Michael Bay Can Suck It

Ahead are spoilers. Not plot-point spoilers, but character and location spoilers. You've been warned.

I saw the new Transformers movie over the weekend. And you know what pushed me over the edge? Not the racially-offensive Autobot twins. Not the humping dogs. And not the marijuana-laced-brownie-eating-mom-of-main-character*. Nope none of that, though they contributed to my overall distaste for this life-sucking movie.

What really pissed me off? Last time I checked, this is the 21st century. The age of the Internet. The dawn of What are my six degrees of Kevin Bacon**? Lemme check from my iPhone. The era of Look! There's my house on Google Earth! Michael Bay thinks we'll just accept that the pyramids are five kilometers from the Persian Gulf and that you can walk out of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and into a southwestern airplane graveyard.

This is the kind of "movie magic" that pisses me off. If you're going to have your characters walk out of a set of hangar bay doors at the Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia and find themselves at an airplane graveyard in Tuscon, Arizona? At least blame it on a wormhole. Don't try to pass it off to me as reality. Granted, we're dealing with a movie about talking robots from space. But don't f*** with my geography.

And then? Oh, this is criminal. The characters are in Jordan, then at the pyramids, then at Petra (back in Jordan), then running through a couple of temples, then at the pyramids, then running through some temple ruins, and blah, blah, blah.

You want to know where all this stuff is truly located? Check it:

To do everything they did in the last 30 minutes of the movie, that's the route they would have had to run to truly hit all the high points. I did all the stuff on the left side of that map and it took me TWO WEEKS!

The temples they run through to get from the pyramids to their destination a half-mile away? Are actually Karnak and Medinet Habu, over 440 miles away to the south. And all the little half-ruined temples/homes they then duck and cover around? Parts of Trajan's Kiosk, located even further south. And part of the Ptolemaic period. Two-thousand years after the pyramids. And in the movie? We're told the pyramids, where this super-secret Decepticon machine is located, are on this strip of land that looks like a dagger. See my notation above? Dagger BS? Yeah. That's actually a Red Sea resort town. You go there to catch a dive boat not to catch some Old Kingdom mortuary architecture. The pyramids are actually located next to downtown Cairo. I believe there's a KFC across the street from the Sphinx. Seriously.

But that's not even my "favorite part" of this whole debacle. This is the one that killed the movie for me. A major character (sitting on top of one of the pyramids) calls for an air strike and tells the USAF he's located five klicks west of the Gulf. Five kilometers. West of the Persian Gulf.


Wow. Just? Wow.

Michael Bay, this may have worked twenty years ago when normal people didn't have access to this type of information at the tips of their fingers. But we're in the 21st century. Quit treating your movie-going public like we're information morons. I look forward to lambasting your next movie Transformers 3: Who Gives A Shit What I Do Because I'm Mr. Michael "Slo-Mo Camera Moves" Bay And You're All Sheep And Will Pay $20 To See This Claptrap That Will Never Be Nominated For a Best Picture Oscar But Will Gross $100 Million Dollars In Its Opening Weekend And I'll Be Laughing All The Way To The Bank.

Ass.

*Not that the eating of said Mary Jane brownies upset me, but that the eating of said brownies did nothing to further the plot in an already ridiculously too-long movie. And it was a stupid sequence. And don't even get me started.

**Kevin Bacon was in Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks was in Catch Me If You Can with Jennifer Garner. And I went to preschool with Jennifer Garner. A stretch, but I'm three degrees from The Bacon. Boo-yah!