Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007)

[knives]

I remember reading it in one of the first articles (I think on IGN) to talk about this.

[zedz]

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.

This is now a Bay priority?

[Doctor Sunshine]

This isn't the first time he's done this. A couple battleship shots from Armageddon were repurposed for Pearl Harbor. As I recall, this was exposed by the special features on the Pearl Harbor DVD.

[Gary Gnu]

If this was a different director, I'd call it a nod to the low-budget sci-fi films from the 40's-50's... I don't think Michael Bay's nodding to anyone/anything here.

Actually, I think Bay's a good director, as someone else here already explained. Maybe the screenplays he's given are just too god-awful. The Rock was good because it was relatively well-written. Maybe Michael Bay should write his own material, and see how that works out.

[Zot!]

Unless this was some kind of 11th hour desperation move, or an intentional easter egg hunt for Bay maniacs, I'm really puzzled. With the amount of CGI used in this, you would think they could whip something up in a jiffy to use as an insert, rather than going to mismatched stock footage. Weird.

[Doctor Sunshine]

mismatched stock footage.

Because each Michael Bay movie is so distinct? Maybe it contrasts with people's images of Hollywood excess but I'm sure he, and many other producers and directors, aren't above saving a couple hundred thousand dollars here and there. It's a nonstarter.

[Alan Smithee]

Actually, I think Bay's a good director, as someone else here already explained. Maybe the screenplays he's given are just too god-awful. The Rock was good because it was relatively well-written. Maybe Michael Bay should write his own material, and see how that works out.

Hate to jump into a Bay thread (don't care what he does or anyones reaction to it) but I do know that the screenwriter of the Rock supposedly dropped out because of Bay throwing in non-sensical sequences simply to appeal to the lowest common denominator focus group sort. I think if there's any problem it's that Bay has TOO MUCH control over his scripts. With this amount of money there is no reason they couldn't hire a great writer to do it. When you spend 250 million on a movie I don't see why you can't budget 10 million for a screenplay, far more than any screenwriter gets paid. You wave around that kind of money you could get the best, but then Bay comes along showing his dick and no ones interested.

[John Cope]

You wave around that kind of money you could get the best, but then Bay comes along showing his dick and no ones interested.

[Anhedionisiac]

I had to check the name of the jpg to know what the hell was I looking at.

[ArchCarrier]

I did that too, but I still don't know!

[John Cope]

Okay, how's this?

[Anhedionisiac]

Brass balls! Strangely hypnotic, too. Alec Baldwin would be proud

[Murdoch]

Well this thread's reached its logical conclusion.

[matrixschmatrix]

Hate to jump into a Bay thread (don't care what he does or anyones reaction to it) but I do know that the screenwriter of the Rock supposedly dropped out because of Bay throwing in non-sensical sequences simply to appeal to the lowest common denominator focus group sort. I think if there's any problem it's that Bay has TOO MUCH control over his scripts. With this amount of money there is no reason they couldn't hire a great writer to do it. When you spend 250 million on a movie I don't see why you can't budget 10 million for a screenplay, far more than any screenwriter gets paid. You wave around that kind of money you could get the best, but then Bay comes along showing his dick and no ones interested.

As I recall, both Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin are rumored to have been hired to punch up the script on The Rock- and as Tarantino was famously paid a million to punch up Crimson Tide the previous year, I wouldn't be surprised if they had spent millions on the script, trying to make a dead thing palatable.

[Gary Gnu]

Bay has no writing credit to his name, but I could understand him having a lot of control of the scripts. I'd still be curious to see what'd he be able to come up with on his own.
Who am I kidding; there'll still be explosions...

[Tribe]

Who am I kidding; there'll still be explosions...

Gary, what's the deal with the tiny, tiny type?

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Snarky fan poster for Transformers 3.

