I've always thought of Michael Bay (Hollywood director of the Transformers and more notably and notoriously of Armageddon and Pearl Harbor) as more of a film-processing machine than as a director. Before you get ahead of me here, this isn't a slam, and I'm not here to rip on Pearl Harbor, though it may well deserve it. I've never shared the consuming hatred that most film buffs have for Bay, though many of his films have been sub-par. To me, Bay exists to translate screenplays into slick-looking, quick cut action loaded films, and in this way he mirrors Hollywood very closely. When he is given a good script like "The Rock" he creates a good slick-looking, quick cut action film. When he is given a script that is mediocre, he creates a mediocre slick-looking, quick cut action film. And when he's given a script like "Pearl Harbor", well we've all seen what happens then.
But can you really blame Michael Bay for "Pearl Harbor"? (I use quotes to distinguish the film, as I'm pretty sure you can't blame him for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941). Sure, a better action director (I'm thinking of James Cameron or David Finchner or Ridley Scott, really just anyone who's made an Alien film) might have noticed the severe shortcomings in the script and barring that might have noticed the very bad acting that was happening in the reading of the script, but its not like this is a new phenomenon.
And can you really give Bay credit for "The Rock"? Look at the actors, Sean Connery, Nick Cage, Ed Harris. That's 3 Academy award nominees starring in a popcorn movie. The writers don't have a lot of other impressive credits going for them, but its clear that much of the strength of the movie is in the dialogue between Cage and Connery.
There is a school of thought that a film director is different from any other artist, in that he can take the work of many other people to create a piece of art reflecting his own viewpoint, such that independent of the contributions of the writers or actors or technicians, he becomes the "author" of the film. And since the whole discussion started in France with the New Wave of the 50s and 60s, this is referred to by its French name "Auteur". And there are examples of Auteur directors, from Goddard to Hitchcock, whose films bear a definite look and unmistakable point of view, independent of subject matter. There are some modern parallels as well, though most directors who would really fit into this category also write the screenplays for their pictures, making the distinction more vague.
But the problem with auteur theory is that it seems to assume that every director is an auteur, or author of his own picture, and even more, this idea has crept into the movie-going consciousness or even into the subconscious, so that directors often get credit and blame for things they really had little to do with. Bay himself has said several times that he makes movies for teenaged boys. Sometimes, movies aimed at teenaged boys can be very interesting, but character development is rarely high on their priority list (OK, it was for me, but I'll accept being and exception).
Which brings me to "The Transformers" which I just watched last week in Hawai'i. I watched the cartoon as a kid, like everyone in my age group, but was pretty well over it by the time I was 13, opting for shows (or even better books) with much better characters and stories. But I had a small amount of nostalgia for the show that didn't make me averse to seeing the film. But I didn't go in expecting to like it just because it had giant robots.
It was quite good, mostly due to terrific writing. Of course, there were several of those typical action movie moments where you wonder why the characters are doing this or that, but that is really to be expected in the action movie genre and shows up in the best of them. But the characters were well written and very funny, and the over the top saving the world pathos contained in any predominantly male kid's cartoon program was kept sparingly brief. There were a few too many characters to keep track of, but this is also an normal action movie flaw (especially in modern times). The characters that were there though were well-written and well-acted and spent very little time annoying me. One possible exception was Megan Fox's Mikkayla. One of the above named directors that pays more attention to actors would probably have offered her some direction freeing her from her standard choice which is to be quiet looking beautiful and inappropriately sullen. But, then, it didn't seem that the writers really knew what to do with her character either, being the required action movie heroine that otherwise didn't have much stake in the story (apart from saving the world, or course).
But most of these complaints are nitpicky in the scheme of a very well shot movie with fantastic writing and stunning visual effects. I wouldn't think of it come Oscar time, but the film is highly recommended as a summer popcorn movie. So I am without reservation recommending a movie directed by Michael Bay. I'm just not giving him all of the credit for it. He certainly deserves credit for the look of the action scenes and the excellent blending of effects and live action, but the same could be said for Pearl Harbor, which is really the point. Michael Bay did his job, and as long as Hollywood keeps putting out scripts that are better than brain dead, he will continue making good movies. Let's just not expect him to make a bad script into a good movie.
Posted by ktismael at July 11, 2007 3:09 AM