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* Illustration: Leo Espinosa * Let me lay it out for you before Glenn Beck does: In early April, President Obama and his so-called defense secretary, Robert Gates, lobbied to cancel some of our most crucial weapons systems. The sophisticated F-22 Raptor jet? PWN'd after just 187 of the $143 million fighters had rolled off the line. (It will eventually be replaced by the versatile F-35, but—35? Really? Who wants to rely on a thirtysomething fighter jet? Mid-mission, it might decide it wants to start a family or a career selling handmade tiepins on Etsy.) Another victim: the Transformational Satellite Communications System, which would have done—well, I don't know exactly. But it had the word transformational in its name.
Which leads me to the really bad news: The Obama administration's new austerity measures directly or indirectly threaten Michael Bay's big-budget Transformers sequel, Revenge of the Fallen. After all, the film franchise relies on prebailout General Motors product placement. And, like the original movie, Revenge was shot in cooperation with the Pentagon, which for more than half a century has provided many a Hollywood production with tanks, planes, ships, weaponry, bases, and even soldiers—as long as the project met DOD standards. (Iron Man and War of the Worlds made the cut; Crimson Tide, which centered on a submarine mutiny, did not.)
But beyond furnishing mere matèriel, Uncle Sam has had significant script input, even helping filmmakers stage (ahem) plausible battle scenarios against, say, alien invaders and shape-shifting automatons. "I sometimes sit in my office and think, 'How would we really attack that Tripod?'" says Phil Strub, a media liaison for the Pentagon. "There's a degree of absurdity in our business that we're not unaware of."
Clearly, he's under strict self-deprecation orders, but I see what's going on. The joint chiefs share my long-standing anxieties about giant robot invasions, and the Transformers movies are their response: a massive war game and training exercise designed to prepare the public and the armed services (all four branches are involved in Revenge—five if you count Bay's operation) for upcoming war with the Decepticons. Why else would Bay and the DOD give a major role to the F-22, an apparently superfluous weapons system no one could justify publicly? (Reason: Its actual anti-Starscream mission was classified. Duh.)
Why entwine a blockbuster with the military in the first place? "I think they see it as a recruitment thing," Bay said when he was promoting Transformers in 2007. But Strub claims there's no evidence that enlistment swells with the release of a pro-military flick. The oft-cited Top Gun example, he says, is apocryphal. He says the DOD partners with filmmakers strictly for image-management purposes—and to show off new weaponry. "If anyone can shoot military stuff, it's Mike. Lord knows, making a Chinook look sexy when it hovers is not easy."
But while slipping a chemise on a Chinook is a fine cover story (and damn distracting!), I know the truth: There are those in our government who take giant robots seriously, and there are those who don't. I'm not going to go so far as to say Obama, once heralded as "the transformational candidate," is soft on Transformers. Nor am I saying he's a secret Decepticon. But for anyone who believes we can slacken our military readiness and wait for the Autobots to save us, remember: They're mostly GM vehicles.
Email scott_brown@wired.com.
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