Each year in September, the Economist holds a conference on the Korea economy (a part of its Bellwether series on Asian economies). They invite me to come, and then I try to write up my thoughts on it in the JoongAng Dailyas an op-ed. Each year, unfortunately, we seem to argue about the same things – a proper, untweaked float of the won, and the openness of the Korean economy to foreign products and owners. Here are my thoughts from 2010 and 2011. I was so busy in the last few months on this site with the US election and other stuff, that I didn’t get a chance to reprint the JAI op-ed. But I like it, so here is the link, and here is the text itself:
“Last week the Economist magazine held its annual conference on Korea’s economy. This series is rapidly becoming the most important regular discussion in Korea for Korea’s foreign investors. Last year in these pages, I was critical of the Korean speakers’ response to foreign concerns. This year was an improvement. The finance minister particularly fielded a tough question about foreign investors’ rights in Korea in the wake of the Lone Star debacle. To his credit, he admitted what many already know from that case – that the Korean public is deeply ambivalent about substantial foreign profit-taking and ownership of major Korean assets.
Yesterday, the JoongAng Daily printed an column by me about my trip to NK. Here is the link and column is reprinted after the jump. This condenses my earlier thoughts on my trip and adds some political analysis.
In passing, I should say that I find the JA the best newspaper in Korea – and no, not just because they publish my stuff every couple months (although that helps) .
For readers who don’t know the Korean media scene, the JA is like the Economist in Korea –centrist, neoliberal, intelligently hawkish on foreign policy, sane on social issues. This is why I send my stuff to them. The biggest newspaper in Korea by circulation is to the right, the Chosun Ilbo. The third big paper is to the left, Hankyoreh. I find the Chosun ok, but sometimes it can sound like Fox News, and I dislike its obsessive, Korea’s-status-in-the-world-is-rising!!! nationalism. But the far-too-soft-on-Pyongyang Hankyoreh I frequently find downright disturbing, as it comfortably trafficks in the worst conspiracy theories like poisoned US beef in Korea or a cover-up of the Cheonan sinking. So if you are researching Korea, stick to the JA first, and then CI.
(So yes, my politics are broadly center-right, even though I seem to criticize the US GOP relentlessly on this site. One thing I like about SK is that its conservatives are in fact conservative, not radical, as the Tea Party made the Republicans. Generally speaking, I find the SK right to be responsible and moderate most of the time. That’s so refreshing. Don’t you miss having sane conservatives back home?)
I was going to write on the Biden-Ryan debate, but it wasn’t that interesting. Biden came off like that aggressive uncle at Thanksgiving family dinner who takes over the conversation, and Ryan seemed pretty out of his depth on foreign policy. I’d say Biden won, but not by as much as Romney won last week.
So this is just a bits & pieces post instead about the first time I ever spoke on TV (yikes!).
This is the first time I ever spoke on TV. Unnerving…
In July, when Vice Marshal Ri Young Ho of the DPRK was sacked, BBC news asked me to speak. I didn’t realize until about 20 minutes beforehand that it would be on TV, and it was 2 am EST. Good grief. So I’m not even wearing a tie, and I sat in my parent’s living room . Good thing they didn’t see the bar behind me!
On September 10, I did a full hour radio interview on my trip to North Korea. Go to recording 169 here. For my write-up of my NK trip impressions, go here.
