Dan recently showed me the latest trailer for Michael Bay’s Transformers movie. Our reactions differed somewhat.

Dan felt the tone of the trailer overly implied (if I remember correctly) a sense of “danger”—more like a war or disaster movie than an action-packed science-fiction romp, I guess. He said he’d go see it, but he expressed concern that trying to make it too serious would make it look stupid and lose the sense of fun of the original.

Personally, I found the trailer pretty promising—not because it lives up to the ideal vision of the property immortalized on my old Transformers sleeping bag, but because the effects looked pretty good. Generally, I’m not inclined to go see a movie just because it has good visual effects, and I’m not certainly not expecting this movie to be a work of art. I’ve been saying for years, however, that Japanese cartoons shouldn’t have the monopoly on the “giant robot” genre, and this movie could help change that.

Okay, it makes sense that the theme of “augmenting the human self with the benevolent power of robotic technologies” is particularly relevant to postwar Japanese national and cultural identity. Still, though, I think American audiences have a special place in their hearts for super-sized monsters and heroes, and Hollywood has had the technology to make those stories itself for some time now. We caught a glimpse of this possibility with the robot suits in Matrix: Revolutions, and I thought we might see more with the U.S. releases of the live-action Evangelion adaptation or Casshern. Both of these, however, would probably be very bizarre to American audiences (and Casshern‘s robots aren’t “giant” so much as “plus sized”). As ridiculous as Michael Bay’s Transformers might end up being, I don’t see a better way to convince the Hollywood movie industry that the giant robot genre is doable than to try it out on an established franchise.

As for the tone of the new movie being too “serious,” or whatever: have you seen the 1986 Transformers animated movie? As others have noted, there’s something seriously heartbreaking about watching your robot heroes die before your eyes.