Nice. Maybe Paramount will fire his ass in the downtime period after they realize they could be doing so much better...

At least we might get some cool non-movie toys in that extra year.

 

That's what I'm saying. Fist bump.

 

Agreed, in facts real director legend Steven Speilberg picked him to direct transformers franchise.

 

Funny, Spielberg suggested it be about a boy and his car.

 

Oh yeah??! Wall-E.


You can have robots as the main characters, and humans as side characters.


I blame everyone involved at the high levels for how this movie turned out. Producers, director, actors, and writers. Oh well, no use arguing about this stuff, just have to sit back and hope that Transformers 2 flops so hard they never make a 3. Either that or hope for a Batman Begins style reboot of the series who can take the story of robot civil war coming to earth and make it both interesting and entertaining.

 

Maybe Paramount pulled a Marvel and replaced Bay for the next movie without telling him. Hope not, cause, as much as I like the movies, I don't think the characters translate well into toys, and the toys are my first love. I'd much rather see the Animated line and the Universe line march on in the hiatus between films.

 

All you people knocking down these characters will eat your words when you see them animated... They will, no doubt, be some of the most popular characters from the movie...

 

 

I saw that coming. Bay will have his way, especially when ROTF makes a crap load of money this summer.

 

I don't know what's more preposterous- people believing the world will end in 2012 or people believing Michael Bay is the best man to lead the Transformers franchise.

He's far from the worst- I'd say he's done an above average job, but a good bit of the worship is unwarranted.

It's not as though he was responsible for the disaster that was the heads of Skids and Mudflap, however.

 

Not at all. You seemed to be happy to accuse all and sundry of an inability to distinguish between fact and opinion (99.9% of people are wrong, you are right, remember?) before going on to make a series of arguments that suffer from just this malaise.

I'm getting confused now...you've just spent 3 pages berating critics of the film...but you don't actually like it?

I disagree with this. Most people I know have seen Armageddon, but I don't recall many of them thinking it was terribly good.

I think people do enjoy Transformers on the whole, but I object to the notion that a 'better' (and I'm aware that this is a can of worms) script would have somehow alienated this audience. If that was true there simply wouldn't be any good, popular movies.

Of course he did some things right, the man isn't an incompetent. The film is quite pretty to look at, and the integration between the CGI and the location footage is astonishing - something that's very tough to direct.

But... how much of Transformers success is realistically down to the director is open to question in my view. Some films clearly live or die based on the passion behind them - the LOTR trilogy would likely never have happened without Jacksons singular vision - but while I wouldn't want to denegrate his hard work (directing any movie is astonishingly difficult) I'm not convinced that Mr Bay was really the deciding factor in the films popularity.

Personally, I think ILM are the true heroes here, they are behind the main reason most people went to see the film - the amazingly real robots. This to me is the magic cash-printing ingredient.

None of this is an excuse to make lame 'BAY IS A MONGOLOID' kind of posts of course. Unless they're funny.

Improvisation by the cast is too late in the day to have a radical effect upon the script - improv is about riffing on a theme rather than big structural changes.

Again, whilst I share your belief that the writer should take ownership of his script, it would be naive to think that an unhappy A-list director wouldn't order new pages if he felt the material was weak. It's not at all unusual for entire drafts to be binned at the directors behest once the greenlight is on.

I'm suprised you find it easy to reconcile these diametrically opposed viewpoints. I'm not particularily agrieved about the movie in general, but I certainly feel no compunction to gloss over what I see as its many, many flaws. I think parts of it are spectacularily bad and I'm quite happy to say so; it was a success despite its unsatisfactory elements, not because of them.

I don't think that makes me bitter, just discerning and consistent.

 

Ok I'm not about to get into the middle of your fight, but I just have to say.

100 points for using the word "MALAISE"!  

 

Ha! Thanking you! It's not a fight though. A minor scuffle perhaps... 

 

I have to agree with that. Not only that, but in Iron Man, Dark Knight and the Spider-man movies, the producers/directors/writers didn't have that many characters to develop, while compared to TF1.

-airfox

 

I'm not arguing that it wasn't successful. That it is, but that still doesn't make it a good movie. And you you just kind of argued yourself in circles when you said that Transformers aren't memorable and then you turned around and talked about Armageddon. Hell, people remember Twister too, and that movie is God awful! Ed Wood's movies are memorable too.

All I'm saying is it's not too much to ask for a GOOD and memorable movie. Be content with the crap he churns out, rationalize by saying "it's good for what it is" and try to convince yourself it was good. Fact is that Bay isn't a good director.

I also don't really like how you try to downplay Transformers as a property in all of this. This franchise has managed to be around in some capacity for nearly 3 decades now. It has it's own convention, numerous websites and message boards based off of it and is still going strong. You'd be hard pressed to find a property this side of Star Trek with this kind of a following and with different generations of fans, not just old hangers on. For nearly 30 years they've been around and have generated new fans, I'd hardly write that off as a "oh, I remember those" kind of things. This movie was going to be a hit regardless of who (within reason) directed it.

I can respect your angle of just accepting it in spite of not liking it. It's very "the dude" Lebowski of you. I, myself, as an artist can't stand Michael Bay. IMO he has zero artistic integrity, he makes movies based on what he THINKS people want to see based on the hollywood formula passed down to him by Don Simpson. He's one of the best cinematographers to hold a camera, but he lacks the tools as a storyteller to be a director. Music videos and commercials are where he belongs, not feature length film.

 

Kickback is a god amongst insects  

Seriously though, while Micheal Bay is most likely not the best director for Transformers, he's certainly far from the worst. Personally I go to the theater to be entertained by what's on the screen. Micheal Bay delivered that to me quite handily in the first movie. Would I have liked something different, yes, but that doesn't detract from the fact that I was entertained by someone else's take on the franchise I've enjoyed for 25 years now.

What I'm getting at is that I'm not so mired down with a dogmatic view of the Transformer's mythos that I can't step back and get some enjoyment from someone else's take on the franchise or respect their interpretation.

 

It wasn't so much the mythos or even the character design that bothered me. It was the complete lack of substance. Although the designs on "the twins" this go around just makes me sick. I can hack a lot, but they just reek of goofy, slapstick nonsense.

 

Michael Bay got contacts in the freaking PENTAGON, he is the best director, just because he can and WILL deliver awesome vehicles for the Decepticons.

 

Imagine how much more advanced the CG and FX will be if it's released in 2012.