I had the opportunity to see the Transformers movie today with a few friends, and while I’m not going to review the movie here (it was awesome, ’nuff said), it inspired a few thoughts that I thought I’d post about. Basically, if this post bores, offends, or otherwise intrudes on your quality of living, you can blame Michael Bay and his ridiculously cool movie.

Do you ever watch a movie where the characters, who are otherwise just regular shmucks trying to make it through another day, get tangled up into a conflict larger than most people see in a lifetime? Frodo never asked to leave the Shire. He seemed pretty happy right where he was, but he ventures out; he risks his life for something bigger than himself. People in movies like that go through trials and torments that are only tolerable to witness because we have a the protection of reality, a thin screen dividing Frodo and his ring from our safe, air-conditioned seats and overpriced popcorn. Those giant robots that tore through buildings like so much tissue paper are placed safely in the realm of impossibility. Even movies where the element of fantasy takes a backseat to the element of realism are thus tamed.

Good movies erase that boundary, if only for an hour or two.  We can all easily sit back and point out all the reasons why giant autonomous robots from Cybertron could never crash land on our planet.  It’s more fun to lower your defenses for a while though, suspend your disbelief, and for just a little while, live vicariously through the characters on the screen trying desperately to save their world from extinction.  It’s a strange and exhausting sensation for me, to feel all of these big, noble emotions.  Maybe we all want to taste, even for a second, what it feels like to have something more to worry about than whether we’re going to finish our next project on time.

When I walk out of a movie like The Lord of the Rings or Transformers, I always feel exhausted.  More than that though, I always have trouble going back to my life, unenhanced by special effects and unplagued by absolute evils, and not feeling a little insignificant.  How can I possibly have any real problems compared to those characters?  I don’t have any worlds to save, evil rings to destroy, or Persians to defeat in glorious, slow-motion combat.  All I have are my comparatively inane worries that I’m not getting enough sleep, that I need to make myself dinner tonight.  Ironically enough, my life is the one that winds up feeling contrived and artificial.

The feeling never lasts too long though.  I guess I just go back to my regular life and get used to it.