Flasz On Film

I have never been a big fan of Michael Bay. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that I have never been fond of his work, which functions as a veritable distillation of tropes picked up from John Woo and Tony Scott, filtered through an obnoxiously infantile perspective and delivered like an onslaught of cliches with indulgent running times. However, as much as Armageddon makes me angry, Bad Boys puts me to sleep, and Ambulance makes me seasick on top of being angry and bored, I don’t feel the same for Michael Bay-directed Transformers movies.  

Now, I should immediately clarify this statement by stating I don’t love them either. What I want to express is the fact these movies (for the most part) are passable enough and that what usually drives me up the wall in any other Bay production somehow seems fitting in the context of a Transformers movie. It is as though Bay was put on this Earth to make those big populist spectacles about teenagers and cars transforming into robots, all seasoned generously with hefty amounts of unabashed rah-rah militaristic jingoism.  

What’s even more fascinating is that Bay was initially reluctant to take on the director mantle when Steven Spielberg offered him the job of helming Transformers in 2005. I believe he thought the idea was… too immature for him and that in order to make it a worthwhile endeavour, he’d have to have a say in how the movie shapes up. It is honestly kind of funny to think that a filmmaker, whose crass sense of humour is one of his most recognisable directorial traits and who has spent a decade up to that point making movies for teenage boys, would turn his nose up at an opportunity to do just that. Yet, he saw the light and – lo and behold – turned in not one, but five movies in this series. 

So, what do I exactly mean when I say that Transformers movies are the epitome of who Michael Bay is a filmmaker? To do that, I think it is going to be the most instructive to first identify what irks me about his other movies. I think the best way to describe Michael Bay cinema is to call it a cinema of exaggeration in that he has built a directorial toolbox by borrowing elements from other filmmakers, some of whom already dabbled in elevated imagery, and made it his own by cranking up the gain without thinking twice about if it is tactful to do so. The word “subtlety” does not exist in the Bay English Dictionary so everything just must be big, bombastic and terminally unendurable.  

Consequently, there are four types of vehicles you will find in a Bay movie: an eye-candy supercar, a rustic 50s pickup truck for those emotional moments, a black SUV for the military and villains and a beat-up VW beetle that the loser drives. Similarly, there are only three types of women in his movies as well: hot supermodels, hot moms and overweight losers. Same goes for men: jacked action heroes, scrappy underdogs and slobs. And you can be damn well sure he will film that overweight slob when they are eating a sandwich. It is seriously as though the movies he directs were conceived by and for the crowd of frat house jocks who wear baseball caps backwards, belch loudly and on command, fart in elevators and who publicly comment on other people’s appearance in hopes of starting a fight and accruing some tribal notoriety.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with toilet humour or unsubtle characterizations. In the right context. Which is exactly the problem I have always had with Bay’s movies because I simply could not get on board with – say – a piece of science fiction where I am invited to follow a supple relationship drama of sacrifice for the greater good while everything surrounding this drama was a joke (which is also where many of my Marvel pet peeves stem from). And the fact the drama itself looked like an Aerosmith video didn’t help either. I also can’t fully engage with a supposedly tense thriller about two guys hijacking an ambulance, where I am also supposed to get behind their woes and socio-economical strife, when everything else looks like a crass cartoon. Bay’s style is almost always completely inappropriate for the material he handles… unless he makes a movie where these cool-looking supercars he clearly has a massive infatuation with transform into robots and sow destruction.  

Once you’ve watched at least a handful of Bay’s Transformers movies and then decide to come back and watch The Island, Bad Boys, Armageddon or The Rock you will realize what I mean exactly because these ‘signature’ canted angles where Bay puts the camera on the pavement and films his actors against the setting sun is not merely an expression of what he thinks would look cool and impressive in the eyes of a seventeen-year-old dweeb. This shot is perfectly staged to insert a CGI-robot in the background. Similarly, whenever he fetishizes vehicular imagery while filming car chase scenes, it’s not just because he thinks cars are cool. It might be because he subconsciously knows these cars should and could transform into Autobots and Decepticons at any moment. Again, whenever you see Bay do an orbiting shot of someone standing atop a building – naturally, at sunset – just imagine this isn’t his go-to shtick because he shallowly thinks it looks great or that it looked great when Tony Scott did it. No. It looks great because in his mind’s eye this shot also features Megatron scaling this building. Problem is, The Rock and Armageddon don’t feature Transformers as characters. Though, at least in the case of the latter you could imagine any of the many meteors smashing into New York or Paris could be balls of steel harbouring alien robots.  

See, my problem with Michael Bay movies has always been the fact their tone is out of step with their intentions. Sure, they work as crass pieces of adrenaline-fuelled entertainment, but they never successfully convince me that I should care about their characters and their personal dramas feeding the spectacle. However, this asynchronicity is no longer detectable in at least the first three Transformers films. In fact, the other two are not much different (at least the fourth one), but this is a topic for a separate conversation. Suddenly, it just feels appropriate to see nothing but frat house humour in a movie where supercars transform into robots and where a big truck insists on introducing himself to everyone in every other scene he’s in. Similarly, these canted angles and orbiting shots all look as though they were no longer just ‘cool’, but rather as though they were staged in such a way to fit a massive robot into the frame somewhere. It’s kind of inoffensively stupid the way many sixteen-year-old boys are inoffensively stupid. It’s fine if they are dumb because they are teenagers – they are expected to be dumb. Conversely, if they insist on wearing their baseball caps backwards at a ripe age of thirty-seven, someone should have a serious conversation with them.  

Therefore, Transformers movies are best seen as teenage movies being themselves. They don’t aspire to much, their worldview is expectedly shallow, and their sense of humour is unsurprisingly unsophisticated. What’s on their tin matches what’s on the inside, which is not the case with many other Bay movies that advertise sweeping disaster spectacles, gritty thrillers and heist procedurals and then proceed to serve you fart jokes and Aerosmith video reels for nearly three hours at a time. I’m fine with fart jokes, by the way. What I object to is false advertising. Just like I don’t mind walking in the rain, but I despise being caught out by the rain. The difference is consent. And by walking into a Transformers movie, you clearly consent to partaking in a very specific kind of entertainment that you should judge on its merit as a mindless Hasbro-branded spectacle where cars turn into robots and where sexual innuendo is how the characters communicate with each other. Which seems to be what Michael Bay was born to do because his other movies would have been immediately improved if they all had Optimus Prime in them. At least the tone would match the drapes.