Beneath Transformers 2’s All-American Surface

This review first appeared on Comrade Alastair, a revolutionary blog from New Zealand.

By Alastair Reith

The latest Transformers film will delight plenty of people. It is filled with explosions, some new characters, bucketloads of special effects and the puerile one liners and adolescent humour one expects from an action film of its nature. It’s also one of the most reactionary films I’ve seen in a very long time. While many will scoff at the idea of a political analysis of Transformers (“it’s just a movie! It’s not meant to be taken seriously!”), the sewage bubbling below its clean cut, all American surface needs to be exposed.

The film opens with scenes of people running in panic past military cordons at the scene of an apparent chemical spill at an industrial complex in China. This quickly turns out to be the site where a Decepticon (the evil baddie robots) has landed. Soon after this we are treated to the arrival of the knights in shining armour, the US military. We see a scene with officers discussing China’s closure of its airspace, and their decision to ignore this and send in Black Ops helicopters with a team of elite troops and Autobots (the nice goodie robots) to deal with the situation. This sets the tone for the rest of the movie. The US military scampers merrily around the world, invading China, demanding access to the airspace of its Egyptian and Jordanian client states, and generally acting as a planetary police force. This isn’t anything unusual, of course, with most Hollywood films treating the United States exactly this way – a good example is Spy Game, in which Robert Redford (retiring CIA officer) organises the disabling of a Chinese power plant and a bloody assault on a Chinese prison by US Navy Seals in order to rescue Brad Pitt (CIA spy captured trying to infiltrate the prison). In the eyes of Hollywood, US imperialism’s armed thugs can do no wrong and the world is their playground, and it is this wall-to-wall view that reaches the eyes of cinema-goers around the world.

This view is not stated explicitly by any means. At no point in Transformers II do any of the characters openly express their blind adulation for the US empire, and this is extremely rare in any film. It is nonetheless there, and it is expressed through the exclusion of any uncomfortable facts that contradict the film’s image of US imperialism as some kind of noble guardian of all that is good in the world. Perhaps the best example of this is the fact that the Autobots and their human handlers are stationed at a US base on a small island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia. This is mentioned only once in the film, for a few fleeting seconds while the letters flicker across the screen to inform us where the camera has made its latest jump to.

Diego Garcia

Diego Garcia atoll from the air

Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Islands archipelago and came into British possession following the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s. When the British colony of Mauritius gained its independence in 1968, Diego Garcia was under its sovereignty. The island was inhabited by about 2,000 people, who lived mostly at a subsistence level without electricity, telephone connection, any postal service, and very little contact with the British Government that technically held power there.

The famous journalist John Pilger wrote of Diego Garcia, saying “there are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie.”

Prior to the independence of Mauritius in 1968, the US and British governments had been talking for some years. The Americans wanted an island to be leased to them for the purpose of building a naval base. At first the US was after Aldabra Atoll, which was uninhabited by humans. However, it was found to be home to the rare Aldabra tortoise, about 10,000 of them. Since it was clearly unacceptable to endanger tortoises, the US Government instead requested Diego Garcia, which only had about 2,000 human beings on it! The island was also horseshoe shaped, which meant it formed a natural harbour and could easily hold a fleet of US warships.

In 1965 at a conference in London, the British pressured Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, post-independence Prime Minister of Mauritius, into selling them the island for just three million pounds, a bargain price.

The British then proceeded to expel against their will the inhabitants of Diego Garcia between 1968 and 1971. On 15 October 1971, the few remaining Chagossians held a last Mass in the island’s one church. Colonial Office head Denis Greenhill (later Lord Greenhill of Harrow) wrote to the British Delegation at the UN; “The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a committee. Unfortunately, along with the seagulls go some few Tarzans and Man Fridays that are hopefully being wished on Mauritius.”

