Why Transformers Isn’t ‘Just a Movie’

The critics have spoken: Transformers: Age of Extinction has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score in the history of the franchise.

The fans have spoken: Transformers: Age of Extinction has made over $300 million in a single weekend.

Naturally, they have to fight about it.

It really is as reliable as the tides: every time a new Transformers movie comes around, you can be sure that it’s going to make tons of money, and that critics are going to hate it.

The narrative surrounding the new film, Transformers: Age of Extinction, used to be that Hollywood was desperately looking in Michael Bay’s direction, praying in public and in private that the fourth film in the hit franchise will rescue a financially lackluster box office season. But once the reviews started coming in, the plot changed. Articles have even emerged simply quoting the most negative Transformers: Age of Extinction reviews on the internet, and it’s been easy to pick up on a distinct whiff of subtext: just how out of touch are these critics?

As a critic and a fan, my relationship with Transformers is relatively centrist: I liked the cartoon as a child, but have trouble watching it today as an adult. (I have the same problems with “He-Man,” “Thundercats” and “Voltron,” although “Robotech” holds up fairly well.) The first Transformers live-action movie was big and loud and stupid, but I mostly enjoyed it. The first sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, was bigger and louder and stupider, and I didn’t like it at all. The plot completely fell apart, the human cast members were annoying and the racist Autobot caricatures were distracting. Transformers: Dark of the Moon was a little better; it certainly had some amazing action sequences, but asking real-life hero Buzz Aldrin to appear as himself and say that he only went to the moon in the first place to steal technology from giant robots was at least a little sickening.

Related: Transformers: Age of Extinction Review: Pure Exhaust

By the time the fourth movie rolled out I had more-or-less resigned myself to the idea that the very bizarre tone and storytelling tropes of the Transformers movies was essentially set in stone, and even a flagrant attempt to move the franchise in a different direction wasn’t going to affect the core formula one bit. Cheesy human protagonists with subplots straight out of a 1980s sitcom once again teamed up with good robots to fight evil robots in action sequences that lasted forever, and actual history was once again subverted to claim that these Transformers were with us all along, in this case in the form of Dinobots that were all over the marketing materials but who only actually showed up in the last 10% of the film.

So when the moment came to review it, I couldn’t claim that I “liked” Transformers: Age of Extinction. I argued that its oppressive bigness operated more as a cinematic endurance test than a meaningful story. I gave the film a middling “4/10” on the CraveOnline scale. Some said I was being kind. But, just like every other time I’ve said a Transformers movie sucked, the reaction I heard more often was that I was thinking too hard about a movie that only exists to entertain. Transformers, I have been repeatedly told time and time again by this franchise’s defenders, is “just a movie.”

But it’s not, and you can’t possibly believe that.

Related: Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura on the Economics of Transformers

First off, “it’s just a movie” is not a defense. If anything, it admits that the movie you’re talking about is indefensible, and then it makes a rather serious leap in logic: that being indefensible is a perfectly reasonable defense. Is a moldy cheeseburger “just food?” Perhaps, but that still doesn’t mean you should eat it. And then of course there’s the irony: that you think a movie is inherently meaningless, and yet somehow still important enough to stick up for.

Transformers: Age of Extinction is clearly not “just a movie.” It’s a major driving force in the economy of the entertainment industry. It’s an American export viewed by millions worldwide. It’s a delivery system for ideas and themes that people pay good money to see, and saying “it’s just a movie” implies that you even don’t care what it tells you. People all over the planet paid a lot of money for Michael Bay to essentially scream at them for nearly three hours. One would hope that they wouldn’t be so naïve as to blindly accept everything he says, be it something relatively benign like “this is a good movie” or something a little more iffy, like “guys who seek out loopholes in statutory rape laws and keep laminated copies in their pocket are inherently trustworthy.”

If you like Transformers: Age of Extinction – even if you love it – you are more than entitled to do so. Just like everyone else is more than entitled to decide that they feel the opposite way. But don’t pretend that it’s meaningless when confronted with criticism. This movie made over $300 million in just a few days. People got excited to see it. Some saw it more than once. They feel it’s worth defending. That means something. Maybe not a whole lot, but something.

Related: Who Are “The Terrible Auteurs?”

And yet the worst part of the “it’s just a movie” defense is that it has nothing to do with the movie, it has everything to do with you. It robs you of your right to have standards. If Transformers is just a movie then EVERY movie is just a movie. If you’ve used this defense you can never say that a movie sucks ever again, and you no longer have any right to praise one movie over another. Your favorite movie, whatever it is, must be meaningless to you. It’s “just a movie” after all. They’re all interchangeable. You had no right to complain about the ending to Man of Steel or to say that Gravity ruled. Batman & Robin is just as good as The Dark Knight and The Last Airbender deserved to make just as much money as Avatar.

Art has meaning. Even stupid art has meaning. If a movie exists only to entertain, that’s just fine, but you’re allowed to say that you still didn’t like it. The whole point of telling a story, or making any other work of art, is for your creation is to have an impact on your audience. Saying “it’s just a movie” is a harsher criticism of Transformers: Age of Extinction than saying it’s a bad movie ever could be. It’s entirely possible for a movie to be bad and also enjoyable. It is also entirely possible for a movie to be bad and also “not good.”

Maybe the critics are right. Maybe the fans are. Maybe they both have a point. But the fact that all of these people feel like they have to say something about Transformers: Age of Extinction means that this film has meaning. What exactly it means is up to you, but explaining what that is would be a far more potent defense than saying you didn’t care about this movie, but feel like other people should.

William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.