Infrastructure isn't "sexy," as politicians like to say, but its current state of affairs has become a crisis Americans can no longer afford to ignore. On Sunday's Last Week Tonight, John Oliver skewered the nation's chronic neglect of its aging transportation system—and proposed a flashy solution to the problem.

Oliver points to a rash of recent infrastructure failures—a water main break at UCLA, a fatal pothole in Oakland, a Pittsburgh bridge so precarious it needs a deck underneath it to catch falling debris—but argues that the real dangers are far more insidious. The nation's dams are 52 years old on average, and 70,000 bridges "need to be replaced or repaired in a very dramatic way," according to Ray LaHood, the former U.S. Transportation Secretary. Of course, it's too often only when infrastructure fails in a dramatic way that people pay attention, and by then it's too little, too late.

CityLab's Eric Jaffe recently described one of the main ways politicians fail to focus on infrastructure maintenance—what he calls the "tyranny of the ribbon"—which is that tendency of elected officials "to care more about attaching their name to a new project than extending the life of someone else's old one." But Oliver doesn't let the American public off the hook either. He focuses on the US Highway Trust Fund, which is, after a series of partial authorizations and temporary extensions, once again on the brink of insolvency. Yet U.S. voters consistently resist increases to the federal gas tax, the fund's main source of revenue, and so far no one in Congress has come up with a viable alternative.

Oliver's solution? Appeal to Americans' inner Michael Bay. "Every summer, people flock to see our infrastructure threatened by terrorists or aliens," he says. "But we should care just as much when it's under threat from the inevitable passage of time."

Cue the fake trailer for Infrastructure, the movie. Featuring cameos by Hope Davis, Ed Norton, Vincent D'Onofrio, and others, the short dials up the sex appeal of routine maintenance, with the ponderous tagline: "If anything exciting happens, we've done it wrong." For all our sakes, we hope this film is coming soon to a theater near you.