Ah, product placement. The devil’s bargain every blockbuster filmmaker must make peace with in order to finance his or her loosely plotted deafening destruction orgies.
Michael Bay—director of such hallmarks of American cinema as Transformers, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor—is one of filmmaking’s biggest product placement perpetrators. No Michael Bay film is without its dose of embedded marketing, and, thanks to Matt Singer at ScreenCrush, we now have a compilation of every single instance of product placement in Michael Bay’s filmography.
Some of the examples in the video are pretty forgivable. Fine, every character can be drinking a Pepsi in that scene. Fine, Josh Duhamel can use an HP laptop in that scene. Fine, that XBox 360 can turn into a Transformer.
But some of these examples are unforgivable in their visual aggressiveness. No, a Transformer shouldn’t crash into a speeding Bud Light truck in the middle of Manhattan, thus making it explode and scatter hundreds of electric blue aluminum Bud Light bottles onto the street. And then Mark Wahlberg certainly should not then pick up one of the bottles and take a refreshing foamy swig from it.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Product placement shouldn’t be that unsubtle. Bud Light shouldn’t be used that prominently. That’s so shameless and such a gross reminder that we live in this oppressive capitalist society run by corporations that stand on the heads of hard-working Americans and will stop at nothing to satisfy their bottom lines.
How dare you, Michael Bay, use the visual art of filmmaking to aid this disgusting corporatism. Watching this video is a maddening experience. It makes me angry. It makes me stressed. It makes my blood boil.
I need to take a breath.
I have a headache.
I need to sit.
Actually, you know what I need?
I need a drink.
I need a nice, tall, aluminum bottle of Bud Li—DAMMIT.
You win, Michael Bay. You win.
