Transformers 2: Automation of emotion, mania for fun mayhem

I was wrong. Not all of us are getting tired of Hollywood movies. Most people simply love (no, are crazy over) Hollywood. The moneyed crowd will brave the heat and humidity of day travel; they will troop to the mall, then brave the crowd just for three hours of feel-good escape that only movies like Transformers 2 can give. There’s no denying it: that’s how 90% of the populace define a good movie, voting with what truly matters, their time and money, film critics be damned. I give up.

But really, it doesn’t take a mechatronics and instrumentation engineer to know why the world loves such violence onscreen: the excitement of the action, the beauty of the art of war and self-defense, the genius of industrial design. Combine all that with:

- breathtaking and outlandish vistas,
- exotic locales,
- charismatically beautiful lead actors in a passable love affair (with the typical complications of love for the minimum conflict), plus
- the humanization of robots (to the point of machines shedding buckets of tears in the middle of a frighteningly genuine show of sadness!),

…Voila!: Blockbuster movie! Smash hit!

Clearly, people’s mania for cool (i.e., mindless) mayhem will be securely sated -- as long as:

- the violence is safe from a distance – or even decorative,
- it is framed within the limits of the silver screen (even as intergalactic as the Mall of Asia’s IMAX theater), and
- the conflict is fictional/fictitious (and not as gruesomely real and fearsomely plausible as Kim Jong-Il’s threat of a nuclear war).

This is apparently the formula to attain that mysterious hip factor (the movie version of personal charisma, say).

Even without a compelling screenplay, the hip set would surely come. You know that they don’t want to be educated -- not that they are dumb, but that they know already. And they come with much-lowered expectations. They know that it takes a child’s level of idiocy (okay, naivete) to fully appreciate the movie. (But the movie is alarmingly so not child-friendly!)

If they want preaching, they’ve just had it -- it’s Sunday, after all. Going to the mall to watch a movie is all about having fun, with oneself, with friends and family. Who needs to know that violence is bad and ugly anyway? That’s a constant fact of life. Who needs to know that glorifying violence is evil? That’s a point that’s better left unsaid even if people know they are being very inconsistent with their values. They won’t mind the conflict because the fun factor trumps everything: that’s how they’d explain away the fun to be had in boxing, cockfighting, and the like. That’s the simple logic of violent films and violent fun in general.

Of course, there are other ways of reading the Transformers phenomenon. It could be seen as a technological showoff. It could also be seen as a metaphorical showcase of the global domination of American pop culture, particularly the comicbook culture. (So many Filipino kids I know read and collect Marvel etc. comicbooks like crazy.)

But the market reading remains the most valid of all. The movie being safe in its silliness, one occasionally saved by effortless comedy and funny overacting, who can complain? Buy a soda pop, buy a popcorn, enjoy the ride.