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Michael Bay’s latest SF film, Transformers (2007), is a slick and action packed summer blockbuster brimming with special effects that succeeds in ways that I had not expected it to do so. Of course, there are the obligatory cheesy lines, full-frontal scenes of people running away from something insanely scary right on their tail, and massive explosions and demolition. Luckily, the film goes beyond its clichés and one liners. On the surface, the film is about a one-dimensional conflict between the good Autobots who serve as humanity’s protectors and the evil Decepticons who aspire to kill and destroy on the path to the life generating “Cube.” However, the film is about much more than meets the eye.

The film begins with American soldiers in Iraq returning from a patrol to their base where their fellow soldiers are working, showering, and playing basketball. This peaceful scene of Army life is soon shattered as the Decepticon Blackout and his passenger Scorponok descend into the camp disguised as a Sikorsky helicopter. The camp is decimated and only our returning patrol heroes live to escape and fight another day.

This crew led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) eventually kill Scorponok with the help of a laser guided air strike and they are recalled to the United States for a full debriefing. However, their return to the States results in the war, once thought of as “over there,” being transfered to the American homeland.

These soldiers fight along side the good robots called Autobots, who are led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen). They find themselves fighting the powerful Decepticons who are led by Megatron (Hugo Weaving). Belying the fact that these American soldiers are fighting killer robots, is that they are fighting a war against an enemy that can blend into its surroundings. The enemy is literally a transformer–capable of transforming from the obvious threat of a giant, intelligent robot to something dangerous yet less threatening due to its terrestrial origins such as a tank, helicopter, plane, cell phone, or boom box (the latter two examples conjure the invasion of the camera phone and spying and the boom box is the harbinger of subversive music).

Even more problematic than the metamorphosis of these giant robots is that the battle is shifted from Iraq (i.e., somewhere else) to America (i.e., the untouched, virginal homeland). The battle between Autobots and Decepticons took place long ago on their obliterated homeplanet, Cybertron. Now, they have brought their fight here to Earth in search of the Cube, an artifact capable of creating artificial life. The Autobots have a noble mission to prevent the Decepticons from obtaining the Cube while protecting humanity in its, to their perspective, infancy. This maps onto American’s own involvement in wars such as Afghanistan and Iraq. In the former, we set out to remove the Taliban from power and in the latter, to depose Saddam Hussein. In both cases, American forces remain to preserve stability and fight off insurgent forces (human transformers). Ultimately, these foreign battles are revisited on America in the mythical “Mission City” where Sam Witwicky (Shia Labeouf) aided by Bubblebee are to hide the Cube. The Decepticons arrive en force to wreak havoc on their way to taking the Cube from the Autobots’ and humanity’s protection. There are telling shots of Megatron and Starscream, both capable of flight, of going through some of the city’s highrise buildings much as the planes of the 9/11 Attacks did in 2001.

These attacks culminate with Sam saving the day, but without truly up-holding his family’s motto, “no sacrifice, no victory.” In the end, one Autobot has been killed, but the central cast has survived and his family is assumed to be in the care of the government. Optimus Prime tries to be the sacrifice to save humanity from the voracity of the Decepticons (and he says this several times during the film), but it’s Sam final decision that saves Prime and humanity from an untimely end. Sam, as the prototypical American hero not by brawn but my family heritage and therefore history, represents a failure in fulfilling his family motto which is as much an American belief system as it is his family’s motto. Thus, the motto and what it represents breaks down in the face of the movie’s conclusion just as American triumphalism gave way to the American identity crisis during the Cold War. I would like to note that there are other ways of reading the ending of the film, but I don’t want to go into further details without giving away anything beyond the movie’s obvious ending.

Transformers is an enjoyable SF film that actually carries a bigger message than robot warriors are destined to fight while dragging humanity along for the ride. For the naysayers who decry the Autobots’ naivety and simplicity in the film, I direct them to watch the Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980s where they’ll find Bay has kept much closer to the source material than one might wish to believe he had. The film updates the core story with contemporary issues and the latest in transportation developments since the cartoon first debuted in 1984. I recommend the movie as both an SF film worthy of a second look and as a summer blockbuster complete with the “transforming sound” and Peter Cullen’s distinctive voice as Optimus Prime.

Visit the official site for more information, and check out the film’s trailers here.