On August 27, I published an op-ed in Korea’s main and centrist newspaper, the JoongAng Daily. I am happy to say that Real Clear World picked it up too. The long version is here (one) and here (two). Basically I argue that even though America is broke, foreigners are so desperate to hold dollars, that we can still fight long, unnecessary wars and borrow incessantly without a financial crisis. To paraphrase Mel Brooks (sarcastically), ‘it’s good to be the hegemon – you can do whatever the hell you want.’
yeah, it’s pretty hysterical, especially when you get the underlying social critique
I try to avoid K-pop on this website, because I find far too many foreigner websites in Korea focus on the silliest, shallowest elements of what is around us – probably because the language is so hard, and so Korean pop culture is the easiest for us to understand. But I keep getting asked, and it is huge hit, so here’s a sociological overreading:
1. Thank god ‘Kangnam Style’ shows a level of irony, self-awareness, humor, and creativity that K-pop normally lacks. That alone is enough to value it, given how shallow, idiotic, and pre-packaged most Korean pop is. K-pop is wasteland IMO. Try this or this, and see how long you before you cringe from the sheer mawkish inanity of it all. Then read this and this (that second one is a little raw), if you still don’t get it. And to their credit, I find most Koreans will admit that K-pop is fairly embarassing non-art if you push them about it. It should also be noted that traditional Korean music is often superb, rich, and authentic; we listen to it at home.
Anyway, none of these carbon-copy ‘k-bands’ like the Wonder Girls or Girls Generation or whatever would ever get considered for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (I’m from Cleveland, so I thought I’d add that little plug). K-pop slavishly copies from the boy-band/girl-band model that began in the US 20 years ago and crossed-over to Japan. The hair, the synched dance-moves, the gratingly cutesy presentations, the insipid teen love-story lyrics, the spontaneity-crushing over-choreography – it’s awful, corporate faux-art. None of them can play an instrument; they are recruited solely because they’re hot, and the music-machine does the rest. Bleh…
Mix Munedo and the Kardashians in the Korean language, and you get K-pop. Korea desperately, desperately needs to de-MTV-ize/de-idol-ize its music scene and get some raging, slovenly, wacked-out desperado-rockers like Meatloaf or Janis Joplin who care about music instead of bling. Instead, it’s hideous, so-repetitive-I-can’t-even-tell-the-difference-anymore synth-pop even Duran Duran would be embarrassed to release, all controlled by corporate hacks with no interest in deviation and who are persistently rumored to sexually exploit their young charges. Like almost everything else in the Korean economy, the music industry desperately needs deconcentration and innovation.
Xenophobia so sloppy and racist, Glenn Beck himself would blush…
I came late to this controversy, but it merits some quick comment given just how creepy the above vid is.
This ‘report’ was shown in primetime on Korea’s largest TV network, on a holiday when people would likely be home with family (and was then rebroadcast until the explosion of response halted it). While xenophobia is fairly common in the Korean media, this is so nasty – especially at this very late date in the long, tiresome ‘Korean women dating western men’ discussion – that it has gone viral in the expat blog world of Korea. It even got into the Wall Street Journal.
I rarely blog about this sort of thing. As an IR academic, domestic politics and sociology aren’t really my area, and I don’t really see myself as a ‘k-blogger’ or whatever. I don’t like blogging about identity politics in Korea, as I think it is prone to recycled stereotyping that tells us little. And I have broadly argued against our (foreigners) participation in the Korean multiculturalism debate, because it’s their country and they themselves need to decide what they want from us. It’s their choice.
But this is the nastiest race-baiting – primetime, slap-dash unprofessional, on a major network, for a general audience – I’ve seen in my time here. (Full disclosure: my wife is Korean). Casual racism is a widespread problem in Korea, as any foreigner living here can tell you. Wide-eyed kids shamelessly point at you like you are a martian; people stare at your body hair; grade and high schoolers giggle and smirk; the old ladies glare at you on the subway; average folks on their cell phones will pause their conversations to remark, ‘hey, a foreigner just walked by me!,’ as if it’s some kind of major event in their day (presumably they think I can’t understand that, or maybe they don’t care?). It’s all fairly fatiguing (read this for a good example), and that’s for white westerners. I can’t imagine being from Southeast Asia or an LDC here. In fact, Cambodian import brides have been so badly abused, the Cambodian government made it illegal for its citizens to marry Koreans. (This hugely embarrassing and deeply disturbing restriction was scarecely reported by the Korean media.) And when the Korean race hang-up gets wrapped into sex, it breeds genuinely disturbing levels of xenophobia, especially for an OECD/G-20 country that really ought to know better. Hence this vid.
