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What is interesting is to compare this lack of "vision" in the machines with the eyes of both Fox and the other significant sex symbol of the film, Alice (Isabel Lucas). I have no great love for Fox, belief in her acting talent to date, or much stock in her status as a vision of hotness. But Bay pulls off two remarkable feats in relation to Fox within the film.

The first is to cast Lucas and apparently (I say this, because in real-life pictures, her peepers appear normal) make her eyes into the cold dead pools of a coke whore. It's more than a little disturbing, even upon reflection with much distance, to consider how vacant her expression is. This allows Fox's normally composed and posed face, and bright, though lifeless eyes, to seem warm and inviting. In the breathtakingly composed shot (which Armond White alludes to) where she hovers over Sam's lifeless body and a helicopter hovers in the upper far right frame, she could almost be accused of grieving.

The second of Bay's accomplishments is to, during the race through the desert as Sam pulls Mikaela along with him, as explosions close in all around them and sand flies everywhere, to keep Fox's breasts perfectly positioned in the center of the screen, and bouncing in counterpoint to the mayhem around them. That might be the other key image from the film, and visible though tiny in the final poster art.

Final observations: Although I have seen several of Bay's films more than once (to increasingly diminishing effect), only one of them have I longed to see again, as it combines his skill at overkill and ridiculous mayhem with a splashy satiric sci-fi plot, and the glimmerings of a conscience. I won't name names, but would you be surprised to know that it's the one that is the lowest-grossing (by far) of his career? I can be such a contrary punk sometimes.

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