[John Cope]

Daniel Kasman and Fernando Croce provide their respective takes. I like both pieces a lot but I think Kasman brings up an especially important point:

One major problem is the gigantism and maximization of Michael Bay. Everything is huge; all is grandeur. A computer generated extravaganza, despite much evidence to the contrary, is not what he excels at. The filmmaker’s preference for an action of vibrantly colored frenzy over one of eloquent spacing obviously means lot of activity. But at two and half hours long and starring animated objected replete with dozens upon dozens of micro-movements, details of puppeteering and robotics, all the ligaments and muscle movements of humans robotized and animated with maniacal attention by ILM, Dark of the Moon defaults to an unimpressive constancy of the big, the important, the energetic, flattening the film over its long timespan. There is no nuance to the film’s love of its subjects, all are equal, from the way two cars colliding magnificently transform into robots in repelling slow motion to the emo hard rock musical transitions whenever the film moves back to its human story, to the camera’s description of a woman’s legs, or its preference for dilapidated modern baroque architecture. It all towers on the screen. The destruction of Chicago is on the same scale as the "execution" of a robot, which is on the same scale as the orange skin tone and fake hair of John Malkovich, or the ritual humiliation comedy of job-hunting, a human subplot which unexpectedly is placed, like in Malick's The Tree of Life, within the context of a violent cosmic struggle.

This is not to say the film is pitched on the wrong scale—indeed, many scenes and sequences, including one where the robot villain demolishes the Lincoln Monument to sit on the Presidential throne while a rat-like mini-robot licks and chips at the decapitated head of the statue, is clearly at the level of preposterous maximalism at which the director excels. The principle problem is that when everything, including the non-preposterous, is expressed at that level, nothing becomes spectacular because the contexual regularization of life is eliminated (witness the "normal" LaBeouf subplots about his parents, job hunting, and self questioning). As such, the immense vision here is threatened to be on the brink of thundering banality. One might miss how Bay makes giants again walk the Earth—not just huge robots tromping in our fields deciding whether to enslave humanity or not, but a movie where everyone and everything in it is giant. The most vacuous of material pleasures, the most misanthropic of human relationships, the most preposterous of product placement and commercial tie-ins, all are dressed and staged like they are the most sexy, most exciting, most immensely, dangerously glamorous things one could possibly conceive of, the wildest, most spectacular of fantastic objects. As if only the cinema could raise things to such heights.

And this flattening out of significance, even of experiential significance, is perhaps Bay's greatest contribution toward reflecting our times (or shaping them), whether born of any conscious intention or not. This inability or unwillingness to distinguish, or give-nuance-to as Kasman suggests, seems culturally endemic and yet in a way a subtle or miss-able thing, even as it shapes responses and contexts. For that reason alone, Bay's project of both monumentalizing and leveling everything has relevance and is, ironically perhaps, of consequence.

[HistoryProf]

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.

how can a giant robot be a bedouin?

[Mr Sausage]

And this flattening out of significance, even of experiential significance, is perhaps Bay's greatest contribution toward reflecting our times (or shaping them), whether born of any conscious intention or not. This inability or unwillingness to distinguish, or give-nuance-to as Kasman suggests, seems culturally endemic and yet in a way a subtle or miss-able thing, even as it shapes responses and contexts. For that reason alone, Bay's project of both monumentalizing and leveling everything has relevance and is, ironically perhaps, of consequence.

This reminded me of something David Foster Wallace said in an interview:

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Brett Easton] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything.

Insofar as you believe the world to have flattened out nuance and significance by making everything the same proportion, then Transformers is going to seem like "an ingenious mimesis." But all that means is it's enacting the worst of what people believe of modern culture. Is this something we should find value in, as opposed to the search for something outside of this badness?

At the same time, why privilege Transformers? If what it does is endemic to culture, what makes it a reflection and not a further product of this culture? What distinguishes it from the myriad commercials, music videos, advertisements that also flatten through leveled proportioning? Why does Transformers reflect them and not them Transformers--what makes it the mirror and them not? What I'm getting at is: if our culture flattens significance, then, logically, all cultural products engaged in this flattening cannot themselves be distinguished from one another either. At the same point that Transformers becomes of consequence it ceases to be of consequence by definition. It's an inescapable paradox. Transformers must itself become flattened and indistinguishable, of the exact same worth or waste as every other thing.