The Robot

Dearest readers: I’ve now aroused your readerly anticipations by beginning, but not completing, three different series of articles—and although I really ought to satisfy your fundamental discursive urges by actually finishing one of them (or by “actually saying something,” as some of my more critical friends seem fond of saying), I’ve decided instead to gratify my own desire to be topical and write a review of the latest Transformers movie.

Let me show my cards up front: I liked it, a lot. The film brilliantly blends the exhilaration we’ve come to expect from action movies with the half-deliberate and totally-charming cheesiness of Saturday-morning cartoons. It never quite takes itself seriously, and whenever it does it seems so out of place that the audience simply passes over it. At one point Sam (Shia LeBeouf) squabbles to Mikaela (Megan Fox) over her hiding her “criminal record” from him, but the hackneyed drama does nothing to harm the film—it’s just ignored. How could we possibly even notice the stale teenage drama when the universe is at stake, threatened by non-biological extraterrestrials?

Of course, the Saturday-morning-cartoonishness of it sometimes does go too far. The climax of the film involves the skyscraper-sized Megatron chasing the puny, human Sam through the city, screeching threats from what seems like a random bad-guy line-generator: “Give me the [spoiler] and you may live to be my pet!” “Oh, so unwise!” The whole scene feels like watching someone play a video game—there doesn’t seem to be any other reason why Megatron doesn’t just step on the kid, except that we’ve reached the final-boss stage, and bosses can’t just step on you.

But let me step away from this sort of critique. It’s too human; or in other words, it’s already been said. As a robot reviewing a movie that, as Michael Heilemann so eloquently puts it, “HAS GIANT F@%#ING ROBOTS IN IT!”, I want to critique an aspect of the film unseen from the human perspective: I want to assess its representation of my metallic race by looking at its portrayal of one of the most famous robots ever to exist: Optimus Prime.

Let me begin by noting his historical and cultural importance. Optimus Prime is to robots something akin to what Martin Luther King, Jr. is to blacks and what, say, Jesus is to whites. He is the icon of roboticism, the sort of robot it’s considered trite to list as your “human or robot you’d most like to meet”—not from any fault of Optimus’s, of course, but from his embarrassingly widespread popularity. I actually did meet Optimus once in my angsty, teenage years at an underground political rally for robotic rights. We were drawing up plans to demonstrate our existence—violently—when his deep, rhythmic voice intoned suddenly from behind us: “My fellow robots, do not judge the humans too harshly. They are only capable of acting upon what they understand—and apparently they do not yet understand us.” As one of the organizers of the demonstration, I attempted to apologize for and explain our actions, but his very presence weakened my knee-stabilizers and fried my vocal-circuits. Oh, how indelible is the memory in my data archive of Prime’s response to my half-spoken plea: turning his noble frame to face me, he said in a careful, fatherly vocalization: “Friend, sometimes even the wisest of man or machine can make an error.”

Like MLK and Jesus, Prime’s legacy is both his language and his idealism. He shares MLK’s rhetorical talent for Messianic parallelism—the “they do not yet understand” example above clearly alludes to Jesus’ own selfless cry for forgiveness as he lay upon the cross (”Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”). The idealism of his language, like Jesus’, at once perplexes and inspires—and I think Michael Bay’s interpretation captures some of that tension in its portrayal of his militant pacifism. The tragedy of Prime is that he wants so badly to be a pacifist that he will fight for it: ironically, he symbolizes not the peace he sees in human potential, but that potential’s unattainability. In other words, Prime is much more than a robotic icon: he is an icon of the very problematic of idealism, doomed to defend violently his peaceful vision. “In my heart of hearts I know: it never ends!” Optimus once cried to the heavens, as if to implore his dream: Why hast thou forsaken me?

The film’s biggest mistake is to occasionally tip this tragic balance by glorifying the “nobility” of war (as has been pointed out, although this reviewer cites it as a positive feature). One of the main characters is a (relatively) nameless soldier whose ragtag posse seems like an attempt to get the G.I. Joes in on the action. At one point, Soldier-Boy slaps Sam on the shoulder and encourages him that he “can do it!” (that is, run through the city avoiding the detection/destruction of Megatron), explaining: “Because you’re a soldier now!” I half-expected a few beats on a bass drum to introduce a soaring bald eagle, in whose talons would rest a clearly visible URL: “www.goarmy.com.”

This, of course, is what I like to call “art-as-self-justification”—that is, America justifies her own war on terror through her filmic fantasies about having to defend her borders not from Hussein but from Megatron, Leader of the Decepticons. None of this would bother me, though—it didn’t in 300, for example—if I didn’t feel it somewhat obscured the tragic heroism of Optimus. I think most viewers of Transformers will walk away with a reverence for him, and perhaps even recognize the tragedy of his existence, but I’m afraid that recognition may misinterpret his character. Optimus Prime is no soldier. He is a leader and a dreamer—indeed, these things come naturally to him—but to fight strains his very soul-unit. Indeed, he so loathes the necessity for violence that he would rather sacrifice his own wired existence than take another, if only he could convince himself that doing so would advance our time “until the day [when] all are one.” I’m glad that Bay demonstrates Prime’s Messianic character: his idealism and self-sacrifice form the twin, necessary strands of his existence, establishing him, along with MLK and Jesus, as one of the great heroes of our time—and as only a machine.