Diego Garcia's location in the Indian Ocean (click for full)

The people of Diego Garcia lost their homes and their livelihoods. They went through emotional anguish and physical hardship, and while technically British citizens they have not received any of the benefits that supposedly flow from being part of that ‘democratic’ nation. The islanders were not provided with compensation, did not have any arrangements made for their survival upon being shipped out of their homes and dumped in Mauritius. Many turned to crime and prostitution to survive, and many committed suicide.

Chagos Islanders protest the theft of their homes by the UK and US governments… With the tacit approval of the Autobots it would appear

Diego Garcia is now used as a base for US and NATO troops in the ongoing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and specifically for launching long-range bombing missions. For all the Transformer’s refusal to share their military technology with the US military (with Optimus Prime saying he has seen humanity’s capacity for destruction, and feels it would do ‘more harm than good’), they seem to feel no concern over the fact that in between flying out teams to battle evil robots, the base they’re hanging about in is launching airstrikes that blow Afghani children to bits.

This is the island on which the Transformers, noble guardians of all that is good in the universe and allies of the US military, supposedly guardians of the same here on Earth, base their operations. The film has the audacity to showcase Diego Garcia as the home of freedom’s soldiers, at the same time as its true and rightful inhabitants rot abroad.

Soldier knows best

The film’s worship of the military is almost beyond belief. It strongly infers that the military should be as free from civilian control as possible, and that any attempts to impose control on it and enforce transparency over its operations are dangerous. A nerdy, bespectacled bureaucrat from Washington is presented as a troublesome pest who dares to questions the activities of those who should be above questioning. An officer states that he considers his General’s actions past and present to be ‘above reproach’. Considering he was saying this from the Diego Garcia base that launches airstrikes on weddings and villages full of civilians in Afghanistan, killing children in fire, shrapnel and rubble, the film’s idea of what merits ‘reproach’ is somewhat unclear.

Afghani child wounded by U.S. airstrike -- many of which come from Diego Garcia

Afghani child seriously wounded in US airstrike, many of which are launched from Diego Garcia

Indeed the film’s definition of good and bad, right and wrong seems to be based around two things. First of all aesthetics, with the Autobots being mostly Yellow, Blue, Red and so on and the Decepticons being mostly black or silver, and generally more spiky and vicious looking than the goodies. And second of all, anyone who opposes the United States is bad, because the United States is good and that’s that.

The Transformers themselves seem to have a more sophisticated moral code, with the main beef between Autobots and Decepticons being over the Decepticons disregard for life and the Autobots respect for it. The rather flat plot informs us that aeons ago the original Decepticon leader and his followers came to Earth to build a machine that would destroy the sun and use the energy from this to create some kind of other energy that is the life force of Transformers. This was only supposed to be done to suns that were not close to any form of life, and these evil fellows decided to do it here instead for no apparent reason. Thus began the civil war…

The question then has to be asked, if the Autobots put such a high value on life that they would wage unrelenting war on their own kind in order to preserve it, why have they aligned themselves with the US military? I can’t think of anything in the world today further removed from the goal of preserving life! For all their talk of “humanity”, “mankind” and the “human race”, they have not aligned themselves with humanity as a whole and dedicated themselves to defending it in its entirety, but have instead chosen to march under the bloodstained banner of America.

This further illustrates the films main theme, Glory To America, for if these metal gods from outer space, arriving on Earth as the ‘goodies’ in the black and white, good versus evil struggle between Autobot and Decepticon, have chosen to align themselves with the US and become largely integrated into its armed forces, how can the US be anything but good? The question is never openly posed, but by not even considering the need to ask it the film makes its views on the matter clear.

On a side note, director Michael Bay obviously has some kind of gun fetish, as this film is in many parts just a big wankfest over military hardware. The camera lingers lovingly on tanks silhouetted against the sunset and rolling onto a beach, sweeps majestically over enormous aircraft carries slicing through the waves and fighter jets screaming through the sky. At some points there is virtually nothing to the film except for gunfire and explosions. In all likelihood Bay’s worship of US imperialism and it’s boys in uniform flows from his simple love of killing machines, as opposed to any kind of rational support for the military as an institution.

