Michael Bay Transformed

My Christmas break days have been pretty much the same, one after another (wake up, make pancakes, watch half or all of a movie, hit the town, come back, eat three waffles and an apple while watching Scrubs, catch up on the Internet, sleep). So here's an article I wrote on the flight home.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Michael Bay over the last few months. It all started when I caught the last half of Armageddon, a movie I’d long avoided because of my self-imposed exile from all things “mainstream,” “blockbuster,” “explosive,” and containing the words “Michael Bay.” A little bit to my surprise, I really, really liked the movie. I ended up seeing the first half a few weeks later when I bought the Criterion Collection edition of the movie, and liked it even more (now that I…y’know…knew who everyone was). Now it’s one of my favorite movies. To me, it’s just as demonstrative as Magnolia, The New World, Star Wars, Brazil, The Fountain, or any other number of films in giving you everything you could want from a movie (and more), and doing it in a way only movies can do. It’s a crazy concept that threatens the entire world, and it’s up to a group of regular guys to save us all (and pretty much anytime “regular guys” save the world, especially if they have to defy orders, I love it). The guys happen to be a great group of very natural actors who relate to the audience instantly with sometimes almost no screen time (Owen Wilson, anyone?). And the emotional component really works for me, less so in the Ben Affleck/Liv Tyler romance, and much more so in the father/daughter relationship between Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler (look, I’m all man, but that scene when Bruce says goodbye to his daughter just tears me up every single time).

Around the time Kill Bill came out (the action movie for the art house crowd), I read an interview with Quentin Tarantino (who’s probably, more than anyone else, been the most influential in teaching me the value of mainstream, studio system filmmaking) in which he discussed how the action genre is one exclusive to movies, and how action directors are really the masters of the medium because it’s much, MUCH harder to shoot a great action movie than it is a good drama (not just on a technical level, but getting great performances in the midst of often ridiculous storylines can really bring out an actor’s potential – look at Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 as evidence of that). Anyway, all of this brings me back to Michael Bay, who at his best (probably The Rock, though Armageddon remains my favorite and the attack sequence in Pearl Harbor is, like it or not, his finest work in orchestrating action) is not just an amazing director of spectacle and explosions, but can coax some very real, or at least very entertaining, performances from his actors (Stanley Kubrick one told Vincent D’Onofrio that acting is better when it’s interesting and entertaining than when it’s realistic). Pointing to Sean Connery’s and Ed Harris’ performances in The Rock is probably the most obvious of when this worked to Bay’s advantage (though I’ll hold ‘til the day I die that Billy Bob Thornton did fantastic supporting work in Armageddon, and how can you not love Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in the Bad Boys movies?), and pointing to Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett in Pearl Harbor is probably the most obvious of when it didn’t. And, as I was getting at above, Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler are incredible in Armageddon. No single performance in Paul Haggis’ Crash makes me feel half of what I feel during Armageddon’s climax.

But Bay is, at his center, an entertainer. He’s in business to give us the kind of classic cinema that’s hard to come by anymore – genuinely thrilling, big-budget, effects-laden, explosive action (which is ultimately why Pearl Harbor was doomed from the start; it should be a historical drama, not summer escapism). Which is why he’s the most obvious choice for a job I’m now surprised he ever took – the brand new take on Transformers. Calling me a Transformers buff would be…incorrect. But like every other good American from my generation, I grew up watching the cartoon on Saturday mornings, and if you give me enough time I can certainly find my Optimus Prime action figure I got when I was six. And I basically just remember there being a lot of cool robots that drove around and fought each other.

First, Michael Bay is the master of big chase scenes. Nobody has ever done it better. So when you have a movie that not only revolves around cars, but your main characters (or at least the ones the audiences comes for) are, in fact, cars themselves that can shoot and punch each other…that’s Michael Bay gold right there. Oh, and they’re coming from another planet? And they pretty much threaten the entire world? That’s Michael Bay…I dunno, platinum. Somewhere along the way, somebody noted that while Bay is the ideal choice for the project, he’d be greatly helped by the inclusion of Jerry Bruckheimer.

