Now, I’m as big a fan of fast cars, slow-mo helicopter shots, rock music, billowing American flags, square-jawed muscle men and pert-breasted sex objects as the next guy. But after sitting through Transformers one can only deduce that something has gone seriously wrong in the world of Michael Bay.

For everything that was once implicit about Bay movies such as Armageddon and Pearl Harbor – namely that American men are cool and that everyone else can just shut up – has suddenly become so explicit as to be almost emetic. And maybe it was the pressure of the crisis in Iraq, or the need to make a “statement” movie after his box-office flop The Island, but so much of this movie is a jingoistic fantasy riposte to the grim reality of the moment.

Thus huge chunks of Transformers take place in the Middle East, where evil unseen killers (the Decepticons, but we know who we’re really talking about, don’t we, Osama?) emerge from the very sand itself, attack and disappear.

Dialogue lifted straight from the Rumsfeld/Cheney playbook is peppered throughout the movie – Americans are warned to prepare for imminent attack; they are told that there will be no victory against the enemy without sacrifice; and we, the audience, are cannily informed by a robot that “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings”.

BACKGROUND

• Transformers

• Robots are just foreign policy in disguise

• The 50 best movie robots

• The Transformers: The Movie

• They're back: the revenge of the '80s

Transformation is complete

Shia LaBeouf trashed a director’s office to prove that he was no longer a ‘Disney kid’. Our correspondent asks what drives him

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Transformers, however, isn’t the only steroid-fuelled movie guilty of subtext overkill. The sword’n’sandals epic 300 went straight for the metaphorical jugular by describing, in gory detail, the heroic stand of a bunch of panty-clad mighty Western defenders against hordes of Persian savages, complete with pseudo-turbans.

That’s not to say that the Middle East should be off-limits for mainstream Hollywood entertainment. On the contrary, the major studios are tackling the subject head on – the Daniel Pearl story A Mighty Heart, Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah and the Jamie Foxx thriller The Kingdom are all set in the region, and all coming soon.

But if you’re going to make a movie that espouses a belligerent stance in the Middle East, don’t try to hide it in a kids’ robot adventure.

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