Little Black Sambots

Skids and Mudflap

It just keeps getting better. The film contains racist undertones as well, with a good analysis of this being written by Devim Faraci;

“These new robots, who begin the film conjoined as a shitty old ice cream truck but who soon get upgraded into Chevy concept cars, seem to be the most extreme racial caricatures seen in a movie in decades.

“The Twins have a simian appearance, with wide faces and huge ears. One of them (full disclosure: I am not sure which is which, namewise. This isn’t a problem limited to just these robots in Transformers 2 as I couldn’t tell most robots apart, except for Optimus Prime and Bumblebee) has a gold bucktooth. They have a ‘playful’ back and forth relationship, which includes them talking in some sort of modern day rap-age jive, calling each other ‘bitch-ass’ or ‘punk,’ talking with an exaggerated, crunked-up ’street’ accent. They appear to be stoned all the time. And they can’t read; when asked to translate some ancient Cybertronian language they sheepishly admit they ‘don’t do much readin’.’

“To be fair, only Primes can read this language, but even the completely idiotic mini-bot (and Italian stereotype) Wheelie can at least recognize what the writing is. The Twins are completely illiterate, it seems. I was actually surprised that the film didn’t find a way to make them wear a Transformers version of baggy pants.”

Foreigners (i.e. non-Americans) are treated as comical, insignificant pieces of scenery. At the beginning of the film some cheap laughs are grabbed with a camera shot of a Chinese man looking with a drop jawed, idiotic expression as Optimus Prime and some evil robot crash through his house. The previously mentioned nerdy meddling bureaucrat, after being forced to parachute out of a plane into the desert, is shown yelling at some Arabs in English that he is America, asking them to tell him where he is, and abusing them and yelling louder when they don’t understand. These two scenes however seem like the height of classy humour compared to the scene with the midget Egyptian border guard, who waddles over to the hero’s car in hilarious fashion, shouting incomprehensibly in his high pitched midget voice. This sight gag had absolutely nothing to do with the plot, and following the midget guard letting the car and its occupants through after the driver yells cheerily that he comes from New York, no further reference is made to it. Despite the frequency with which the characters change location and the multiple countries the film takes place in there is not a single character that isn’t American.

And while the treatment of women is nowhere near so grotesquely overt, things are far from good there either. There are only three female characters to speak of in the film – the main character’s girlfriend, his mum and a girl at college. His girlfriend is shown looking terrified while he looks calm and rational, his mum is portrayed as a babbling hysterical idiot who reacts positively to being slapped on the arse and gets high off hash cookies she unwittingly buys from what she believes are “environmentalists” and runs around making a fool of herself, and the third female character is a nymphomaniac seductress who forcefully demands sex from the main character and turns out to be an evil Decepticon who took a detour through Terminator on the way to this film, and is trying to stick her extendable metal tounge down Shia Le Bouf’s throat. So a murderous sex object, a madwoman and a character who gains screen time only by virtue of going out with the main character… not the most inspiring line up of women.

Any film that bases its characters at a place like Diego Garcia deserves to be attacked for it, and as far as I’m aware nobody has done so yet. The two caricature black Autobots are some of the most disgustingly racist characters to grace our screens in a long time, and were extremely irritating to boot. The worshipful treatment of the military and the general contempt shown for anything outside of America also deserve to be ruthlessly exposed and condemned. Despite the fact I enjoyed some aspects of Transformers II (I’m usuqlly quite easily pleased when it comes to movies, and I went to this expecting what I got, a cheesy action blockbuster filled with special effects, stupid one liners and plenty of violence. There was even a nice wee romantic subplot, and I’m always a sucker for a love story), the things I describe above prevented me from finding any real pleasure in the film as a whole.

One day it’ll be possible to make a cheesy action movie that doesn’t uphold murderous imperialism and promote racist stereotypes. I look forward to seeing it.