Coursework 3 - The Michael Bain Of My Life

It should come as no surprise that in a world driven by capitalism, Hollywood today is only motivated by its own political economy. Producing hollow soulless films that lack any true authenticity and/or originality. This recurring financial attitude to cinema is slowly but surely reducing film from an artistic development; to nothing more than mainstream recycled rubbish. Whereby we find ourselves watching different movies with exactly the same core structure. In fairness, mass methods of producing movies only exist to feed our endless apatite for the biggest and latest releases, or more appropriately dubbed ‘the blockbuster phenomena.’ But in the end, at what cost does this obsession with popular culture and money ultimately have on the films we know and love?

Michael bay, for want of a better word, 'directed' the films Transformers 3 and Armageddon, among with many other blockbuster hits. These two films perfectly reflect the extent to which Michael Bay has conformed to the pressure from Hollywood and adopted this mainstream attitude to filmmaking standards and techniques.

Transformers 3 on the surface, is an exciting movie about robots from the planet Cybertron, that live among humans to protect and serve from enemies in space. Yet underneath its conventionally scripted plot, it’s actually a mixing pot of everything its target audience would expect to find in this specific genre. There is in fact nothing unique about it at all. It follows the same conventional narrative structure that you’d find in most Hollywood films. The exact same plot scenario happens to also occur in Armageddon, another one of Michael bay's earlier films. These particular narratives are called "a hero’s journey."  The vast majority of these types of narratives are exactly the same sequence by sequence. They push the hero and major characters through the process of transformation, until they have changed or fulfilled some kind of inner destiny, or in this case saved the world. Unsurprisingly, these journeys that our main protagonists go through are yet again not too dissimilar. For instance the equilibrium in Transformers 3 is exactly the same compared to Armageddon. They both begin peaceful in a world of normality where everything seems fine, and then all of a sudden something goes wrong, they fix it, it breaks again, then right at the last minute the worlds saved the hero gets the girl, and they literally walk off into the sunset. Both are your quintessential action movies, relying heavily on CGI and the occasional explosion so we can justify our own reasoning for buying a ticket to an “action movie.”

We can also look at how these films are completely Americanized. For one, in Transformers 3 and Armageddon the main characters are all American. considering that both films are about saving the world, then surely we would see some sort of varying ethnic group appear at least once. However, the foreigners that do appear in the films are based on racial stereotypes and are often portrayed as evil or stupid. 

                                  
                                                                                                                    

This surely demonstrates that the "poison factory" that is Hollywood (Michael Medved) is narrow minded and incapable of comprehension outside of its own culture.

                           

                             

It might also be worth noting from a technical perspective, that the majority of Hollywood productions generally tend to follow the same colour scheme. Using teal of orange to produce unnaturally orange skin tones against a blue background, which creates this glamorized unnatural look. These tones are today used as a preset for the foundation of Hollywood’s make up in cinema. Ready and waiting for the next big release this generic approach is easy, dependable, and cost efficient. Yet lacks any originality.

Micheal bay is nothing more that a puppet, conforming to mainstream filmmaking as result of the tight strings that Hollywood has in place. Yet with Armageddon grossing $201,578,182 worldwide and Transformers 3 taking in $352,390,643, this trend of quantity over quality in this mass producing film fashion is clearly not slowing down. But again i ask the question, at what cost?

References:

Box Office Mojo. [Online] Available from: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/search/?q=transformers. [Accessed on 06 March 2013]

Simon, C. (2009) Dominant vs Counter cinema [Online] Available at: http://filmtheoryandcriticism.wordpress.com/research-topics-source-materials/new-wave/dominant-vs-counter-cinema/  (Accessed on 02 March 2013).

Medved. M., 1992. Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values. [online] Available from  from: http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060924355 [Accessed online 03 March 2013]