Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007)

[Tom Hagen]

Those aren't ideas, they're special effects.

[MoonlitKnight]

Those aren't ideas, they're special effects.

Classic.

[jojo]

All stops pulled. Someone should be dedicating themselves to that. Should such dedication and such money (!) be better directed? Well, to me if that's a question it's also a laugh. It's just so totally beside the point. This is what it is--a diagnosis of a time and a temperament and an unabashed drive to entertain (Bay's self one suspects as much as any of us). Sometimes, maybe even often, it's this sheer, even megalomaniacal bent that captivates and "entertains " me.

Hmm. I would describe Bay as a good director, in that he has considerable mastery over the tools at his disposal. The thing with him is that he really doesn't do anything meaningful with it. He's like those great commercial artists who've mastered anatomy, paint, colour theory and such, but then goes on to basically paint car ads for the rest of his life.

[Zot!]

All stops pulled. Someone should be dedicating themselves to that. Should such dedication and such money (!) be better directed? Well, to me if that's a question it's also a laugh. It's just so totally beside the point. This is what it is--a diagnosis of a time and a temperament and an unabashed drive to entertain (Bay's self one suspects as much as any of us). Sometimes, maybe even often, it's this sheer, even megalomaniacal bent that captivates and "entertains " me.

Hmm. I would describe Bay as a good director, in that he has considerable mastery over the tools at his disposal. The thing with him is that he really doesn't do anything meaningful with it. He's like those great commercial artists who've mastered anatomy, paint, colour theory and such, but then goes on to basically paint car ads for the rest of his life.

It would be great if I only had to watch Mike Bay car ads. He is an auteur, I will give him that, but his personal style (that is produced by an army of technical people) is unwatchably hectic, and the content of the films is dumb to the point of being offensive, far beyone the silly stereotyping. I would be hard pressed to choose someone who's films I lke less.

[jojo]

I would say I dislike Zack Snyder more. Because he's a nerd who wants to be cool.

Tarantino at least is unapologetically nerdy.

[Finch]

he has considerable mastery over the tools at his disposal. The thing with him is that he really doesn't do anything meaningful with it.

Since when did poorly composed shots, total lack of spatial awareness and editing for people with the attention span of a bumble bee amount to total mastery over the tools at Bay's disposal? The man is clueless, definitely, but what really makes his lack of care and talent so aggravating is that it comes combined with a total contempt for, and condescension to his audience. He treats his audience like a bunch of primates and caters to their worst instincts. If you want a genuine masterclass in putting together a coherent and elegant, not to mention exciting action sequence, you'd need to look no further than Korea where even the least exciting action scene in movies like The Man from Nowhere and The Good, The Bad & The Weird is so much superior to Bay's compositions that it's really damning. Even fellow Westerners like Martin Campbell show greater skill and craftsmanship than Bay: Casino Royale had issues of its own, for sure, but its action scenes were everything you'd want from the genre.

[jojo]

Since when did poorly composed shots, total lack of spatial awareness and editing for people with the attention span of a bumble bee amount to total mastery over the tools at Bay's disposal? .

I think those are just his own cinematic preferences, rather than him attempting something better and failing. Bay doesn't really give a crap about anything other than getting to his money shots. And if you ask those millions of people who line up for his movies, they usually respond that they got what they came for in that respect.

In many ways, Bay is the perfect director for this generation's moviegoers. If his audiences continually pay money to be treated like primates, then he'll continue doing what he does best.

[MyNameCriterionForum]

he has considerable mastery over the tools at his disposal. The thing with him is that he really doesn't do anything meaningful with it.

Since when did poorly composed shots, total lack of spatial awareness and editing for people with the attention span of a bumble bee

http://www.criterion.com/films/731-by-b ... volume-one" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[matrixschmatrix]

The AV Club seems to disagree with the review Knives posted, arguing that the new Transformers actually does show Bay responding to some criticisms. Honestly, dumb though his movies are, I'm not going to expend any energy hating them if they're just a series of decontextualized action scenes- those have never been the most painful part of Bay's oeuvre in any case.

