What do you want out of a movie? I mean seriously, why do you go to the cinema? Sure, sometimes it’s sweltering outside and you just need to be somewhere dark and air conditioned, and sometimes you’re on a first date and really want to see how well you and this other person can sit silently near each other, but those are answers to why you went to a movie, not why do you go to the movies. It’s something worth thinking about. Something that I don’t believe is easy to answer, but a real consideration if you consider yourself any sort of aficionado. And while you’re thinking about that, think about this: Michael Bay is someone who knows exactly what he wants out of a movie.
He wants that camera at a low angle and constantly moving. These are motion pictures! These are a big deal! Look at the grandeur, the sheer epic-ness that is Mark Wahlberg walking around a barn or Kelsey Grammer sitting at a conference table or Thomas Lennon making a phone call. What are you going to do, film badly written conversations as if they are actual dialogues between people? Fuck no! Spin that shit around, blow the colors out, fill the frame with detail – people will pick out whatever bits of exposition they can. And even if they don’t, who cares? This is a ride, baby, and it don’t stop just because you’re not following.
He wants to do the same fights over and over again, hoping that changes in locale or the precise identities of the hunks of metal pummeling each other will make them feel different. Where do the bad transformers keep finding all these disposable grunts? Even if you’re a giant robot, if you’re almost beaten to death, surely it takes some time to recover, right? At a certain point, aren’t cities just leveled? Like, how many skyscrapers are there really? It doesn’t matter, pay absolutely no mind to logistical concerns. As long as there keep being explosions, gun shots, punches, stabs, and fireballs, everybody wins.
He wants these things, and Michael Bay keeps getting them too. Because everyone else wants them. There’s a safety in knowing exactly what to expect, and it’s what’s made Transformers one of the biggest franchises in the world. If anything, this new one, Age of Extinction, is the safest bet yet, because by switching leading men from Shia LaBeouf to Mark Wahlberg, they’ve eliminated the chance for a remarkable performance. What I mean by that is that at least Shia always gave us a central character to hate, a human piece of shit whose terrible behavior could distract us from the hollow spectacle around him. Mark Wahlberg is a great actor, undoubtedly, but he’s not someone who typically elevates material, and as you might expect, he just coasts through this movie like Schrodinger’s actor, simultaneously giving a good and bad performance, just another cog in Michael Bay’s terrible machine.
