I was going through my feed reader, skimming through the various stories about how Transformers has made more money in two and a half days than Evan Almighty has in two and a half weeks, and I realized that I could not find words to express exactly how much I didn't care.
This is one of those cultural moments where I feel out of sync with everyone else on the planet. The only movie I lined up to see this week was Rescue Dawn. Not only do I have no personal desire to see Transformers, but any twinge of guilt I feel over shirking my professional responsibility to see it so that you don't have to can be easily assuaged by directing you to Metacritic (where it's scoring absurdly high for a pic alternately described as "mercilessly inhuman" and "pure teen wish fulfillment.")
I suspect it's wrong for me to feel this way, but before flagellating myself too severely, I decided to turn to Google, to find out whether or not I'm truly alone in my apathy. A search for "I don't care about Transformers" produces the following five results:
1) A comment on a Kotaku post about the opening cinematic for a Transformers video game. The post says the cinematic "looks like liquid sex"; the comment, by CheekMystique, says, "G'dmn! I don't care about Transformers at all, but woo, that looked pretty cool." Here we have a Transformers heretic turned into a believer by the sheer awesomeness of a spectacularly-rendered video game intro. It's inspiring, but I don't think it's going to work for me.
2) A post by BenKenobi88 at gamers forum VG Chartz. "I don't care about Transformers at all...I never watched the cartoon...I only know basics like Optimus Prime, Megatron, Autobots and Decepticons," he writes. "I saw the movie today...and it was AMAZING. Basically, the CGI is the best I've ever seen." In case we didn't fully grasp his point the first time, Ben immediately follows up with a second, two-word, all caps post: "THE BEST." Another conversion inspired by technical virtuosity. That's two points for Michael Bay.
3) CarolynMichelle's apathy might be too qualified to even count. "I don't care about Transformers that much," she writes at FilmSpot. "[But] the movie isn't out-and-out horrible. In fact, I'd say it beats out Masters of the Universe to become the greatest film based on a line of action figures ever!" CarolynMichelle eventually concedes that Transformers is "probably Michael Bay's best movie", but still can only muster a grade of C+. Score one for apathy!
4) A comment on the profile of MySpace user 25809974. "I feel like I'm gonna get beat up for what you wrote in my page. I don't care about Transformers or Batman, I totally have a hot supermodel girl friend who like loves me and whatever." It seems to be in response to a comment left by Bill, which reads in part, "Newest transforner trailor makes me and Andy get wet in our panties." [Um, sic.]
I'm not gonna score this one.
5) A message board thread on Ain't it Cool, which seems to be *about* whether or not anyone should care about the new toys spawned Michael Bay's movie. This isn't apathy--this is hostility. The phrase "rape of childhood" comes up more than once. The phrase "I don't care about Transformers" is followed by "but it just doesn't make sense to me why they'd voluntarily screw around with something that ain't broken." I don't think this one belongs on our scoreboard, either.
So, there you have it: me and CarolynMichelle at FilmSpot are the only two people left on the planet who really don't care about Transformers--and even she cares about it enough to see it. So I give up. Michael Bay's still not gonna get my money, but I won't begrudge him to opportunity to take anyone else's.
Originally posted on:
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