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The 5GW Movie hat Mighta/Coulda Been: Transformers
Cross-posted from PurpleSlog.
The blog Chained to the Cinémathèque reports on what could have been a movie with 4WG or 5GW themes:
The film starts out as an allegory for 4th Generation Warfare (4GW), or perhaps even 5GW: enemies are hidden among us, yet to reveal themselves; they pose an existential threat to our society due to their capability to inflict huge damage instantaneously; these enemies emerge from the crowd of our everyday life, and have the ability to then slip back among us unnoticed, tainting all of our everyday routines and interactions with suspicion and fear. The film then renegs on this promised exploration of the enemy in our midst, in favor of a traditional (read: 3GW) military fantasy, where expertise with the tools of war provides hard-fought but ultimately inevitable victory.Dang. Oh well.
It might be fun to imagine alternate 5GW-ish plots and themes for movies and TV shows.
Posted by PurpleSlog on Jun 3, 2007 09:50 PM
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4 Comments
“a traditional (read: 3GW) military fantasy, where expertise with the tools of war provides hard-fought but ultimately inevitable victory.”
This is always the way it ends in such movies, isn’t it? Rambo or James Bond, Mission Impossible. Maybe it began with Spock, who could always win with superior knowledge of technology.
Even the Mission Impossible movies went that route,whereas the TV shows were more about manipulation and deception. While bored at work, I will day dream of 5GW version of movies and see what I can come up with.
In the James Bond before the last, “Die Another Day,” Bond would have been dead if not for his super-sonic ring. His foes practiced manipulation and deception, but technology won the day.
Normally in movies, technology is the evil always opposed to organic power. For instance, the first two Spiderman movies had villains who were super because of technology, opposed by Spiderman whose powers are organic. In most Superman movies, Lex Luthor is the mad genius with technology who is fought by the wholly organic Superman. In the X-men movies, the good-guy heroes are mutants (organic) and the bad guy in the last two X-men movie used technology.
So there’s this love-hate w/ technology. Humans have been struggling over its meaning for a long time.
Now having seen “Pre-Transformers” with my kids (a July 2nd “early release” in the Secret City :-), I have to agree with Chained. The first two-thirds of the movie are great 5GW drama — what you think you know about many things is what you’ve been lulled into believing, and things are really not as they seem. The fact that the SECDEF wasn’t even privy to some of it ups the 5GW ante. But the urban showdown at the end, with the same shoppers frantically running from Decepticon debris with shopping bags (even 10 minutes after the fight started) strained credulity and lost the opportunity to make this a true masterpiece. But if you’re after ticket sales, Akira Kurosawaesque subtleties are lost….