Why Are We Still Watching Transformers?

I was eleven when the first Transformers movie came out. It took me three years to see it, and for a fourteen-year-old kid just discovering movies, it wasn't bad. It looked cool, had pretty people in it, and had just enough of a story to be engaging. It was no The Rock, but still. I skipped the second one despite a glowing review from my cousin, saw the third for a laugh, and my friend dragged me to the fourth because it was Friday and we weren't cool or old enough to drink.

It is now 2017, and we've reached the fifth installment in Michael Bay's flaming monument to casual racism and the sexualization of minors, and it's time to stop.

It's true, this is allegedly Michael Bays last outing in the director's chair (Is it Michael? Is it really?) And I'm sure there's a small legion of loyal fans still hoping for the Transformers adaptation they've been waiting for for thirty odd years, but for the rest of us this madness must come to an end. Transformers, you're done. You forced Shia LaBeouf on us when we neither asked nor wanted it. You subjected us to robot testicles and product placement so blatant it makes Man of Steel look like the peak of artistic integrity. Do you remember that time when you made Stanley Tucci drink Chinese milk in the middle of an action scene? Or when you made Frances McDormand change into a pair of Nikes for literally no reason? Or how about the ENTIRE FUCKING EXISTENCE OF BUMBLEBEE THE CLEARLY LABELLED CAMARO? I think it's time we finally stood up for ourselves and demanded an end. And admit it, we need Michael Bay back where he belongs. He's the last holdover from an era where movies could be both somehow incredibly dumb and incredibly entertaining at the same time. He is a relic of an era where we somehow took Ben Affleck more seriously than after he won Best Picture. A time when you could send the crew of an oil rig into space and still make it into Criterion Collection. Nicolas Cage was a legitimate action star where he comes from. And now we've relegated him to a closet of plots and characters so incomprehensible that they're matched only by the effects that claim to bolster them.

They're a mess of jumbled information so dense not even the preteens they're marketed to can decipher them. If nothing else, Marvel has demonstrated that audiences respond to simplicity in their big-budget summer films. While the MCU has mastered a balance of engaging and easily followed, if predictable, plots and characters, Transformers has seemingly done the opposite, steadily devolving into a mess of overly complicated and nonsensical string of events that can only serve to alienate filmgoers who would otherwise enjoy their spectacle. The flat, grey special effects don't help comprehension. Instead of assisting in what could be a fun and glamorous action spectacle, they create a sea of pixels that fills up the screen and makes every frame the random splatterings of a shitfaced, computer age Jackson Pollock. That's the problem you face when you try to make Transformers photorealistic. They just look like a homogenous, muddy, junk pile. The other lesson Transformers has failed to learn from not only the MCU but virtually every successful, modern blockbuster is that people like bright colors. No matter how much you oversaturate the grey, it'll still be grey. Wonder Woman took that note from Batman v Superman. Listen to the people, Paramount. Making movies for kids is important. It's a responsibility. Once upon a time, you made Indiana Jones. And now we're getting a Bumblebee spinoff movie. Why? Because you're convinced that's what we want. But we don't, right? Right? We're beyond that now, aren't we? Surely after five heaping piles of poorly generated grey CGI metal garbage, we can just let go of this franchise, right? Anyone? Please?

PS

The moral of this story isn't to just make another Indiana Jones movie. You've already made four. I think we're good.