Another Perspective
By: Peter Veugelaers

 The two big movies of the last two years have been about the pertinent subjects of the 21st century. The Dark Knight (2008) is about fighting violence with violence and whether or not it’s okay. Transformers (2007) show the world is driven by technology.

 Lots of people are seeing these movies because it touches with the crux of 21st century life. The world can be a violent place. What’s the solution?

 It’s like people are seeking answers to the big issues today. These movies reflect the issues. Their effects are potent. One stirs the issues of justice, the other the issues of technology and people and implicitly relationships with machines and how these can benefit people or be of harm in dominating us through over-reliance. In other words, RSI. The implication is military. Can people solve their differences when technology assists the divisions? Would they have the courage?

 What’s Transformers (2007)? And it’s sequel (2009)? Machines on machismo? Superficially, it looks like it. It looks like machines dominating. That’s what’s happened in the 21st century. A few people complain about the attitudes of people today. We’ve become the machines. Yet, those people who complain about the 21st century like these two movies. Their attitude is just the same as the attitude they criticize. People have become so absorbed into the culture that they have lost knowing how to reflect. It’s tragic. Robots are our future, maybe our more human replacements, and is the military still the future?

 Transformers and its sequel are cautionary tales, yet the world seems to be headed for more and more technology and less and less intimacy. The movie, like most movies, will reflect the culture but is powerless to change it. What we are left with is hollow effects echoing the clang of 21st century machinery.

 The Transformers leaves me numb, like it’s supposed to. The world is a violent place. And it has a semblance of a solution. I didn’t like it, but it works. Maybe that’s because it’s about the struggle between the knowledge of good and evil and who wants what, going back to the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve took of the evil instead of the good and suffered the consequences. That primeval set-up is what drives the Transformers story, one which pitted a battle for the Allspark, something which promises power to the beholder, and Optimus Prime is wise enough to know what to do with it. The new film continues that trace.