Optimus Prime is saving my life
I’ve finally unlocked the secret to eternal youth and immortality — or at least to getting a decent workout.
For years, my biggest obstacle to working out has been boredom. If life is a banquet of tedium, then exercise machines are a tray of stale spelt-and-gravel buns with little rock-hard pats of bread-shredding butter.
Stationary bicycles, treadmills, ellipticals, StairMonsters and rowing machines all boil down to the same thing: boredom, with gears and a digital readout.
The exercise industry knows this, and they’ve tried to help by providing three offerings:
• deafening music attuned to the tastes of people 15 years older and/or younger than you are,
• televisions tuned to business news or (in an act of startling cruelty that would be rejected as heartless by most CIA rendition sites) food channels, and
• video screens with connectors two generations behind whatever mobile device you happen to have on you at the moment.
The time-honoured tradition is to just throw on headphones and listen to music, and I’ve tried to do that with middling success… but the sad truth is even Squeeze, Metric and Jane Siberry can’t kill the tedium.
You know who can?
Michael Bay.
I stumbled on this by accident when I was at my gym and thought I might try watching a movie. Maybe something on Netflix.
The first thing you need to understand is that, in Canada, Netflix consists of 1) The Trailer Park Boys, 2) a documentary about the little-understood rivalries among subspecies of deer ticks, and 3) and 4) two movies, one of which is inevitably a lesser Mike Myers film. (Canadians who tell you this isn’t so are on the take from Netflix. Don’t believe them.)
I’ve already seen So I Married An Axe Murderer five times, so that left Transformers: Age of Extinction. I nearly decided not to, then fatefully said “Eh, what the hell,” and pressed “Play.”
The second thing you need to understand is that T:AofE is in no way a great movie. Since typing that sentence, I’ve taken an entire day to think about what criteria denote a great movie, and not a single one applies.
It is, however, a fabulously expensive one. Every time Michael Bay sees an explosion, some part of him thinks, “Mm-yeah, but it could have been bigger.”
Do you ever listen to eight-year-old boys talking about what would be really cool, each one-upping the other? “Yeah, and it would have a racoon head with a machine gun in its mouth!” “Yeah, and the raccoon would have rabies!” “Yeah, and the rabies would be teleported into people!”
That must be what it sounds like inside Michael Bay’s head all. the. time.
The result, movie-wise, is a suite of action films that just keep topping themselves with in audacity and shameless absurdity. And that, it turns out, is what it takes to keep me running indefinitely on the treadmill.
And as I do, I’ve been gaining an appreciation for Mr. Bay’s oeuvre.
Truth be told, the way the new Transformers in Age of Extinction change shape really is cool. The fire that sweeps across a landscape turning everything into frozen metal really is cool. The action sequences are bombastic as hell, but they aren’t always predictable and there are some dandy surprises.
Age of Extinction is a lot like the first Transformers movie (those are the only two I’ve seen), in that they both shape up to be pretty fun, not-bad mindless entertainment.
Until the cars start talking.
And then each movie becomes terrible.
Not just because their dialogue is awful, although it’s Batman-and-Robin-1997 bad. But because the cars are insufferable, and Optimus is the prime culprit.
Optimus Prime can’t open his mouth without hectoring us humans on what short-sighted fools we are, and on our fundamentally hypocritical, conflict-seeking nature, and how disappointed he and the other Autobots are in us. He says the word “humans” the way parasitologists talk about especially aggressive intestinal worms.
Which might sting a little more… if not for the fact that every single Autobot and Decepticon is based on a human stock character, from the tough-guy commando to a stoic rōnin. And the Autobots spend more time squabbling with each other than anything else.
So whenever Optimus Prime sighs and shakes his head, I hiss, “Take a look in a rear-view mirror, buddy. Objects may be more human than they appear.” (That’s usually when the person on the treadmills to my left and right switch abruptly to the recumbent bikes.)
But I’m still running, or rowing, or whatever you call elliptical-machine motions. Transformers may not be art, but it gets the adrenaline pumping.
And if that’s what it takes to get me to exercise more, and prevent an early death, so be it.
Son of a gun. The Transformers really are protecting human life.