Jerry Bruckheimer might be the most powerful person in Hollywood. I don’t know, I’m not there. But the fact is that the man is completely in tune with his main audience – teenage boys – and has been for nearly three decades. He knows how to take a great concept (or, in the case of Pirates of the Caribbean, a pretty crappy one) and churn out a great movie that will make more money than you knew existed. A lot of people don’t really know what a producer does, and in some cases the answer is little more than taking care of the business angle of filmmaking. But Bruckheimer does what any great producer should – he produces. He handpicks the director, helping him (I don’t think I’m going against the facts by not saying “or her”) mold his vision, especially if he’s fairly new to the game (Bad Boys was Michael Bay’s first movie; Top Gun and Pirates of the Caribbean were Tony Scott’s and Gore Verbinski’s, respectively, first forays into filmmaking on that scale). And his stamp is as much on Bay’s first five movies (Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and Bad Boys II) as Bay’s himself.

I don’t know why Bay bolted to go work for DreamWorks and Steven Spielberg (but it’s probably to work with Steven Spielberg), but the result was astonishing. Spielberg reportedly personally selected Bay to helm The Island when he (Spielberg) decided it was too close in style to Minority Report for him to shoot himself (that’s right…Spielberg decided not to shoot a film and chose Michael Bay as his successor of sorts). And while there’s a lot to like about The Island, it feels like it was Bay trying to find his footing in a very different environment. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some fantastic action moments and great chase scenes, and early on some really cool sci-fi stuff, but the movie doesn’t function well as a cohesive whole; it feels like Bay was trying to prove his more serious sci-fi side while still doing what he really enjoys most and does best – genuinely thrilling action. And of course blowing shit up.

Enter Transformers, a project Bay actually passed on the first time around, saying it lacked an emotional component. The trailer was just released online recently, and trying to say how thrilled I am Bay ended up taking the job (after the emotional component was filled by Shia Lebauf getting his first car and it being a Transformer) is a bit of a challenge. Look, I love Armageddon, but it’s not perfect, and I hope someday Bay will put out something that really shows everything he’s made of (to many, that slot is filled by The Rock, but to me, Bay thinks on a much bigger scale than that, and ultimately his greatest achievement should reflect that). And I think that film, oddly enough, could be Transformers. Just going by the trailer, Spielberg’s influence is palpable. And while I thought Bruckheimer’s touch would be missed, I think it’s the Spielberg touch that’ll propel the film to be better than it should have been. Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is so good because it takes a familiar concept – alien invasion – and puts it on a human level, treating it as a disaster movie/survival story. It’s Saving Private Ryan meets Close Encounters (no, really…it is). A lot of reviews for the film noted Spielberg’s strength in the film was his restraint, saying he never “goes over the hill” (an allusion to the scene in which Tom Cruise tackles his son on one side of a hill while we see helicopters firing missiles at the alien invaders on the other side, though we as an audience never go to the other side to see the full-blown battle, aliens and all). And while a movie revolving around fighting robots would be well advised to dive right on over that hill, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t take notice of such lessons.

Which is why I say there’s that Spielbergian influence on the movie (based on the trailer), most notably when the little girl (and children are a staple of Spielberg) slowly approaches a pool, tension rises…and a giant killer robot climbs out. And it’s actually kinda freaky. Apply the mood of that and the tone of War of the Worlds with the look of a Michael Bay movie, and you realize what Bay, Spielberg, and the whole team have been planning while everyone was arguing over the fact that the robots look totally different from the cartoons – a fairly realistic look at what happens when fighting robots take their battle to our neighborhood that’ll still have all of those awesome, epic shots we love Michael Bay for.

On a technical level, what’s most exciting for film fans is that Michael Bay really takes advantage of the technology at his disposal more than any other action director. Chiefly, his use of CGI (computer-generated imagery) is actually awesome (Industrial Light and Magic, who did the breathtaking work on Pearl Harbor, War of the Worlds, and every Star Wars movie, is handling the bulk of the work on Transformers), but he knows how to use practical effects (whenever possible, but never for the sake of it). I know there are huge arguments against the use of special effects in movies, and sometimes it’s deserved, but what’s exciting to me about it is that with technology where it is today, you can do ANYTHING in movies. In the 90s, that largely meant doing shit for the sake of it (which is why there were so many bad natural disaster movies). As we’ve gotten closer to now, the artistic component has showed up and the best big-budget directors are the ones who have figured out how to use CGI as an extension of their artistic vision (the ones who do it best being Peter Jackson in LOTR and Kong, Sam Raimi in the Spider-Man movies, Bryan Singer in Superman Returns, Kerry Conran in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Robert Rodriguez in Sin City, and by the looks of it, Zack Snyder in 300).