Video Games as the Fear-Mongering Pop Adjunct of America’s post-9/11 ‘forever wars’
Even tea-partying righties should be pretty shocked at this shameless, exploitative (and wildly inaccurate) manipulation of Americans’ post-9/11 paranoia as a marketing gimmick. And you thought 24 was off the air. Well here’s the video game version, all designed to scare you s—less – for cash. When the Homeland Security Department terrified the country 10 years ago by telling us to buy ducktape and sheetwrap, at least they had public safety goals, however confusedly, in mind. But this pseudodocumentarian ‘they’re-everywhere!-no-one-is-safe!’ crap is just to shill some video game. Bleh.
And Oliver North?! Good lord – the guy violated the appropriations clause, the Logan Act, and who knows how much other statute, and should have been in jail next to Frank Colson. Yet this guy is credible for the (apparently) largest entertainment franchise in the world now? Wow. H/t to Kotaku: “What does this say, then, about the market for a game like Call of Duty? Does Activision really believe its core market is so full of gun-crazy, right-wing types that it feels entirely comfortable employing Oliver North as someone to help sell the game?”
Part one is here, where I noted the game’s high-level of 80s camp hamminess.
To compensate for that gauzy 80s nostalgia, the game throws copious, unnecessary brutality at you to tell you its ‘serious.’ This creates a high moral awkwardness in that NK is an extreme human rights abuser in the real world, but is here used for sadistic entertainment. ‘Highpoints’ include: the opening sequence shows occupation soldiers executing American parents in front of their screaming child. Later your character hides from the NK People’s Army (KPA) by climbing into mass grave, after watching a mass execution, and hiding under the bodies. Survivalist gun-nuts are presented who torture and execute captured North Koreans, with implication that they may eat them too. At another point you are encouraged to not waste your ammunition killing KPA soldiers who are on fire after an air-strike.
If all this doesn’t make the gamer complicit enough in pro-American bloodlust, you get regular ‘kill ’em all’ exhortation in your militia from a one-dimensional, ‘tough-as-nails’ alpha-male stereotype (Milius wrote Conan the Barbarian too) berating his whining female sidekick for her lack of vengeful determination to butcher on behalf of America. As the game website tells us, “Because Rianna is not former military, and not a battle hardened combat vet, cracks in her exterior resolve will show at times. She is a humanitarian, she does have feelings that she needs to deal with and control in the line of duty. She’ll never feel good about everything the Resistance has done and will continue to do, but she’ll also never let those emotional struggles to destroy her and the other’s ruthless resolve to win at all costs. There is no other option.” Yes, the NRA, military-loving, survivalist patriot will triumph over her inner Amnesty International sissie.
So we are back to the tiresome, right-wing GWoT trope that if you really love America, you must be willing to go over to the Cheney’s ‘dark side’ and beat the hell of out people. I hate this motif, because it says the rules of engagement are for liberals and wusses. All of America’s opponents are unremitting, unrelenting, thoroughly evil, and so cunning, that there is no choice but to blow them away with extreme prejudice at all times. You namby-pamby liberals, with your Geneva Conventions and squeamishness to use a gun, just get in the way, or worse, give aid and comfort to the enemy by according them due-process. Real men just kick a—. As with Michael Bay villains, the ‘evil’ of the Homefront Koreans is so ridiculous and exaggerated, that it is obviously just a narrative fig-leaf to mask the real point of movies and games like this – vengeful, extreme carnage, including torture, executions, and mass killings, as pro-American, nationalistic entertainment.
