Raging Robots

MENOMONEE FALLS, WI - Michael Bay's Transformers further cements the director's place in the film pantheon of not giving a fuck. Following in the tradition of Bunuel, Casevettes, Lynch, and any number of maverick filmmakers, Michael Bay continues to make movies that give the finger to standard film narrative. In Bay's universe, script and character development takes a backseat to blowing shit up real good. Unlike the aforementioned directors, Bay seems to attract a wide following of multiplex minions eager to get off for two hours on an orgiastic feast of high body counts, bodacious babes, bombastic action sequences, and a basic good vs. evil aesthetic easily digestible for audiences with short attention spans hungry for spectacle.

On that front, Transformers definitely delivers the goods. Clocking in at a bloated run time of 144 minutes, the flick gives overtly generous screen time to robots transforming and beating the metallic shit out of each other. In between those epic set pieces you'll find the expected Bay banter - heavy handed exposition hovering around a central character who Bay surrounds with 'quirky' characters and environments, beautiful women, fast cars, and impossible to believe plot contrivances. Nobody does that better than Bay.

In the interest of full disclosure, I no longer respond to this kind of filmmaking. I think his first feature, Bad Boys, is an absolute masterwork of this new kind of action genre - still holds up today. Each subsequent film has just increased my annoyance with Bay's disregard for all things coherent. The Rock was enjoyable, Armageddon was insulting to the point of me actually walking out of the theatre mid movie, and nothing needs to be said about Pearl Harbor. My senses can no longer stomach his tourettic camera or the onslaught of cuts and edits he infuses in each film that most directors don't total in their entire filmography.

But hey, everyone's inner boy needs to be released. And as I get older I'm finding this to be a necessity in my struggle to stay sane. So for that, thank God for Michael Bay.

I can't say that I liked Transformers, but I certainly was entertained for the majority of it. For a lot of the 'lost boys' sitting next to me in the theatre, there is a very specific glee to seeing toys you worshipped from childhood fully realized on the big screen some twenty years later.