What was with all the Obama bashing in T2? Obama is never on screen but it is clearly specified that he is the President (and that he’s running to hide in a bunker) , and the movie has some cartoon douche of a liberal stereotype acting directly under the authority of the President, calling off the heroic Special Forces guys from the fight, saying they want to leave “diplomatic options on the table,” with the decepticons. There’s all this garbage about how the smart, noble military types are being undermined by the stupid President (who, again, is specifically named as Obama) wanting to stop the military from fighting, negotiate with evil robots, etc, The whole movie is filled with this fascistic, pro-military, anti-government, “Obama is a coward who hates the troops and wants to surrender to the terrorists” theme. Is Michael Bay a right winger or something?
I wanted those smug, Special Forces assholes, or whatever they were supposed to be, who threw the civilian, White House guy out of the plane to get court martialled and DD’d.
Megan Fox’s ass works really well in this movie, though.
Yeah but you have to remember the first movie , where the sec/def put the whole military on hold , until George Bush was in the bunker, alough not named.
Jesus Fucking Christ on a pogo stick, dude, it’s the fucking Transformers. Is there nothing in the world that isn’t a vast right-wing conspiracy to you?
The funny thing is that Obama was elected in November, sworn in January, and the movie was released June 26, there was just no way that you could have gotten feedback on Obama as President, enough to take a swipe at him.
Bush was not specifically named as Bush in the first movie. It was just a Bush-like character. T2 actually refers to “President Obama,” and clearly specifies that the villain is doing Obama’s bidding.
That’s not a “conspiracy theory” (I have no habit or pattern or inclination to see right wing conspiracies everywhere). I’m not reading subtext, I’m reading text.
The fact that it’s supposed to be a mindless popcorn movie based on freaking toys (not even a comic book, just toys for eff’s sake) is what makes it weird that Bay would politicize it. I know the first movie had a pretty dick-sucking attitude towards the military (I understand the military won’t let Hollywood film its toys for movies unless the script is approved as pro-military), but this one goes out of its way to paint Obama as a detriment to the military.
Maybe its just a difference of opinion on how the military is portrayed, but I would have to agree with people who have stated that they liked the movie cause the Transformers showed the armed forces in a competent and positive light.
Or would you rather have Oliver Stone and Verhoven doing the only war movies.
The addition of Obama’s name is likely just to add a tiny note of versillimitude. The implication of Bush being the chicken in the first movie was not exactly subtle.
“The military are awesomely brave warriors screwed by the stupid politicians” is pretty standard fare in big, stupid action movies and frequently seems to pop up in Bay’s shit. “The Rock” is a great example.
I have to agree. I don’t know exactly when this movie was shot, but I’d say chances are good it was probably sometime last year and the script was probably written sometime before the election. For all the screenwriters could have known, McCain might have been elected.
Or even verisimilitude. Although apart from that my impression was that the interfering political flunkey seemed like a leftover from the Bush era. So I agree with the rest of your post.
Here’s the thing- it’s a stupid Transformers movie. That means the government has to be more or less useless so that the kid and the Transformers can save the day.
Oh, he most certainly was. Granted it was only for a frame or so, but Bay deliberately put his image in there.:
It was during the part Soundwave overrode all the satellite communications so that Megatron (or was it The Fallen?) could announce to the world their presence. I can’t really remember what he was saying, but I’m sure it was of the “you puny, stupid humans” regard. I’m not saying this makes Bay a hyper-righty — perhaps he would have flashed McCain’s image, had he won the election — but, regardless, Obama is in the movie, and it made me raise an eyebrow when I noticed it (when I wasn’t busy vomiting into my popcorn from the abysmal horridness that is Transformers 2)
Obama was mentioned, what, twice throughout the movie? And even then, it was only in obviously dubbed segments. What this implies–as if it weren’t obvious already–was that every scene which involving a character who mentioned mentioned “the President” (and not by name), was shot well before Bay even knew who would become president.
Had McCain won, I suspect we’d have the exact same movie, only with McCain dubbed in instead of Obama.
It’s not just that Obama was established as the POTUS, but that the douchebag government guy was established as specifically doing the President’s will.
So why specifically name him as the President then? Why not just do a fictional POTUS like they did in the first one? I know the first one was a thinly disguised Bush, but at least he wasn’t presented as actually being Bush himself.
Who knows? Perhaps simply to make it appear more current? To attribute anything more to it without any actual insight from the director seems a bit silly.
Video clip of Bay answering this very question(link).
According to records searches virtually all of the big guys associated with Transformers 2 (Steven Spielberg, Stacey Snider, Roberto Orci, Ehren Kruger, Brad Grey) donated money to either Hillary Clinton (in the primaries) or Barack Obama (in the general). Bay himself did not donate money to any political campaign in the past 10 years that I could find through a records search. I get the impression he’s not very political and also think that no matter who was President they’d have gotten similar treatment in this movie.
For the record I haven’t seen Transformers 2 nor do I particularly intend to, I guess my generation came a tad too early to really get into giant transforming robots.
