Calling a movie “bad” doesn’t tell me very much, and is unlikely to keep me from going.  There are many ways in which a movie might be bad.

There’s “Snakes on a Plane” bad.  The badness is actually the genre, and the title tells us what to expect.  The genre has certain rules and expectations, and this kind of bad movie can be done well or poorly.  Snakes on a Plane hit all the right notes, so people called it bad.  By which they meant it was a very well done “bad” movie.

There’s “Crank: High Voltage” bad.  You throw plot out the window, along with a good dose of physics, probability, and narrative logic.  But what you replace it with is a bunch of crazy, unpredictable events that, somehow, fit.  The movie is considered bad because it doesn’t have the things a good movie is supposed to.  But it has so much other awesomeness stuck into every possible corner that it really doesn’t matter.

There’s Sci-Fi Channel original bad.  These movies are formulaic, yet fail to rise to the basic requirments of the formula.  Bad special effects, terrible acting, ridiculous scripting, and broken physics make you flat out angry.  Or you laugh.  But the movies are low-low budget, usually there’s at least a few actors who are trying hard.  If the bad guy/creature is evil enough, you cheer for them to get it, even though you know the whole thing sucks.

Then there’s Michael Bay.  Big-budget, crap gets blown up, plot-holes swallow whole planets.  Random stupid elements are stuck in, and CGI runs rampant.  You can sort of like Michael Bay because of that “awesome” commercial.  He’s a big kid who likes to blow things up, and he likes the piles of money we give him.  The first transformers movie, Armeggedon were pretty bad, but in a fun way.

But there are degrees of badness within the Michael Bay category.  Pearl Harbor was so bad they wrote a song about it.  And Transformers 2: ROTFL, hurt.  People say: “what did you expect?”  Well, the first movie was okay for a summer outing.  How did the second find it’s own special level?  The movie is not only rife with stolen scenes, questionable special effects, stereotyped racial robots, and random things-humping-other-things, it also laughs at us.  The viewers.  Michael Bay thinks we’re idiots.  He also thinks he can tell us he thinks we’re idiots, and we’ll still give him money.  We do.  This is a unique level of badness.  Nearly unique, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull Disaster comes close.

Last night I had a dream.  It was so scary, so soaked in anxiety, that it woke me up at around 4:30 a.m.  So maybe I should say I had a dream this morning.  It started off innocently enough.  I was standing in some kind of steep hall, with friends, watering the carpet with a garden hose.  Some kind of thing, it was either a polar bear or a malevolent ice cream truck, was playing around at the bottom.  Naturally, we hosed it.

The thing started coming up the carpeted hall, but fortunately I realized that if I kept spraying water it would lose its footing.  But I needed to have enough water.  (By this time the carpet had disappeared).  There was another, side hall, and the polar bear/ice cream truck would switch over and try coming up that side, but I quickly doused that as well.  It seemed clear that I couldn’t keep this up for long, though.  The only thing for it was to run.  But I’d left some of my clothes in an obscure locker somewhere and couldn’t quite get there in…

Everything changed.  The polar bear/ice cream truck that I had been keeping at bay was now a mobster.  He had invited me, and I was waiting around for the party to get going.  I didn’t much like this mobster, and he knew it.  He had some nefarious end planned for me, yet I couldn’t seem to leave.  Partly because my keys and suit jacket were now wherever those other missing clothes were before.  The party kept filling up with other sort-of-bad people.  I decided I would not go along with whatever they wanted, and failed to applaud when the bad hair guy won some kind of contest that involved matching air canisters with bottles of some kind of liquor.  He cheated by substituting a broken drill, but because he was a known mobster friend/important person, everyone clapped anyway.  Except me.  I knew, then, that I would have kill him, or he would kill me.

My friends didn’t understand the direness of the situation.  Mostly because, apparently, they hadn’t lost their car keys and suit jacket and could just leave.  I was not only trapped, but I had trapped myself.  I did not have the spirit it took to simply walk away from something that was going really badly, and could only get worse.  It was this overwhelming feeling of being trapped and yet being a contributor to my own state that woke me up.

Sometimes dreams don’t mean anything.  But a lot of stressful dreams go back to real-life situations.  There were clues here:

Whatever badness was happening, I had accepted it

I was surrounded by certain friends

Much of the dream was spent keeping something at Bay

The only thing that matched this was an unfortunate decision to see Transformer 2: Return Of The Friggin’ Losers (ROTFL).  Sitting through this movie violated even my normal willingness to watch trash.  After all, Michael Bay KNOWS IT SUCKS.  But he’s counting his money and laughing at us as we sit through it anyway.

There is one argument that this is actually a great movie.  It’s a great read, but it doesn’t require anyone to see the actual movie.  There’s another argument that this movie will doom future civilizations.  (Also a great read, but it does contain an inaccuracy about why someone went to the wrong theater).  But I think there’s a worse fate in store for us now.  We have willingly given up our money for something we knew would be bad, for something that turned out to be far worse than we imagined.  Now we will wait in our little cubbyholes while vast sums are dedicated to the making of Transformers 3.

Condorcet came up with a theorem about juries and how, if a group of people share their knowledge on a topic, they will come to a better decision than the average of the decisions each would make as an individual.  Of course as soon as this sounds great, they start coming out with limitations:  group-think can reduce the value of decision-making.  If, like the Republicans insist on doing, one large sub-group all decides to think the same, then the overall decision loses power.  There are other problems, groups may tend to make correct choices if there is an objectively correct choice, and if the group has some level of knowledge, and if all members of the group participate, but otherwise it’s likely that the group will not only make a wrong choice, they are more likely to stick to it.

But the real problem is that some powerful alien force can introduce robots.  This article explains how scientists model Condorcet’s theorem among animal communities. But they don’t just watch the animals, they create convincing robots which infiltrate the bug communities and convince them to do something self-destructive:

José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels used robotic cockroaches to subvert the behaviour of living cockroaches and control their decision-making process. In his experiment, reported in an earlier issue of Science, the artificial bugs were introduced to the real ones and soon became sufficiently socially integrated that they were perceived as equals. By manipulating the robots, which were in the minority, he was able to persuade the cockroaches to choose an inappropriate shelter—even one which they had rejected before being infiltrated by machines.

Just imagine if some other power tried to do the same thing with us?  They could send robots into our world, disguised as humans, and convince us to make self-destructive choices, such as ignoring global warming, invading Iraq, and giving away our civil rights.  That would make a good story, wouldn’t it?