A mere three months after its theatrical release, Michael Bay’s Transformers is on DVD. The most successful movie of the summer, you can probably still find the movie in second-run theaters in areas a bit more metropolitan than the one in which I live. I guessed that Transformers, like so many summer blockbusters, would be released around late November or early December in time for Christmas. My questions about its strangely early release date were answered while I was watching the special features on the Two-Disc DVD. When talking about the change of Bumblebee from a VW Bug to a 2008 Camaro, one of the film’s designers praised the new Chevy model: “It’s a fantastic car, and I wish they were releasing it earlier than they are.” I realized that Transformers is coming out in mid-October instead of late November so that it can sell other products.

Transformers crosses some sort of boundary. When I saw it in theaters last summer I remarked that it was essentially a two and a half hour long commercial for Hasbro, GM, and the Army. And now it’s being released soon enough before Christmas shopping season that all the parents who happen to watch it with their children will be reminded that they have cars and toys to buy (and armies to join?). All mainstream films are arguably advertisements of sorts for a certain kind of middle-class lifestyle and value system masquerading as drama, but this level of advertisement saturation is, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented. Our popular culture is now to the point that our media no longer have to hide purposes like these, but can make it part of the fun. No longer does it make any difference to the audience whether or not they can tell what you’re doing is propaganda – it all amounts to the same thing anyway, so why not come clean about it? It seems that anything is permissible as long as you’re doing it self-consciously.

Still, the DVD tries to pretend that the super-long commercial is a real movie, with stars and producers alike claiming on the making-of featurettes that they really wanted to make a “real” “honest” movie about people. This is one of the more amusing aspects of the aura surrounding the film, as Bay and others have been insisting since the beginning of its production that the idea with Transformers was to make a genuine human drama of sorts. A telling moment on the DVD indeed is when star Shia LaBeouf talks about his initial worries that DreamWorks would “screw up” the adaptation of Transformers, and insists that by inserting human characters, they remained true to the spirit of the show/comic books/action figures. Anybody with just a passing familiarity with the world of Transformers (like me) knows that this is a ridiculous assessment. The robots were the stars of the show! Bay’s lack of a grasp on this basic concept is the reason that Transformers had such a terrible climax.

All this being said, I really liked Transformers. I mean, come on, it’s giant fucking robots fighting. Even Michael Bay can’t screw this up. The climax, as I said, mostly sucked, because most of it is spent watching Even Stevens run around in the foreground while there’s a GIANT FUCKING ROBOT FIGHT going that Michael Bay found appropriate to put in the background. Optimus Prime battling Megatron is somehow less interesting to Bay than a Disney Channel star running around L.A. with a box under his arm.

I read an interesting article around the time the film came out that pointed out that while traditionally, action scenes in films have had their own rising action, climax, and falling action, Michael Bay’s films are a series of climaxes – his focus is not on narrative unity, but on “the shot.” He has no true grip on exposition – that which masquerades as such are stereotypes spouting jokes, a kind of series of climaxes in its own way – and as such his films could be almost literally re-edited randomly and still make as much sense as they do in their current state, or so this article contended. A good argument for this reading of his films is the fact that the trailers for Transformers, included on the DVD, which are essentially mixed-up versions of the movie, are just as enjoyable and (non)sensical as the film itself.

I wish I could remember where I saw this article, but this lack of true cohesion is obviously a symptom of Bay’s career as a director of music videos and, unsurprisingly, commercials. Transformers is then, in many ways, the movie he was born to make, being as it is a very, very long commercial. As such, the special features are mostly incredibly boring: who the hell cares about how a commercial was made? I got a few things out of wading through a couple hours of the three-plus hours of special features on the “film,” though: (1) Contrary to my former suspicion, the military did not let DreamWorks use their planes, etc for free, so our tax dollars did not go into making this movie. (2) Shia LaBeouf had another telling moment while filming the scene in which he confronts Megatron: “‘I’ll never give you the AllSpark! Never!’ . . . Mike[ael Bay], I sound like a fruitcake! That’s a shit line.” (3) The Transformers fan base is even more pathetic than I am.

In conclusion, here’s a quick summary. Michael Bay: A douchebag whom I learn to love a little more with every successive film. Shia LaBeouf: Wise beyond his years, has a really hard name to spell and/or pronounce. Transformers: enjoyable, if only because giant robots fight each other at least three times and because of an incredibly beautiful co-star whose depiction is one of those that sets back feminism by about 100 years, but still makes me happy. The Transformers DVD: the two-disc edition is not worth it, and if you missed it on the big screen, the one-disc might not be worth it either. Transformers (1984): Features a song by a band called “Kick Axe” and a man named Al who is apparently “Weird;” was the last role of Orson Welles.