Flasz On Film

As much as it pains me to acknowledge this, the introduction of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to our zeitgeist in the latter half of the noughties was a gamechanger. However, it bears remembering that at the time the original Iron-Man was being released, nobody truly believed in what these Marvel mavericks were trying to accomplish. The world remained doubtful still when The Incredible Hulk stumbled awkwardly through its theatrical run, and it took a few more years – until The Avengers came along and solidified this experiment with its mindboggling box office success – for MCU as we now know it to become a bona fine cultural item.  

This made everyone in Hollywood take notice and probably resulted in countless meetings where angry executives pointed at PowerPoint slides and berated their underlings for not coming up with their own shared universes and hence for leaving untold billions of dollars on the table. They all looked at the Marvel experiment and attempted to reverse engineer it to somehow tap into what they saw as an impending cultural shift. After all, most big Hollywood studios had intellectual properties on their books – some currently alive, some dormant – that they could in theory “marvelify” and hopefully elbow their way into the shared universe trough. WB had DC superheroes. Universal had Classic Monsters. And Paramount had Transformers. However, what none of these other competitors had, was time.  

Marvel’s shared universe grew organically, almost under everyone’s noses. It slowly expanded in scale and ambition while the world remained suspicious of whether this idea of bringing together a small handful of superheroes, whose cultural footprint didn’t extend very far outside the immediate comic book fandom, would pan out. And when it did, everyone took notice and immediately decided they wanted what Marvel had… without thinking necessarily about having to spend the best part of a decade building up to this success. We can all point to how haphazard and directionless WB has been with their DC properties, as they scrambled to accelerate their own shared universe and pumped out unfinished or meddled-with movies as though there was an emergency and they had to be evacuated before they were ready. We all know what happened to Universal’s Dark Universe, which came a bit later. And now, having seen Transformers: The Last Knight, Bumblebee and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, we can see how history repeats itself time and again as all the major Hollywood players keep repeating the same mistakes because they focus obsessively on the result without paying any attention to how they’d get there. They dream of ascending to the summit of Mount Everest and in doing so they all tend to forget about the gruelling trip uphill, the need for equipment and professional help.  

Now, I’m just a guy with opinions so what will follow is a massive conjecture on my behalf, which I am entertaining mostly for my personal amusement. However, having recently caught up with all Transformers movies, I noticed this shift myself and it got me to wonder if there had been a power struggle behind the scenes, some of which – inadvertently or otherwise – filtered through to the movies themselves. After all, art imitates life. And it therefore seems a compelling proposition to see how the movies themselves illustrate what I can only imagine was a massive crisis of ownership over the Transformers series.  

The more or less coherent Witwicky trilogy (Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Transformers: Dark of the Moon) pre-dated by nearly a year the release of the eponymous, arguably game-changing The Avengers, which was the rubber-meets-the-road moment for the entire subsequent shared universe craze. As such, it only follows to assume that the forces that be in Paramount decided they would like to partake in this veritable process of milking the cinematic universe cash cow, but they fully realized it would have been unwise on their part to re-launch the Transformers franchise only a few years after the last movie had hit theatres… and made a billion bucks. So, it is logical to assume that a change in direction mid-journey was insisted upon. The massively successful Hasbro-branded franchise was to be “marvelified” on the go, to enable long-term sustainability of the property.  

So, what if the movie reflects this process and allows the viewer to observe this powerplay through the narrative itself? I don’t think it’s a long shot to assume that Transformers: Age of Extinction could function as a wholesale functional metaphor for the process of studio meddling with a property over which two key people – Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg – had been holding sway for many years. However, their methods were the methods of the old world. The Transformers trilogy played by the book. It’s a manifestation of an archetypal hero’s journey that has a beginning, a middle and a locally definitive conclusion. Granted, it still leaves its universe open to further exploration, but as far as we, the viewers, are concerned, Sam Witwicky’s storyline is complete. 

Age of Extinction acknowledges this conclusion and immediately separates itself from it by treating it as past. Remember Chicago? In the world of Transformers, the end of Dark of the Moon was a watershed moment of cataclysmic significance which could be mapped onto how perhaps these movies came together in the past and indicated what the intention was going to be in the future. It is almost as though we were supposed to acquiesce to an understanding that what happened during the entire Witwicky trilogy was a result of a complete lack of integrated leadership. Autobots running around doing their thing, their government handlers going about without external oversight, different agencies at odds with each other because they didn’t know what to do with what they had, and a little scrappy kid – Sam Witwicky – trapped in the thick of things because he accidentally ended up with a space robot in his garage. Madness. 

