dir: Michael Bay
Michael Bay may be the director most movie reviewers and commenters on the tubes of the internets ridicule and belabour with the hate, but he is extremely successful, and thus virtually untouchable. He is like a shiny metallic titan from one of his movies: towering like a Colossus, legs splayed over the entirety of Hollywood, all his withered critics mewling and mouldering in his gargantuan shadow. The worst reviews, the lowest opinions of thousands, if not millions of people, are nought but ants at the feet of Alexander the Great. We cannot mark, let alone harm him.
If you were to run an algorithm or some kind of search on a review aggregator to find out what words are used most commonly by the majority of film reviewers who tackle his monstrous products, the list would run something like this: “visually spastic” or “incoherent”, “all shiny surfaces with no substance”, “nonsensical plot”, “aggressively violent”, “assault on the senses”, “women looking like glossy pornstars”, “way too long”, “painful, stupid dialogue”, “overedited”, “two dimensional characters”, and “breasts bouncing around in slow motion”.
In fact, that’s it, that’s the review, not only of this flick, but every flick he’s ever made. As entrancing as it may have been to watch Megan Fox’s breasts bouncing around as she and Shia LeBeouf ran across the sand in the latter stages of the movie (which takes up about an hour or so, out of two and a half of them), I couldn’t help but wonder as to the logistics of it. They seemed to jiggle around in such a particular way that I had to wonder whether Michael Bay devoted an entire production unit to achieving his desired level of consistent movement. Specialist gaffers, key grips, engineer costumers and tape experts devoted to structuring Fox’s “performance” in just the required fashion. Millions of dollars devoted solely to the momentum achieved in a woman’s rack.
I honestly wouldn’t put it past Bay. He is renowned for being something of a perfectionist, and he has virtually limitless budgets. What I can’t really figure out is why, since he devotes so much time and resources to achieving his ideal shots with no constraints upon his desires, why he then feeds all of these postcard shots through an editing woodchipper. Ninety per cent of the time, despite having focussed attention and no distractions, I could barely figure out what was going on at any given time by comparing the current scene with what occurred immediately before it.
That being said, part of me, perhaps a more immature part of me, still enjoyed this movie, as much as anyone can enjoy anything made by the premier hack director of his generation. Yes, Shia’s performance is even worse than anything else I’ve seen him in, and yes, almost all of the dialogue throughout this long-ass movie is purest nonsense. Yes the plot is deeply, deeply retarded, and yes, the movie is as shiny and vacant as Megan Fox’s expressionless face.