the bad robots have come to earth to take its resources in order to re-build their homeworld. the twist is that the “resource” they’re after is human slave labour—because even alien robots have not progressed beyond capitalism (and its antecedent economic paradigms). michael bay’s vision of american supremacy is total, right down to the smallest details of how the economics work.
i liked the 20 minutes at the beginning when the movie became a workplace comedy. the way michael bay shoots women is fucking H I L A R I O U S !! it is one of the most crucial details in the gestalt of his fascist vision. i liked all the falling and moving around the collapsing building—that actually stuck out as unusually creative and invested for being the umpteenth action set piece coming as late in the movie as it did.
characterization in this and the Beast Wars one is still strikingly bizarre. shia is fully doing an autistic thing here. he is so full of uncomfortably real screams, violent outbursts, twitches. none of it gets downplayed for laughs, either: he screams in unhinged terror, but does not apologize for it. he smashes his busted car 100 times, but it’s not downplayed or undercut; rather, it lingers awkwardly as an uncontrolled outburst.