Do you see the analogy? Sam is Michael Bay in this interpretation. All these government factions pulling in different directions while a destructive spectacle unfolds in the background are representative of all those different studio factions vying for dominance over the golden egg-laying Hasbro property that scales buildings and destroys cities. The time came for a transfer of power. 

However, the scrawny little kid (that’s still Bay) who once reluctantly took the challenge of making a movie about toy robots and turned it into his own festival of stuntmanship, militaristic propaganda, fireworks and toilet humour, is no longer in the picture. He’s a grown man now who’s on the lookout for new challenges. By his own admission, Bay always contended that agreeing to continually helm Transformers movies was tantamount to him remaining entrenched in his comfort zone. He knew how to make those movies without leaving his bedroom and he’d still make Paramount loads of money. But now, with the advent of the MCU, studio decided that – having studied both what Bay had done and what Marvel had been up to – they no longer needed authorial direction. ‘We’ll take it from there’, they said. ‘You’re relieved of duty’, they insisted. ‘We know how to make them now’, they followed… which is exactly what Stanley Tucci’s character says at one point in the movie.  

This entire movie is a giant metaphor in this regard. K.S.I. – the evil corporation capable of building Transformers using harnessed black box alien tech – is a stand-in for the meddling studio. Cade Yaeger, a scrawny inventor who finds Optimus and shields him at all costs – that’s Bay again. And he also has a daughter on the precipice of adulthood, parting ways with whom gives him immense parental anxiety. He doesn’t want to give up the ownership over the franchise just as Yaeger is trepidatious about the intentions of the young male suitor circling his little princess. He knows what boys are like. Read it as he knows what the big bad studio will do to a series he spent so many years raising and growing more and more fond of.  

Now, this is where the twist is because we know whose name is found beneath the “directed by” label at the end of the movie. What if Bay agreed to make this movie – and I remind you once more, I don’t know what I’m talking about; I’m just being playful and satirical here for my own amusement – with an ulterior intention not to let anyone turn the franchise into a shared universe? What if he decided he’d take it behind the shed to kill it himself? Imagine that scene in The Road where Viggo Mortensen gets ready to execute Cody Smit-McPhee before a band of roaming cannibals get their hands on him. Or that scene in The Mist where Thomas Jane chooses to kill everyone in the car and spare them the misery of fleeing interdimensional creatures.  

To fight Galvatron – a corporate-built imitation of Megatron that’s crowd-sourced, split-tested and specifically engineered to slay the seemingly obsolete Autobots, dazzle audiences with its sleek Apple-esque pizzazz, and intimidate its immediate competition – that scrawny little inventor ensnared with separation anxiety must help Optimus Prime, an avatar of this franchise’s past, get into a position where he would literally ride a robotic T-Rex into battle. If that’s not a jump-the-shark moment, then I don’t know what is! I fully realize there is a subsection of the audience who will be not only receptive to this iconography, but even openly and vocally supportive of it. But I think I speak for most filmgoers when I say that the image of Optimus riding a dinosaur into battle against iMegatron with sparks everywhere and Pete Cullen’s voice announcing he’s Optimus Prime over top of that roaring T-Rex is a bit much. It is almost as though it was specifically introduced in there to take the franchise so far into the realm of the preposterous that audiences would have no other recourse but to revolt against it.  

Maybe it was supposed to be a kill-the-franchise moment that could have put to bed the very idea of turning Transformers into a conveyor belt of products adding up to a shared universe in the image of Marvel. But this mission failed. Galvatron survived. What is more, he survived only to be effectively ret-conned or conveniently forgotten by the following entries anyway, which only goes to prove that Paramount would turn their attempt at Transformiverse into a veritable poopshow at the first opportunity anyway. The franchise stalwarts got to see how their creation was warped by personalityless corporate interests into something it was never built to become. What is more, they ended up enslaved and shackled to an oar, forced to make another movie in the series, Transformers: The Last Knight, and we all know how “great” that movie turned out.  

There you have it. Transformers: Age of Extinction is as far from perfect as you can imagine. Hell, it’s at best consistently mediocre as a self-contained blockbuster, but it functions effectively as a metaphorical illustration of how authorial voices – limited in their expression as they may be – wage a losing battle against powers beyond their imagination and resort to radical means to avoid seeing what they had spent years putting together be recklessly converted to the Dark Side. It just goes to show that even the image of Optimus riding a T-Rex wasn’t enough to dissuade Paramount from pursuing their dream of building a shared universe out of their Hasbro properties. They are trying to this day. And it seems they have been told a decade ago it was a bad idea. Or at least Age of Extinction seems to indicate it if you look at it as an allegory of a crisis of ownership.