Transformers: The Premake

In his production of Transformers: Age of Extinction, Michael Bay and his production team hop around the world, activating various places as blips on the great Transformers map, displaying how truly globalized the American entertainment system has become. Opposing the maximalist tendencies of Bay, Lee uses the rhizomatic capacities of the Internet (the ultimate Archive!) to source a radical, critical “making-of” film, exhibiting the first-person vantage of the computer screen. By presenting, in Lee’s words, “a critical counter-image in which personalized digital media asks what Hollywood is really doing in the world,” the film examines the post-national worship of CGI as a new transcendental ritual.