I want games and films to be edgy too, but I am increasingly disturbed by the Cheney-esque reveling in gratuitous torture and brutality by the good guys in post-9/11 geopolitical action entertainment. There is a willingness to wear it openly, almost proudly, as if it were a badge of honor of one’s seriousness and commitment to defend America that one won’t hesitate to violently break the law. Bay’s Transformers trilogy is filled with executions as entertainment; Modern Warfare 2 included torture and an infamous scene where the gamer actually machine-guns dozens of innocent civilians as part of the plot; 24 is notorious for torture and similar brutality; and Homefront includes a ghastly ‘killing fields’ sequence not narratively necessary, but just thrown-in to raise the extremity level yet higher (shooting parents in front of their kids wasn’t enough I guess).
This doesn’t mean games and films should be neutered, and I concur that mature games that include adult themes enrich it as a medium. But there are games thatinclude moral choice that actually inform the violence and give it some meaning – even if you choose to be harsh. And even the Halo series, arguably the best shooter out there and filled with violence unsuitable for minors, doesn’t present gratuitous brutality just for its own sake.
In sum, the NK invasion environment is interesting, creative, and somewhat engrossing, especially if you know anything Korea. The wacko blend of gun-fetishism, surreal NK agitprop, 80s USSR references, and Hooters and White Castle (another sponsor) generates unintentional and bizarre camp laughter throughout. But Homefront eventually capitulates to the Tea Party/NRA version of US force – armed militia vigilantes rescue America with extreme brutality and righteous vengeance. Terrifying; it’s ‘Michigan Militia – The Game.’ In fact, I got so emotionally jaded after the killing fields sequence, I was surprised that the later implied cannibalism wasn’t actually shown. I can only imagine how uber-bloodthirsty the next Modern Warfare will be this fall. As I havesaid somany timesbefore, this is why we frighten the rest of the world…
As a part of my regular effort to avoid work yet nonetheless self-justify slacking as ‘work-related,’ I played Homefront this summer at home on vacation. Unfortunately, it has been banned in SK (where it would make millions, I have no doubt). I wrote about it earlier when it was released and there was controversial buzz around it. Readers will recall that it is a first-person shooter in which you play an American resistance guerilla fighting against a North Korean occupation force in the US. Through a (rather ludicrous) series of geopolitical twists, NK manages to reunify with SK under Northern leadership, then pull Japan and Southeast Asia into a ‘Greater Korean Republic,’ and then sail across the Pacific (!) in order to invade the US which has been crippled by a massive oil shock resulting from a Saudi-Iranian war. If you are genuinely interested in the details of this future ‘counterfactual,’ the wiki write-up is good. For the idiot fan-boy, ‘this could really happen, dude!’ version, try here. As a website about Korean security, I thought this would be off-beat to discuss.
As for a review of the game itself, it got 70% from Metacritic. That sounds about right to me. The gameplay is like most other shooters, and I found the long distance between checkpoints had me re-playing too many sequences again and again. The real hook is the apocalyptic, over-the-top environment. In play, it is basically a nastier, crueler version of the already fairly cruel Modern Warfare series. As I said in my commentary on Bay’s Transformers 3, I believe one reason contemporary geopolitical games and films show increasing levels of gleeful brutality and unnecessary cruelty is US disillusionment with the GWoT. After a decade of torture, wounded veterans, and exhaustion with the ‘recalcitrance’ of the Middle East to its ‘liberation,’ the Americans who ‘hoo-rahed’ at bin Laden’s death are ready for geopolitical viciousness as entertainment. So forget Halo’s goofy aliens or having tea with Afghan village elders – let’s get down to kicking the crap out of the axis of evil.
