Why I Refuse to Watch “Transformers 4”

There won’t be a review for “Transformers 4: Revenge of the Fallen Extinction Dawning Dark Moons” or whatever it’s full horseshit title is. And the reason for that is because I won’t be seeing it.

“Why’s that?”–you might ask. Well, it’s really because of some comments that the film’s notoriously awful director Michael Bay made, and the horrifying reality that he’s absolutely right.

While promoting the film, Bay was asked what he had to say to the film’s detractors, the detractors of the series, and really critics who think his whole career has been the ideal of mediocrity at best. And he basically said the haters can hate because they’re “still going to see the movie anyway.” [It did, after all, have the year’s biggest opening weekend…and it can’t all come from the Honey Boo Boo crowd, at least some indie-film-loving liberals with college degrees had to slip in there.]

That might sound like pure arrogance from Bay, a director who’s not known to be the most reflective of types, and it is, but the scary thing is: he’s also dead right. I mean, have I ever really enjoyed one of the Transformer movies? No. Do I think each successive film has been worse than the last one? Yes. Do I dread the thought of sitting through a nearly 3-hour tour of dumbassery and did I actually rank this bloated idiot-palooza as my “Least Anticipated Film” of the Summer? Absolutely. I would lose brain cells just watching something as dumb as a robot dinosaur smash into other robots.

So why reward Michael Bay for his regression back into awful? [Last year’s “Pain and Gain” was his best film ever, and the first step in the right direction he’s taken since the Transformers series started.] Why review a film I know will suck just so I can write it a scathing review talking about how it sucked?

No…no, not this time. For once, I’m refusing to watch a Summer blockbuster that no one with good taste really likes but only goes to watch because of some cynical studio calculation that we’ll all just gravitate towards these films because they’re so big we can’t avoid them. A massive studio blockbuster of Transformers-size might have it’s own gravitational pull, but if we truly want better, then it’s time for at least some of us to start pulling away.