Why do they keep letting Michael Bay make movies?
I just can't figure out who green lights Michael Bay to direct movies.
In case you didn't guess, I saw Transformers last night. And I'll admit, I really enjoyed it. But how could I not? I'm smack in the demographic for this film: a kid that played with Transformers as a kid, watched the cartoon regularly, and was over the moon at the idea of seeing Optimus Prime as a live-action character.
ILM didn't disappoint. The Autobots and Decepticons looked and sounded amazing. I was blown out of my seat at the sheer magnitude of giant robots pounding on each other in DLP quality from the 10th row. Transformers should have been an all-time classic action/adventure film.
But it wasn't. It was just a series of cool action sequences, interrupted by storylines and performances on par with The Phantom Menace. And I enjoyed it on about the same level, and for about the same reasons. If it weren't for this childhood alliegance to the underlying premise, I probably would have hated it.
It's all Michael Bay's fault. He can't get screenwriters to write a coherent story. He can't eek credible performances out of actors. His films shift emotional states like a schizophrenic pregnant woman on cocaine. Transformers is a teen coming-of-age story, a comedy, an action film, a political drama and a computer caper -- all at once. Oh, yeah, and there's giant fighting robots.
As a computer professional, some sequences are downright offensive. Such as listening to a 5'11" blonde Australian national hottie recruited by the NSA to determine the origin of an audio sample that attacks DoD systems tell "senior analysts" that the only way to prevent Frenzy from "hacking" a Wikipedia search taking place from Air Force One is to "cut the hardline." Does is not occur to Bay that his target audience for this film is 30-year old geeks -- precisely the sort of people that choke on their popcorn through a sequence like this? John McTiernan, Peter Jackson, the Wachowskis, Bryan Singer, even Tony Scott would all have better attention to story detail than Michael Bay.
Also, between Tea Leoni, Liv Tyler, Scarlett Johansson, Vanessa Marcil, Jennifer Garner, Gabrielle Union and now Megan Fox -- could he make his oral fixation any more obvious?
Alas, at this point the only thing I can think to do is not pay to see it twice. Sad, huh?
UPDATE: It just occured to me how to describe Michael Bay. He's a porn director. Instead of sex, he shows battles, but otherwise, those are the movies he makes: blockbuster-scaled pornography.
Comments
Look at it this way. At least the suggestion to cut the hard line to kill a Wiki search is far less offensive than Will Smith depositing an instant virus into an alien spacecraft from his laptop (see Independece Day, 1996) Thank goodness aliens use 802.11b and Windows.
Apparently Hollywood likes it though as I see they have already announced a sequel. Sheesh.
Posted by Scott At 11:47:26 AM On 07/03/2007 | - Website - |
And your ID4 reference doesn't work. As ridiculous as it was, at least...
1) Jeff Goldblum was the awkward ubergeek who wrote the virus (not Will Smith)
2) It was delivered via a physical connection made when their ship docked with a central control system
3) The program was presented not as a frequency analysis of a waveform, but as ACTUAL TEXT. If I remember correctly, it was Java running on a MacBook. (Which I suppose is grossly unrealistic insofar as Java doesn't run on Mac machines)
I mean, in Independence Day, you had a four-eyed MIT doctorate in a lab full of geeky government scientists who'd been reverse engineering a sample system on an alien craft for the last 30 years. There's some level of plausibility there, at least in the nature of the individuals, the delivery mechanism, and the timeframe involved.
Transformers just tries to throw around technical terms that are complete babble. They didn't even TRY. They had a medical advisor, a military advisor and an armorer on set -- but an IT advisor!? I guess they just couldn't afford one with $150 million in the budget.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 12:27:12 PM On 07/03/2007 | - Website - |
I cringe whenever I see anyone sit down at a computer in any movie. What's truly sad is that the vast majority of the movie-going public believe it's all relatively accurate. In their view of the magic that occurs in the black box, it's plausible that some modern computer, somewhere, paints the screen in characters slow enough to watch it as it scrolls across, and it makes sounds like R2D2 in the process.
Posted by Charles Robinson At 01:36:34 PM On 07/03/2007 | - Website - |
You are just having a pop at IBM with that quote aren't you. Aren't you?
Posted by Kerr At 03:08:56 PM On 07/03/2007 | - Website - |
Posted by Mike Lazar At 09:36:52 PM On 07/03/2007 | - Website - |
Yeah I hate it too when cool action sequences are interrupted by storylines. Action scenes are timeless, storylines get boring after the 1st time you see them, since you already know the story...
Posted by Mika Heinonen At 02:02:17 PM On 07/05/2007 | - Website - |
Eh?
Posted by Ben Poole At 10:10:23 AM On 07/08/2007 | - Website - |
I was not overall distracted by the inaccuracies. Imagine someone like my sig other, who is an attorney, who sees all the legal movies and TV shows and can't stand how they are so often wrong. Its the same thing with IT. Its entertainment ... just enjoy it.
And hearing Peter Cullen's voice in the beginning made me want to spooge. :D
Posted by John Head At 01:31:02 PM On 07/09/2007 | - Website - |
I will admit though, there should have been more depth to the writing- it really could have been so much more. Yes, the technical terms made absolutely no sense, and Anthony Andersen as some sort of hip-geek didn't quite do it for me.
Maybe we're all spoiled by Spider-Man (great story *and* great effects), but I think transformers did well
Posted by Mike Robinson At 04:17:38 PM On 07/10/2007 | - Website - |