Transformers and the Dangers of Hope
Hope is a powerful force. It’s the light at the end of a dark tunnel, the answered prayer for a pilgrim after a lifetime on their knees. We want it to be a gentle relief, but it more often appears bitter with blood on its knuckles after fighting through hellfire to survive. Hope can inspire a soul to survive anything through a promise of salvation. It’s the whisper of a dream during a sleep full of nightmares, a song when the world is silent, peace when the storm turns violent.
Hope is also the only reason why I suffered through the entire eight movie Transformers franchise, enduring five truly terrible movies at grueling three hour runtimes for the experience of two good movies (and one somewhat okay one).
There’s no sugar coating it - the Transformers movies are just bad. And I love bad movies. If you’ve read my previous blog post about the Alien vs. Predator franchise, bad movies are my jam. But the Transformers movies as directed by Micheal Bay are just, frankly, terrible and not in that endearing, enjoyable way that I typically love with bad movies. They’re an affront to the movie watching experience and made my life worse for watching them.
The first three movies featuring Shia LaBeouf as our main human hero are yellow-tinted, sweaty homages to hyperactivity that blatantly hate women. Megan Fox was treated with less respect in the first two movies than the fake CGI robots voiced by Spongebob that hump her leg and we don’t do much better with the forgettable maybe Australian/maybe British woman that replaces her in the third movie. The next two installments bring Marky Mark Wahlberg of the Funky Bunch into the mix, which does absolutely nothing for the franchise except make them even more incoherent than the previous three with a vomit smorgasbord of half-conceived plotlines and characters that never once really sync up or make any real sense aside from “big robots punch each other”. Even then, the big robots punching each other isn’t that fun to watch because the CGI is so dismal you can’t recognize anything. To add salt into the wound, each movie is about three hours long (or at least feels that way) so there’s not even a quick escape from the cruelty of witnessing Optimus Prime’s repeated self-hating attempts to save the humans who continually want to nuke him (toxic relationship, much?) and the endless roster of Decepticons that can’t just stay in the scrapyard despite the illusion of victory provided at the end of the previous movie.
But do you know what kept me watching this terrible franchise despite my severe lack of enjoyment? Hope.
Hope that the next movie wouldn’t be as terrible as the last. Hope that the itty bitty whispers I heard on the internet about Bumblebee (2018) and Transformers One (2023) being somewhat decent installments for the franchise were true. I endured the first five terrible movies, my soul getting slowly destroyed with each new unfunny robot masturbation joke and poorly orchestrated CGI metal gears crashing against each other in messy action scenes, because I believed things would get better.
That hope somewhat paid off. If it wasn’t for my perseverance in my goal to complete the entire franchise, I never would’ve had the gratifying experience that came with watching Bumblebee (2018) where the franchise finally learned to see women as more than eye candy next to the big cool boy robots and it paid off incredibly well. I was fully enraptured watching Hailee Steinfield overcome her grief with the caretaking of the newly muted Bumblebee living in her garage as he reckons with his isolation on a strange new planet (in the 1980’s too!!!). I even had a bit of fun watching Anthony Ramos run around a knock-off Indiana Jones set with a Pete Davidson robot in the somewhat okay Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) that everyone kind of forgot about. Transformers One (2023) was a truly stunning experience as well with a vivid animation style, tremendous voice acting, and dynamic character development surrounding betrayal that belongs better to a Shakespearan play than to a children’s movie that was horribly neglected by its production company’s marketing department.
But were these three improved experiences worth the pain endured watching the first five movies before them? Hope provides strength to endure the unsurvivable. But is everything meant to be survived? Why accept watching five terrible movies on the basis of hope alone when there’s plenty of other more enjoyable movies to watch in the world?
Take it from me: engage hope with caution. Hope is a powerful force to help us find light in a dark time. But depending too heavily on hope alone without action can result in suffering through five terrible movies when the remote was in arms reach to find a different film. We must take responsibility for our own happiness in life than rely solely on the whims of desire for an alternative fate. We must learn to switch the channel rather than wait on hope to make the plotline to Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) make sense.
More importantly, we must take my hope that the next Transformers movie will just be about Stanley Tucci playing a drunk Merlin for three hours with Linkin Park playing in the background and make it into a reality. Michael Bay, call me.
Please, Michael Bay. Do one good thing in this world.