Most critics have panned Transformers 2, and while I agree that the film had many problems, it wasn’t completely without merit: it brought up an interesting idea to my attention, and while it was hard for me to judge whether this was accidental, I had to conclude that there was indeed a writer onboard who tried to squeeze in some deeper meaning.

The critics complained about a confusing plot, the inability to tell the autobots from the decepticons, the illiterate “nigger-bots”, the US army persisting in using ineffectual weapons like assault rifles, instead of the actually effective ones like bombers, the film being undecided as to whether the robots are machine or biological, and so on. And I agree with the critics on all of these points.

One scene I haven’t seen much criticism on, but which bugged me, was when the red bot died. His brother, the green bot, cried and mourn his death, but the humans appeared completely oblivious, and when about 5 seconds later, it turned out that the red bot had not actually died, the green robot was overjoyed and again the humans were stoic. It was almost as if they had decided to rewrite the scene with the red robot dying after they had already filmed all the humans, and just added a few extra plot elements in CG.

Another thing that bugged me (but no other critic seemed to complain about) was how wimpy the autobot’s energy weapons sounded. Couldn’t they have picked a better sound effect than the satirical “pew pew”? I suppose it’s just as well, as those weapons not only sounded ineffectual, but actually were ineffectual as well: I can’t recall a single robot that died from causes other than a melee attack.

But enough negativity. The interesting idea that Transformer brought up was the idea of harming one species to save another. I’m not sure I fully understood the plot, but from what I’ve gathered, the autobots and the decepticons are the same species, and from an alien planet. They ran out of resources on that planet, and so have traveled across the galaxy looking for more resources to ensure their survival. A side effect of the process of harvesting the resources they need is that the star in the star-system they are harvesting from will extinguish. In the whole galaxy, they had only found seven suitable star systems, and Earth is one of them. They used up the other six already, and now they need to harvest our star system, causing the Sun to extinguish, or else the robots can no longer reproduce (or their offsprings become unviable aborted fetuses or something).

On Earth we see maybe a couple dozen of these robots, but presumably back in their home system, they have a population in the billions. We don’t meet those billions of robots, so we don’t get the whole story, but the autobots and the decepticons are in conflict with each other, and so when they both agree on something, we can assume that that upon which they agree is true, and anything else would be lies from one side or the other. (This assumption wouldn’t work if the two parties were in conflict with each other, and also in conflict with the humans, but it seems like the autobots are not in conflict with the humans, so we can make this assumption). This story about needing to harvest our Sun is corroborated by both sides, and thus probably true.

There are many things which are not corroborated by both sides, but an important one I wish to highlight is the claim that the robots swore not to harvest the star of a star-system upon which there existed life. I don’t remember the exact wording, but if that was the exact wording, then this claim is highly improbable, as there is good reason to believe that life (microbiotic, perhaps) exists on many star systems, and given how rare a “harvestable” Sun is, it’s an extreme dangerous restriction to put on oneself.

If, instead, the exact wording from the movie was something more like “Don’t harvest from stars around planets with intelligent life” this is more understandable, but still in the realm of unreasonableness. The autobots claimed that the robots made this solemn oath, but never in the presence of a decepticon. And the decepticons never bring up the topic. Could this claim have been a lie?

An apt analogy to make would be the decepticons being, for lack of a better term, “normal” people and the autobots being PETA. Normal people agree that trying to preserve biodiversity is an honorable ideal to try to uphold, but I’m sure that if the survival of the species were at stake, most people would say fuck the animals, we can’t allow ourselves to go extinct. PETA and the autobots, however, seem to take the ideal to extremes. The autobots seem to aware that their species will go extinct (the bad guy — Megatron? — directly asks Optimus Prime “You sacrifice our whole race for one human?”) and still persist in fighting the decepticons. Are the billions of citizens back on their home planet okay with this? Are they more likely to share the decepticon’s ideals, or the autobot’s ideals?

I also do not recall the decepticons ever stating the annihilation of all humans as their goal. It’s entirely plausible to me, that the decepticons mean particular harm to the humans at all, and any conflict between the humans and the decepticon arises solely through the humans’ resistance to giving up their resources. To argue that the decepticons have no rights to human resources is hypocritical, because we as humans take resources away from animals and other lower lifeforms all the time. When we build houses, we are destroying the habit and environments of the insects and worms that lived in the area. We don’t mean them any harm. They’re just in the way. And maybe they got the section of earth “first”, but we don’t care. We respect property rights amongst others of our own species, but we don’t respect property rights of lower life forms.

Giving up our sun is not tantamount to self-genocide: In the same manner that many humans are “humane” and will transport an ant or a fly or some other insect they find inside their house to another compatible environment (namely outside their house), the decepticons could simply harvest our sun, and then transport all the humans to another star system. Remember: The decepticons only have 7 stars they can actually harvest from, whereas we could probably live comfortably around any G2-class star, of which there are billions. By refusing to give up our sun, we are, in fact, the ones committing genocide.

And even if the decepticons turn out to be assholes and don’t transport us, to another star system, they really don’t come off as having anything particularly against humans, and thus would probably not object if the autobots decided to transport us in their stead. The analogy here would be (reasonable) animal activists protecting species which are being harmed by the colonial expansionistic practices of the more pragmatic members of their race. However, in the movie, the autobots are portrayed as using actual, physical violence against the decepticons, putting them closer to the animal activists terrorists who bomb research labs, than the humane animal activists who simply rescue, heal and relocate animals who are suffering from proximity.

One final object I’ll counter is the possibility that the robots don’t have a survival instinct like humans do, and thus do not care whether their species go extinct. I claim that there’s a very high likelyhood that they do have a survival instinct, and as evidence, you need only look at the behaviour of the decepticons in the movie. The survival instinct is the whole motivation for their journey to earth.

You might then counterargue that perhaps the decepticons are exceptional, and the majority of the billions of robots back on their home planet do not have a survival instinct. To counter this, first I will point out that the robots reproduce (you see egg sacks with fetuses in the movie, and they specifically talk about how they need to harvest the sun to make these fetuses viable). If the decepticons are different from the other robots, it means mutations are possible during reproduction (or else the decepticons wouldn’t be different). Reproduction plus mutation is all that’s needed for natural selection to kick in.

Now despite the fact that we don’t have formal definition for intelligence, the robots are “obviously” intelligent. Natural selection plus intelligence will cause survival instinct to predominate (because the intelligent beings without a survival instinct will eventually all die off), thus showing that in all likelihood, it’s the decepticons which are normal, and the autobots which are strange mutants with mental diseases causing them to be a danger to the rest of their society.