[John Cope]

O'Hehir gets it. Best part:

"Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is too much in every direction -- too much action, too much plot, too much noise, too much destruction -- which is exactly what makes it the Wagnerian fulfillment of the American summer-movie tradition. It's a great and terrible film, in identical proportions and in all possible meanings of those words...It's so massively and excessively vulgar that it doesn't just flirt with self-parody, but chews it up and spits it out, and I'm not even sure that's unintentional. In food terms, "Dark of the Moon" is like going to TGI Friday's and ordering everything on the menu and then going to Krispy Kreme and doing it again. It's not worth doing, it'll definitely make you sick and a lot of it will taste bad, but as a performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment, it's magnificent.

There's also an excellent roundtable piece at Variety in which claims are made that Bay proffers a mode of spectacle purely as energy and movement rather than classically clear logistics (which is a claim worth making) but unfortunately it's subscription only.

[Zot!]

I've actually made the association to Brakhage myself. Then again, I think Bay is more like watching a scrambled cable channel. I'm glad somebody gets some kind of sick pleasure out of his movies, but I cannot on ANY level.

[Mr Sausage]

O'Hehir gets it. Best part:

"Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is too much in every direction -- too much action, too much plot, too much noise, too much destruction -- which is exactly what makes it the Wagnerian fulfillment of the American summer-movie tradition. It's a great and terrible film, in identical proportions and in all possible meanings of those words...It's so massively and excessively vulgar that it doesn't just flirt with self-parody, but chews it up and spits it out, and I'm not even sure that's unintentional. In food terms, "Dark of the Moon" is like going to TGI Friday's and ordering everything on the menu and then going to Krispy Kreme and doing it again. It's not worth doing, it'll definitely make you sick and a lot of it will taste bad, but as a performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment, it's magnificent.

There's also an excellent roundtable piece at Variety in which claims are made that Bay proffers a mode of spectacle purely as energy and movement rather than classically clear logistics (which is a claim worth making) but unfortunately it's subscription only.

The above bit by O'Hehir is incomprehensible to me. I don't see the point in praising something for making a million bad choices in lieu of a few good ones. Even less do I see the worth in trotting out that hoary old cliche about defining/fulfilling/embodying the blockbuster, which on top of being an empty criticism that demands more definition and qualification than it usually gets, always sounds to me like "it takes all the worst parts of the genre and makes them even worse!" Indeed the whole paragraph is riddled with cliches, to the point where I think I've read each of its sentences before in other reviews. Perhaps the worst offender is invoking performance art once again to justify otherwise unjustifiable behaviour. As for being juvenile Id-fulfillment, maybe it is, but why should that be interesting? As far as I can tell from the paragraph, Bay doesn't indulge his id in any interesting or revealing way--he just does it a lot more loudly than anyone else. As praise, that's reductionist: "you've seen it all before, but never for this long or at this volume." *shrugs*

The only interesting point is when he says the movie becomes its own parody, perhaps purposefully. Unfortunately, he disproves his suspicion that it's intentional when he calls the movie Id-fulfillment, since intentional parody requires self-awareness, something "juvenile Id-fulfillment," by definition, cannot have.

[Brian C]

O'Hehir's full review, though, despite endless hedging and caveats and double-talk, is ultimately quite negative. I think. I mean, it's got a lot of hedging and caveats and double-talk, so it's tough to say for sure.

The bit that John Cope excerpted makes a lot of sense if you see it as a potentially bad-faith effort to speak out of both sides of his mouth, which he spends a good part of the review doing. At one point he calls the film "a landmark of super-cinematic or anti-cinematic excess that tries to be every kind of film at once and almost succeeds." For crying out loud.

[Nothing]

http://www.criterion.com/films/731-by-b ... volume-one

[jbeall]

Just saw the new flick, and Edward Said must be turning over in his grave; orientalism is alive and well. The first time we see Megatron, he's a bedouin in Africa. Of course, Michael Bay's confused mise-en-scene carries over to geography as well, since he's a bedouin on the savanna.

Aside from that particular moment, the movie's full of hyper-conservative visual and verbal rhetoric: in addition to all the shots of a tattered-but-still-flying stars & stripes, we learn that you can't negotiate w/the baddies, and that "sacrificing the few to save the many" is traitor-talk. It turns out that eight years is a surprisingly long time, because I felt like I was watching a cultural relic from 2003 instead of a summer blockbuster from 2011.