The influences on the game will be immediately apparent to anyone in IR who lived through the 1980s and will provide regular camp laughs of nostalgic recognition. The story is ridiculously cheesy, because it is basically a re-tread of the Red Dawn scenario which feels wildly out of place today. Made during the height of the second cold war, that 1984 film, featuring a Soviet ground invasion of North America in the mid-80s, was already pushing reality enough, but here the story just goes off the rails, because NK is so preposterous in the USSR role. Can anyone really imagine NK helicopters flying air patrol over the ‘American zone’ of occupied Denver? I’m not even sure what means… It’s just too improbable to pull you in. Indeed one wonders why the invader wasn’t the far-more-obvious China, but I guess you can’t annoy the world’s biggest emerging market…
In the wake of 9/11 and given NK’s well-know weakness, the scenario is ludicrous. The ‘Norks’ (a suitably racist replacement for today’s ‘haji’) are shown doing stuff that modern gamers won’t even recognize as Cold War-tropes and motifs (re-education camps, house-to-house round-ups, a stalinist cult of personality). Modern Warfare and 24 have your standard issue, post-9/11 terrorists to give them immediacy and edge (and racism), but how many people will identify with a NK-cum-Soviet invasion of America in 2011? Playing it made me feel like a tween again, worried about whether we needed bomb shelter in our backyard.
(A bonus bizarro addition is the game’s sponsorship by Hooters [wait, what?]. Its restaurants show up in the game, generating even more surrealistically dissonant dialogue like ‘take out the sniper in the Hooters’ lobby.’ Hah!)
The writer of Red Dawn was John Milius, and he wrote this game as well. He even wrote a book for the game, in case you need more killing in the name of freedom. Homefront has all the traits of campy, right-wing cold war paranoia that Milius is known for and that IR types old enough to remember the 80s will recognize immediately. There are heroic resistance fighters in a masked nod to the mujahideen, contras, and other ‘freedom fighters’ against communism whom the US sponsored back in the day. Pol Pot-style death camps are included (!). The survivalist, NRA (National Rifle Association) gun-culture machismo that informed Red Dawn is back; lots of cut scenes show an ‘armed citizenry’ guarding their homes and lounging with their weapons. The enemy of America is once again communists, and somehow those communists manage to launch an transoceanic invasion of the US homeland. There are commie agit-prop signs up throughout the game, like ‘Praise to the Dear Leader’ and ‘Rejoice at the Korean-American Reeducation Facility.’ These are in proper Korean and provoke great laughs of 80s recognition mixed with sheer campiness for rendering NK agitprop into a surreal US occupation setting. The antagonists even speak in a NK accent. But it all feels like such a weird stalinist throwback in the current age of terror and al Qaeda, that it’s more like watching ‘I Love the 80s’ than a edgy contemporary video game. Someone remind Milius that Brezhnev died 3 decades ago.
“In the name of freedom, we will kill them all” – Yikes!!
Part one is here, where I noted the film’s extraordinarily brutality, including battlefield executions by its American-allied protagonists.
The obvious, if unwanted, parallel to such battlefield cruelty is all those conservatives who complained for years that America’s rules of engagement in the GWoT were too strict, or Limbaugh’s flippant defense of Abu Ghraib brutality as ‘hazing on the nightshift.’ Bay’s childish defense, I’m sure, is the throw-away fig-leaf that the Decepticons are ‘evil,’ so it’s ok to just blow them away, decapitate them when they’re defenseless, or draw-and-quarter them. But I can’t imagine such levels of brutality, including multiple executions (!), making their way into a mainstream blockbuster for tweens, produced by family-friendly Spielberg (!!) no less, before the GWoT. We’ve become a harsher people when liberal restraints on force give way to bloodlust.
To see Bay’s regression more clearly, note that first film had no executions-as-entertainment, the second ‘only’ had one (in the first China sequence), but there are four in this one. If this seems unfair, recall that this isn’t an R-rated horror movie, with different standards and genre tropes. Also, Bay has always reached for a certain national security credibility; he’s like the Hollywood version of Tom Clancy. He reverentially celebrates the US military. Bay gets uniquely deep access to actual US hardware from the Pentagon. Armageddon lionized NASA. Pearl Harbor told everyone that America is awesome. In this Transformers film, the Autobots even help derail Iran’s nuclear program. In same way that uber-popular, ultra-violent video game franchises like Modern Warfare obviously channel American attitudes about force, the military, and terrorism, so does Bay. So I don’t think it’s too much to notice how Bay turned Transformers from a toy-movie for tweens into Black Hawk Down meets Saw with robots.
