Is Michael Bay the devil? That’s the very question Entertainment Weekly asked in a 1998 headline, after many critics complained that he was the poster boy for everything wrong with Hollywood (as that particular article stated: “big stars, big spending, big explosions, big box office”). The answer, I think, is no. Wasn’t he just following the formula of producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, who were criticized for the very same reasons when Bay was just an undergraduate in film school? In the 1980s, critics called it “gigantism.” I guess Bay was just a new target for an old attack.
     Bay’s work is unapologetically crass and commercial, and it makes a ton of money. He might be an easy target for people who write seriously about movies for a living, but I don’t think he can be so easily dismissed. In many ways, I’m often more interested in understanding a film’s flaws than I am in assessing what it does right. (This can be frustrating to anyone who has discussed a movie with me that I claim to like, only to hear me criticize it.) I don’t like Michael Bay movies any more than most critics, but there’s a directness of vision that I find, dare I say, respectable. Is there any filmmaker who’s as honest about the kinds of movies he makes than Bay? To be fair, I haven’t seen all of the original Bad Boys, nor have I seen any of The Island, but I’m not optimistic on the chances of those films winning me over. Bay’s art, if you can label it as such, is overkill, and he works only in extremes – loud and fast, mostly. He’s a bad storyteller to be sure, but he’s a bad storyteller worth discussing.
   The late Peter Benchley once prophesied to the Los Angeles Times, “Wait and see, [Steven] Spielberg will one day be known as the greatest second-unit director in America.” That was during the making of Jaws, and Benchley was understandably upset: Spielberg had just publicly criticized the author’s book. Twenty-two Spielberg films later, that comment couldn’t seem more shortsighted or foolish. His career speaks for itself. But Benchley’s ridiculous misnomer for Spielberg could not be better suited to any filmmaker working today than Michael Bay, which makes the fact the two directors have teamed up to make Transformers especially ironic.
   In all of Bay’s work, there’s forward momentum to the imagery, and, by linking one shot to the next, a story seems to occur. But there’s nothing cinematic about the way he accumulates moving pictures. That’s one of the reasons his films always have excellent trailers – every shot is powerful by itself, and yet they’re all inherently meaningless. He might be the greatest second-unit director film has ever seen. Any decent editor could have a field day re-working their order; they have about as much to do with storytelling as the movies they advertise.
   I first took note of this back in 2001, while watching Pearl Harbor. Every individual image was stunning (director of photography John Schwartzman really outdid himself in that regard) but it was such a reckless beauty. Any sense of visual cohesion was sacrificed. It was no longer about the movie or even the scene – it was all about THE SHOT. And its power lasted only as long as it was up on screen, which, in a Michael Bay film, isn’t very long. The years he spent directing commercials serve him well here. He doesn’t seem to understand the dynamics of a given story, but he sure knows how to sell it. In Pearl Harbor, he’s not connecting us to the depth of feeling Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale have for each other, he’s just advertising romance. In Transformers (or The Rock or Armageddon or Bad Boys II), he’s advertising excitement. In neither case does he actually achieve the desired effect. His films are a collection of pay-offs with no attention paid toward set-up (visually, emotionally, structurally). It’s just one big, visceral release after another.
   Is there something wrong with that? Well, think of the best action scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark or Die Hard and you’ll begin to notice how traditional narrative devices – set-up, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement – shape the way the events unfold, sometimes in purely visual terms. What great action set-piece isn’t also a smaller-scaled triumph of storytelling?
   This is the only reason I find the last act of Transformers much more satisfying than the rest of the movie. It’s far too busy to allow any one story thread to find its footing, but, by cutting between Transformer dogfights, Transformer battles, and Shia LaBeouf running from Transformers, it creates a kind of parallel tension that nothing up to that point really had. It’s the illusion of better storytelling. For the most part, though, Bay stages action as a series of climaxes, skipping all the rest. It’s pure kineticism made to look like a movie. His technique hasn’t changed much since his commercial days. He wants us to be instantly excited, without him having to build tension or suspense in a sophisticated way. One could walk in the theatre at any moment (no matter how small) and be pummeled by the intensity. Even the corny one-liners in Transformers seem like they’ve been cranked up all the way.
   I suppose you could attribute all of this to Michael Bay’s “style,” but I don’t think he really has a style. He shoots Apache helicopter take-offs the same way he does Josh Duhamel’s reunion with his wife and baby – silhouetted against a gorgeous, setting sun. He shoots Megan Fox the same way he would a brand new car; her tan skin glistens not unlike the chrome on Optimus Prime’s front grill. We respond to the glossy sheen coating each image before we ever begin to consider what it is we’re actually looking at within the frame. Bay gives every moment, no matter how throwaway, equal importance. He has no discretion.
   And style without discretion is no style at all; it’s merely an aesthetic. Bay, however, achieves his aesthetic brilliantly. What cinematographer or visual effects unit wouldn’t kill to have even a single image from one of his films on their reel? Take, for instance, the terrific shot in Transformers where two robots collide on a Los Angeles freeway. Bay shoots their collision in slow-motion – it’s the one great, show-off moment in the whole film. He’s practically begging for intense scrutiny, and I’d be lying if I said there was even a second where I doubted two robots weren’t fighting among L.A. traffic. There’s not a lack of visual integrity in a Michael Bay film. He’s a perfectionist, but he’s a slave to THE SHOT. He’s got a great eye, but he can’t see past whatever set-up he’s shooting right then. I can’t deny his talent on a purely technical level, but his aesthetic sense quickly becomes numbing. When there’s so much gloss, everything begins to look dull.
   There are some things in film that will forever remain elemental: the least amount of work a comedy must do to be effective is to simply be funny. Tack on a great story and strong characters and you might have Annie Hall. Likewise, the least amount of work an action film must do to be effective is to simply be thrilling. I gave up on Michael Bay movies having great stories or strong characters long ago, and yet, I find that he continually fails to deliver thrills. I’ve got friends who really love what he does. They remind me that nobody blows stuff up like Michael Bay. That’s true. He wields explosions around as gracelessly as bad comedies do jokes, and yet his pyrotechnic fervor has wrongly come to symbolize the entire genre: the bigger the fireworks, the better the film. This notion certainly falls in line with Bay’s aesthetic. His films offer more fireworks than the Fourth of July, only he uses them as stand-ins for genuine excitement. I don’t think I’ll be impressed until he learns how to better light the fuse. He confuses quantity with quality, size with achievement. Even bad comedies are full of punchlines, but that doesn’t make them any funnier.