I haven’t seen the new Transformers movie, but I’m reminded of a blog Lance showed me which had many points of criticism. I, for some reason, last night I got the urge to watch the Steven-Spielberg-wishing-he-was-Stanley-Kubrick flick A.I. The first part, right up to young Haley Joel Osmont being abandoned in the woods was actually pretty good. Yes, if we imbue a machine with the capacity to need (in this case the need for love) do we then have a certain moral responsibility to see that need is met? Then the crap parade started and very slowly made its way down Main St. So many horrible things. Do you remember the film? Didn’t you see it? Terrible, terrible movie. It felt like one of those exquisite corpse exercises where you pass back and forth a paper adding paragraphs–sections would make sense but only on their own because to hell with continuity or logic or any notion of common sense.
“How, how can we give this story of a robot in an eternal seek-mission for the motherly-love of one specific woman who died two millennia ago a happy ending?” yells Spielberg. “Eureka! Advanced robots will bring her back to her exact age and exact set of memories up to that age using DNA saved by an animated teddy bear. Oooh… but she still will eventually die right? Okay, well, she’ll die and we’ll come up with some bullshit about how space-time only allows us to bring people back once and for only one day and this one day she spends with our robot-child will be so perfect that he’ll go into some sort of bliss coma and we’ll live happily ever yadda yadda NEXT!”
I’m going to watch Transformers because I really have to see if it could possibly be worse than this.