man that has been left for scrap, hunted down by an all too powerful security agency who has taken away our freedoms. You can almost hear Eisenhower uttering his final words “Beware the Military-Industrial complex” throughout the film.
By the end of the film, Optimus Prime realizes that his era is over. His John Wayne routine is tired and every effort he’s made to save the people of his adopted world ends in conflict. There is no place for a damaged junker clinging to old ideologies of right and wrong. Our country is now at the mercy of an unchecked Government obsessed with violating our civil liberties and a military-industrial complex who will create more efficient killing machines to keep anyone who interferes with our interests in check. There is no place for him here. Not anymore. The purity of the American Dream has been corrupted beyond recognition. Our very society has been transformed into something unrecognizable.
There’s so many other little jokes at play. Stanley Tucci’s technology guru CEO who feels like the bastard love child of Howard Hughes and Steve Jobs. The ultimate culmination of big business and big ideas. There’s the Dino-bots that have to be recruited and tamed in order to help save the day. Do they represent our pent-up rage of the American citizens watching their country being taken away? Do these dinosaurs represent the old values of America’s founding fathers that we have strayed so far from? There’s so much subtext here to dissect. It might take years and countless documentaries to really understand what Bay was trying to say. There’s an added level of humor when you realize that the Transformers movies have been staples of the July 4th Independence Day celebration. Michael Bay delivered a movie about the death of America the week before celebrating it’s birth. Under the guise of a very long, very action packed movie, Michael Bay has delivered a subversive message of the death of the American ideal making Transformers: Age of Extinction the most surprising and intelligent movie of the year.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