I wrote a review of the Transformers 2, where I argued that Bay fetishizes (US) military hardware and glorifies the US military so much, that he is given unparalleled access to display US weaponry. His simplistic good vs. evil storylines and adultatory portrayal of the US military give his films an ‘establishment,’ rah-rah feel that vastly more interesting but subversive war-films like Apocalypse Now or Platoon could never have. The most sycophantic line of the film is when the ridiculously improbable new ‘Bay girl’ is legitimized before no less than the Director of National Intelligence, because ‘she comes from a good military family.’ There is so much elitism and militarism wrapped up in that statement, that it could have been written by Robert Heinlein.
This is entertainment for WR Mead’s Jacksonians, mixing American exceptionalism, self-righteous violent vengeance, and alpha male strut into the modern Republican party. Pandering to these reactionary sentiments is easy: America battles for good, deploys flashy, high-tech hardware, and, most importantly, wins. In the background are waving flags, boyishly shallow speeches about ‘freedom,’ and Pentagon guys barking dialogue like, ‘failure is not an option,’ or ‘roll out strike package dark star whiskey tango foxtrot…’ If you’re not in the military, you’re probably a wimp or a liberal. And if you can throw in a hot babe wandering around in a bikini or something, so much the better to capture the mix of sexual titillation and self-righteous, militaristic posturing that has made Fox News such success. Indeed, I’ve often thought that Fox News models itself on Bay’s flashy, militaristic, sexualized style.
Hollywood is far more nationalistic than American conservatives, wedded to the trope of ‘liberal Hollywood,’ will admit. And Bay is the leading edge of this. He is bombastic, reactionary, and jingoistic, and people love him for it. His films make ridiculous amounts of money, suggesting a far deeper reservoir for a conservative, pro-military Hollywood than the standard Republican interpretation of Hollywood admits. This is entertainment for men of course, but for the sort of anti-feminist, semi-authoritarian Tea Partier who thought W’s landing on the Abraham Lincoln was a milestone in America’s foreign policy history of ‘kicking a—,’ pines for Sarah Palin (a housewife hottie who wants to bomb foreigners and loves America), and doesn’t understand why the greatest country on earth is losing the GWoT and ceding place to China. As no less than Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots says in the clip above, ‘In the name of freedom…we will kill them all.’ That is pretty much all that’s left of the Bush Doctrine for the angry, frustrated, ‘I-don’t-give-a-damn-anymore-about-the-rules-of-engagement,’ tea-partier.
This is where the third Transformers film is revelatory. It is one of the most purposefully, gleefully cruel mainstream geopolitical films I can think of since the Rambo-80s. It displays better than any GWoT-era film the growing American acceptance of war cruelty resultant from ten years of frustrating, inconclusive combat. That normally tempered Spielberg produced the film too shows just how far the bar has fallen. Indeed, Spielberg should be embarrassed after producing morally-nuanced war-films like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. This is entertainment for an angry, confused, militarily exhausted electorate looking for decisive outcomes and now willing to tolerate cruelty to get them. When people say that 9/11 and the GWoT have made Americans a nastier, angrier, less pleasant people, this is exactly what they mean.
I missed this over the summer, but the blu-ray just came out, and it’s a nasty, harsh, rah-rah militaristic mess. I won’t bother with the story. You already saw it and know how ridiculous it was. (Try here if you don’t.) I’ll only note that great actors like Malkovich, McDormand, Turturro, and Nemoy are complicit now in the militarization of American cinema, as is Buzz Aldrin (sooo embarrassing that was – wow). The Asian racism and gay jokes are a just as offensive (and painfully unfunny) as the black racism of the second one. And the new ‘Bay girl’ is even worse than Megan Fox, who at least had a grittiness. This one is just living plastic and skin-cream. Bay never misses a chance to promote emotionally debilitating lookism to young girls. (Even Bay’s female corpses must be hot. That must take a sexism award somewhere.)
