While flicking through the latest issue of Sight & Sound magazine, we were surprised to stumble across the following comment by Crash director Paul Haggis in a story about how the Iraq War is being represented on-screen.

He said: “To make a film like Transformers at a time of war is a political act.”

Haggis didn’t go into any more detail, but his thoughts reminded us of our ‘Transformers/War On Terror’ theory from a few months back (hey, we knew that GCSE in Media Studies would come in useful someday).

Here’s what we had to say back in July (doesn’t time fly, etc):

“Transformers (which, let us not forget, first appeared during the Reaganite years) is all about ‘the enemy within’. Robots (ie, terrorists or commies) in disguise. You have to be extremely vigilant to spot them as they move among us. Heck, they’re even turning ‘our’ technology against us. The good guys have to beat the enemy at their own game by donning disguises themselves or acquiring more weaponry. And though they claim they won’t hurt ‘humans’, it’s acceptable for them to injure innocent people as collateral damage. The good guys rationalise this by winning the hearts and minds of decent American folk, while demonising the so-called baddies and emphasising the greater good. They spin tales about how the baddies cannot be trusted and how they have consistently messed things up on their home ‘planet’. Frankly, if they’re not reined in, the war will spread to other ‘planets’…”

Well, you get the gist. We’re gonna send a link to this story to the Sight & Sound film boffins to see what they have to add, but in the meantime, why don’t you post your own theories and comments below.

Posted by Thin White Duke

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 10:11 pm and is filed under News, Reviews . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.