If you think that Michael Bay movies suck, I'm not going to convince you otherwise (mostly because I agree with you about every one of his movies in which
Nicolas Cage doesn't save the world). But it's at least worth noting that many professional filmmakers and film theorists don't agree with us. For instance, James Cameron, the most successful action director of all time, admits to having "studied his films and 'reverse-engineered' his shooting style." Apparently those rapid cuts from one angle to another that are the hallmark of Bay's "lazy" filmmaking style are technically way more difficult to pull off than ... well, not doing that.
The quotes about him being an AWFUL director and a soul carcinogen are from the comment section of an essay
in which a respected film theorist claims that "
Armageddon is a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color and shape." The essay was written years after the release of the movie, when Bay's second and third films were released as part of the Criterion Collection, a series of collector's edition DVDs curated by serious film scholars for fans of challenging art movies.
Where we see a car crash of colors and noise being filmed by an unskilled dumbass pointing his camera at whatever is exploding the loudest, some surprisingly great filmmakers and serious film scholars see an idiot savant. We ridicule his one dimensional characters, but film theorist Jeanine Basinger thinks we're missing the point, claiming that Bay's films are supposed to create "a kind of abstraction and unreality that is found in musicals." While we might see his constant cuts as an assault on our short attention spans, Basinger believes that his rapid cutting is the closest thing to abstract expressionism in modern Hollywood films.
In fact, you can make a shockingly strong case for Bay as auteur. For instance, it was long assumed that the plot for
Armageddon was sketched out by Hollywood producers while doing cocaine and exploding LEGO cities with fireworks. In fact, it was Bay's vision from beginning to end. He came up with the idea while attending Wesleyan University (one of the best, and most liberal and artsy liberal arts colleges in America). He was taking "a geology course with this tectonic expert" who said, "Calamities happen; it's the plumbers who will fix the world." Bay loved the idea that the blue-collar workers would be forced to save the day if the world ever faced a geological disaster. He just changed the plumbers to oil-rig workers, put them on a giant rock hurtling toward Earth and added the line "Talk about the wrong stuff" because he's a bit of an idiot.
Just a few years out of college, Bay was already considered one of the best visual storytellers working in the world of TV commercials. He created the first "Got Milk?" ad, and won the two most prestigious awards in the advertising portion of the Cannes Film Festival. And that was all in his first year as a professional director.
Once he made the jump to feature films, he was immediately unpopular with critics and people like me.
The Rock is the only of his movies that is rated over 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. His most poorly reviewed film,
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (21 percent), is also his most successful at the box office. And according to a bunch of people who take film a lot more seriously than I do, it's because modern art isn't for everybody.
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