No one captures the ups-and-downs for popular consumption of current American attitudes toward war as well as Michael Bay. Bay’s films obviously carry the moral weight and approval of the American Right. This is most clear when he guiltlessly references signature moments in US history like the collapse of the Trade Towers, the moon landing, or Challenger explosion. More leftish action directors like James Cameron or George Lucas would be relentlessly criticized were they to do that. Consider the Right’s response to Avatar and Star Wars III, compared to Transformers. But ‘America’s director,’ just like ‘America’s newsroom,’ can do this, because he is reliably nationalistic and pro-military. As Timeput it, Bay has become the “CEO of Hollywood’s military-entertainment complex.”
As a result of Bay’s signature position as the filmic voice of the US populist-militarist right, no movies better capture the US emotional arc regarding the war on terror than his Transformers trilogy. As Americans have become more and more frustrated by an unwinnable war, more tolerant of brutality like torture, and less compromising, so has Bay. The films have become progressively more jingoistic, bitter, macho-sexist, and cruel. This is entertainment for the Tea-Party. In this most recent installment, there are even four battlefield-executions (!) in this Steven Spielberg (!) production based on a line of toys and aimed at young boys. But I guess that’s good stuff in the GOP primary these days.
The antagonists (the Decepticons) are nastier than usual, but the protagonists (the Autobots) are extraordinarily brutal for mainstream heroes, and Bay revels in it. The usual story about how the Decepticons are ‘evil’ is thrown in to provide a moral fig-leaf for the Autobots’ violence, but it’s a sham. Bay really wants to show us a vengeful bloodbath (the last hour), and here is where the Tea-Partier frustration and anger at the confusion over the GWoT’s course is most obvious. The film, like current the Tea Party-influenced GOP primary season, is filled with a deeply disturbing bloodlust for brutality. This is not a fun action film for the comfortable, amiable America of the 1990s (like Bay’s Armageddon). This is war carnage for a bitter America desensitized to vengeance and brutality after a decade of torture, confusion, wounded veterans, ‘ingratitude’ from Iraqis and Afghans at being ‘liberated,’ sky-rocketing costs, and global condemnation. T3 is wish-fulfillment for the people who hoo-rahed at OBL’s death: if only we could just go and kick the s— out of all them.
The Decepticons execute an Autobot made up to look like an old-man by shooting him in the back of the head. This came off so harsh, that a woman sitting next to me gasped and looked at her rather shocked boyfriend. When a Decepticon fighter crashes, the Autobots dismember the pilot alive to the jokingly-delivered line, ‘this is going to hurt.’ Holy c—! Sadism is hilarious? Kids are supposed to find that line humorous? At the end, Optimus Prime – remember, this is main good guy – kills one bad guy (Megatron), who had actually just assisted him, by hatcheting him unsuspectingly in the back of the head and them pulling out his entire brain stem, complete with arterial spray. Next the chief bad guy is dispatched after he is badly wounded and crawling on the ground begging for mercy. Nevertheless, Optimus Prime shot-guns him in the back at close range. Twice. And the camera lingers on his pained face as he’s being shot. Wow. WTH happened to Michael Bay (and Steven Spielberg)? Does Bay really expect us to endorse this kind of brutality as entertainment? Both antagonists are in morally compromised positions, yet the hero effectively executes them?! Are we supposed to cheer on the Autobots (allied with the US military in the film) when they brazenly disregard the rules of engagement (which makes liberal states’ use of force more trustworthy) and just execute people?
.
. Good thing they didn’t see the bar behind me!
Robert E Kelly 