Whatever derogatory or negative things I or likeminded critics might have said about past Michael Bay films, it was undeniable that the man could direct an action sequence. No matter how racist or misogynist the larger movie was, when things started blowing up and racing around the screen, all critical faculties were momentarily short-circuited and the film became fun and exciting, if only for a fleeting moment.
But a curious thing has happened since the days of
Bad Boys and
The Rock, Michael Bay became a “better” director. The goal of most good directors is to incorporate the themes and aesthetic concerns of the film as a whole into every scene, thus creating a cohesive work that speaks to something specific about the human condition. (That’s a little overblown but you get the idea.) Good directors do this in every scene. Hack directors do it only once in a while. Michael Bay used to be a hack director, content to fling his racist, anti-feminist, borderline fascist beliefs only in a few keys moments. Thus, while
The Rock is mostly garbage, the occasionally decent, subtext-free scene sneaks into the film and provides a respite from the rampant conservative agenda in evidence throughout the rest of the film.
Not so anymore. From
Bad Boys II to
The Island and now with
Transformers, Michael Bay has managed to push his horrific social agenda into every corner of the film, leaving no sequence safe from his barbaric worldview. Take, for instance, the sequence in
Transformers in which a Decepticon springs from the desert and attacks the heroic band of US soldiers that survived an earlier attack and are now trying to alert the officers back home to the danger coming their way. A younger Michael Bay might have been content to film a “bitchin’” battle sequence full of slow motion low-angle shots and lights streaming into the camera and call it a day. But the new Michael Bay finds time to insert a horrible, unfunny, racist aside about the foreign workers who, having stolen jobs from Americans, are now too lazy to do those jobs properly.
Leaving aside that this scene sucks all the air out of the larger sequence (thus destroying most of its tension) and is terrible filmmaking besides, the issue of outsourcing is so multi-faceted and difficult that a much better filmmaker than Bay could make a whole film about it and never quite get a handle on it. To think that he could say something meaningful and humorous in a few seconds is the height of Bay’s arrogance. And though he never quite reaches those lofty heights again, each of the action sequences in
Transformers is saddled with an equally unfunny and racist or misogynist “joke.”
Though I can’t speak to Bay’s intentions in making this film, it seems likely that the more science fiction aspects of the Transformers were never a big draw for him. And maybe that explains the terribly convoluted and not convincing in the least plot machinations of the film. Maybe it even explains what the hell an Australian analyst character is even doing in the film (since she does nothing more than re-explain to an already overwhelmed audience something they have either already grasped or don’t care about anyway). Either way, Bay clearly has no idea what to do in the scenes where things aren’t blowing up or whizzing around. And that’s bad because this film, more than any other Bay film before it, spends an awful lot of time listening to people and machines yammer away at each other.
And yeah, the giant robots from space talk. And they don’t use speakers; they actually have mouths. And lips. And horribly cliché voices they’ve picked up from TV and the internet.
I understand, of course, that these robots have to do a little explaining to the humans but the extended planning sequence when the Autobots first reveal themselves to the humans is just laughable. They all have cutesy names like Bumblebee and Ratchet and Jazz. And they bicker and tease like a bunch of fourteen year-olds. It’s pathetic really.
To make matters worse, this scene is followed almost immediately by a scene in which the five thirty foot tall robots try to hide from the hero’s parents while they question him about masturbation and peek out the windows to check on the geraniums. The sight of the mighty Autobots crouching under a porch awning while a middle-aged woman takes to her son about his “happy time” is more than my childhood memories can take. Even if the sequence didn’t betray everything that Bay was trying to say about the awesome power of these robots, it would still have betrayed a fond childhood memory. That level of awfulness is a feat to be sure, just one I’d rather not pay money to be subjected to.
From that point on the film completely collapses in on itself. There is no logic (internal or external) to anything that happens. Plotlines are abandoned with no resolution (what happened to the Mountain Dew machine that was turned into a crazy killing robot by the All Spark (ugh) and why did it turn into a killing machine in the first place?). Things happen that make no sense (why can’t Bumblebee, after he loses his legs, transform into a smaller version of himself with legs?). A lot more stuff blows up. Lights shine into the camera lens. People walk towards the camera in slow motion. The end.
