Transformers: Age of Extinction and No More than Meets the Eye

 by Christopher Barr

Transformers: Age of Extinction did not follow its marketing tagline that states; “The Rules have Changed”, rather it remained a racist, sexist, homophobic, Michael Bay-hem, hodgepodge of robots smashing robots while pathetically dull human characters run around and underneath them, screaming their ungrateful, superficial faces off, to an extreme.  The camera shots are almost always panning and saturated with product placement.  The movie becomes a commercial for Bud Lite, Victoria’s Secret and Chevrolet more than a movie about the battle between good and evil or any possibility of character development and story.

Age of Extinction is a movie with no people in it, it is a movie where 'man' in the Michel Foucault sense, is a mere invention, and in the case of Transformers, a horribly bad one.  The archeology of our thinking and the history of ideas have all been uploaded into computers and have become what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls "mercantilization" commodified by corporations, judged on their commercial value and not on their truth, and they are then sold to us, the naïve, didn’t-know-better consumer.  The movie has larger-than-life machines popping out off the screen with cardboard cut-outs that represent the human side, drained of any risk of growing but fashioned in the latest in ‘cool’ clothing.   

Technology has become the new religion, the new source of belief.This movie has manifested its technology into somewhat relatable robots.  One's with eyes and a mouth for it to speak to us humans from, robots with feelings, and sadly in the case of this movie, robots with more feelings than the humans they claim to care about.  Other than this being a dreadful movie, we should be alarmed to say the least about these implications; knowledge has become externalized and in some cases, weaponized.  Our philosophy is no longer searching for truth within the knowledge we have available to us.  It means to package and sell it, control and censor it in fundamentally diverse and unique ways, but at what cost?  The loss of the human imagination to the uploading of manufactured ideas, suppressed and delimited by corporations is where the new world is heading, as we are crop-dusted in saturation and blinded from critical thought.

“The intellectual faculty is what separates human beings from other life forms.  It’s associated with higher, distinctly mental processes, such as reasoning, abstract thinking, knowing, understanding, and also judging, believing, forming opinions, feeling higher emotions, and deliberating and choosing.” 

 - Aristotle

When knowledge becomes data it is no longer the undefinable matter of minds, rather it becomes a commodity in the form of alien robots that have come to earth to save us all, (from ourselves so it seems) to put us back on the idealized course of good.  This robs the mind of deep thought which is required to construct ideas and create notable discourse.  All the great thinkers of the past have the great thinkers of their past to thank for creating a path for them to walk along. Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the mental state of the mind didn’t just come to him; he had influences like Nietzsche and Plato to thank for his eventual contribution to the mental sciences.

The corporate and governmental business plan is to maintain a dumbing down, a numbing of the population to keep control over them.  They want them to remain in the Rousseauian proverb of being, “…born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”  These movies are idea absorbers; they paralyze the mind and tranquilise the will.  Their function is to medicate their viewers into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers sort of state where lethargic complacency maintains its hold.  These movies reduce the viewers to infancy so dependency on the system is all they know.  This controls the frontier of innovation so inventions, cures to diseases and political candidates can be monitored and policed if necessary, so corporate shareholders remain confident with their investments.     

  

Edward Said says that 'Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires'.  The American empire drinks from the same well of arrogance.  It lives under the illusion that technology will save us all as long as they control and profit from it.  They don't see as empires before them didn't see, that their superior view of themselves is the nail in the coffin they didn't think was coming.Transformers is a story of American arrogance and superiority, a story filled with propaganda that is selling the image of the great narcissist; I am right and they are all wrong.  It’s keeping everything controlled so the corporations that sponsor it and the American military that consults for it, will get the brain-washed zombies they need to maintain their own existences.

Some fascinating threads that do weave through Transformers lie in the area of artificial intelligence.  An area of study that asks, "What does it mean to be alive?" “Can metal under the right technological circumstances feel pain and or suffering?"  “The question within the context of the story is; are Transformers living beings?  Certainly with their miraculous capability to change shape as complicated mechanisms, does support that they are intelligent beings with state of the art technological abilities, but are they alive, can they die or do they just stop working?

Our machines are heading toward, and in some cases arrived, becoming thinking things that operate under their own decision making processes.  Robots exist in the real world, thinking machines that, as they evolve, will become weapons.  Drones are manned by soldiers on military bases so they are not quite autonomous yet, but they soon will be as the technology advances to the point of robot self-awareness.  Where will their morality come from in the real world, where will their views on good and evil reside?

Optimus Prime has always maintained a moral responsibility.  Kant has stated that if we are going to follow what is right then we should do so universally, in all cases.  The Autobots and the Decepticons have been fighting like the Christians and the Muslims for years.  They have been fighting so long that I’m sure most can’t even remember what they are really fighting for; they are just fighting for the sack of fearing the Other.  Megatron is the fascist that Optimus Prime feels he needs to keep at bay.  Optimus Prime is the optimist in these stories, he’s the hope we all cling to while we traverse the fantasy into a world where there are heroes, and not just men fighting over profit shares and resources at any cost.

The end of Age of Extinction was quite similar in scope and insanity as the first three; it was loud and unrelenting with very little pay-off.  The Dinobots team up with the Autobots to save the day.  Like the corporate slogan in the movie; the past is history, the present is past and the future is now, spells a sad day yet again where this form of Americana sludge can be shilled out to millions of viewers.  The corporate program is well in affect; keep purchasing to define your life and remain subordinate to those that rule over us all.  The Decepticons are the corporation, they are the government and we are the Autobots that fantasize about freedom but when we leave the theatre we remain in chains, unable to transform our way out of it.

“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”

- Jean Baudrillard