Yes, I realize that it's pointless to dissect a Big Dumb Summer Blockbuster such as Transformers 3, but it's also the case that this movie is probably only worth watching from a cultural studies perspective. Bay may have his own visual style, but the finished product is hardly exemplary of the auteur theory; from the script to the direction to the product placement, this flick screams Hollywood hackery.

[stwrt]

It's about getting as many bums on seats as possible and in that sense it will be hugely successful. Checking if some guy "liked" it enough when he came out of the theater doesn't figure very high on the producer's project management schedule.

[jbeall]

Agreed. And I knew that going in. My point is simply that, the big-dumb-summer-movieness irony aside, Transformers 3 is full of overt nationalist demagoguery and unconscious racism that both creates and reproduces unconscious trends that are endemic to contemporary American cultural life.

I suppose that it's only fair to spoiler tag, but

Spoiler

the film is clearly "meta-." The comic-relief autobots watch an episode of Star Trek in which "Spock loses it," and then an Autobot voiced by Leonard Nimoy is introduced. Gee, I wonder what he'll do... The winking irony is one thing; it's the rather less ironically treated rhetoric that spoiled this movie for me. Not that my expectations were all that high going in, but even by that standard, this movie was still irritating as all hell.

[John Cope]

Transformers 3 is full of overt nationalist demagoguery and unconscious racism that both creates and reproduces unconscious trends that are endemic to contemporary American cultural life.

Perverse as it surely is to say, that it undoubtedly is this in extremis (still have yet to see it) is exactly why it's worth seeing and reacting to. Whether Bay is indifferent to these issues or is simply, as you say, re-presenting ingrained aspects of American life writ large is of little consequence to me. It's the Biggest, Boldest version of attitudes many unreflectively associate with proper July 4 values. The fact that he doesn't qualify any of this stuff in any more human or humane fashion is why it stands apart from flag waving banalities like Independence Day. In other words, I kind of respect the unmitigated, unrelenting nature of his bad taste and jingoism. Even if it's pure cynicism it's breathtaking.

[jbeall]

I think that's the point I was trying to make at the end of my first post about the film, when I said it's worth viewing from a cultural studies perspective. You've articulated the idea far better than I did, however.

Anyway, yes, Transformers e is worth watching for the reasons you detail. But that implies a critical viewpoint that the film's blockbuster status is designed to prevent. After all, people go to these movies precisely in order to turn off their brains for 2.5 hours.

[dx23]

Some people have noticed that Michael Bay just copy/pasted scenes from The Islandin his new Transformers film.

[Gary Gnu]

Some people have noticed that Michael Bay just copy/pasted scenes from The Islandin his new Transformers film.

Are there more instances?? That's pretty funny, though... in a tragic sort of way. While the Tranformers films are among the worst, most grueling experiences ever, and could be held partially responsible for the dumbing down of this generation; I've always found The Island to be tolerable. Now, it's a guilt by association sort of thing.

[colinr0380]

I like the implicated equation from that first clip that a pile of scrap metal falling from the back of a truck can be so easily replaced by an intricately designed robot. At least they both cause the same amount of damage, which is the most important thing!

(There is a potential joke to be made here in comparing this to the situation of Megan Fox getting replaced for the third film, but I'll let others make it!)

[Roger Ryan]

I suspect the re-use of the second shot is there because Bay didn't have enough coverage to make the wider shots cut together smoothly. However, while getting into that shot from THE ISLAND looks okay, the shot coming after it has no continuity.

While Bay reportedly shot TRANSFORMERS 3 in 3-D, I would imagine these moments needed to be post-converted from 2-D, right?

[knives]

To my knowledge they used The Island footage because the only good shot they had of it was unusable because it's the same shot that captured the stunt woman getting paralyzed.

[Roger Ryan]

To my knowledge they used The Island footage because the only good shot they had of it was unusable because it's the same shot that captured the stunt woman getting paralyzed.

I was wondering if that was the case. Has this been discussed somewhere or is it just an assumption on your part?