The Spectacle Never Ends

You sit in a theater and a giant robot crushes a building. That’s the whole thing. Dinobots wrecking everything. The plot is garbage and you know it, but who cares. Michael Bay made another Transformers movie because he figured out exactly what we actually want, and it sure as hell isn’t a good story.

The crazy thing is it works. Two hours of robots destroying a city, surround sound, screen the size of a wall—that hits different than anything smaller. You know it’s stupid. The dialogue is stilted, the characters are thin, the logic is nonexistent. Doesn’t matter. You’re not there for logic. You’re there to watch scale and chaos rendered in sound and pixels, and Bay is genuinely good at that one specific thing.

I know people who bitch the entire time they’re watching these movies. Terrible plot, pointless dialogue, what a waste. Then they’re back for the next one. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s understanding what the thing is. These movies aren’t trying to be art. They’re trying to be an event, and events work by different rules. The plot can be garbage and the spectacle can still be worth your time.

So the robots keep coming. The cities keep burning. Somewhere someone’s tweeting about how awful it is while they’re literally sitting there in the dark, watching it all blow up. And they’ll be back next summer for the next one.