If anyone who has watched GvK, the movie isn't so different from Bayverse movies. Big and dumb action popcorn flick, but it has 76% fresh on RT. So can I say critics are simply biased towards Bay?

 

Just because they're the same type of movie doesn't mean they have the same quality of writing across the board. If that was true Batman & Robin would be just as good as Infinity War or Endgame. Or that Critics are biased towards Bay when compared to Pacific Rim.

I had fun watching Godzilla vs Kong, while outside the first and third one, I would much rather do work than watch any of the Bay films.

 

No. The fact the question is even being asked shows there is more nuance to understanding how critics work that you need to understand before simply assuming one action film is the same as another beyond who is directing.

 

Basically this, I feel the same way about the MonsterVerse films that I do about the most recent live action TMNT movies, not exactly stellar movies with amazing scripts but fun films nonetheless that clearly cared about the source materials they were adapting.

The Bay movies never really had any of that love and care put into them.

The Incredible Hulk from 2008, argued by many to be one of the worst if not THE worst MCU films (though I'd mostly disagree) clearly had a lot of love and respect for the Hulk as a character, and is easily way better than any of Bay's TF films.

 

Honestly even age of extinction had a more thoughtful plot than Godzilla vs kong and tf 2007 is a much better movie but has 58% on rotten tomatoes,dotm too but I was wondering too why gvk has a high score and it’s not that I like bayformers.

 

For starter:

The monsters are the big thing there. They're not shoehorned into sideline while we see the characters trying to get laid. In fact, one of the complaint is the story of Godzilla's human side is too weak (and they are).

The Kong side is solid, it's basically an adventure of searching a lost world.

Then there's how they present the CGI, there's none of the blurred mess of Bots when you can't see who is who. You can clearly see who is Zilla, Kong, and *spoiler*.

Physics aside (like ship buoyancy), every of their movement have the weight. Even Zilla's swimming is enough to cause a high wave.

And they don't change their appearances (except Kong looking older and bigger) drastically between movies.

AoE or TLK can't even compare to this.

 

If your movie is going to be big and loud but stupid as hell you have to atleast make sure it is well edited and fun, which is not what you can say about most Bayformers films, which are long as fuck.

It is undeniable that critics do have a certain anti-Bay bias, they've always had a wonky relationship and impotent nerds too grew to loath Bay out of mere "grrrr he makes movies for jocks with MY property??", sure, but I think anyone can look at ROTF and DOTM and TLK and see "wow, this is boring and loud"

 

Because the Bay films failed at even the one thing they set out to do which is to be fun popcorn films. The action scenes in the Bay films are bad. There's very little of robots duking it out and when there is, it's poorly choreographed and it's hard to follow.

 

They were fun that’s why they made so much money.

 

i've only seen the first half of the film but in general while both have dumb writing i'd bayverse movies are poorly made altogether not just the writing/plot, i'd also say the godzilla v kong has a much simpler plot than most bayverse movies that try to have a lot going on, on top of it's poor writing. the first movie and dotm are fine and i'd say could be compared

i feels like mainstream film critics are trapped in a loop where every time they're critical of films they get backlash for being too critical then they choose to not be critical of films and get backlash for not being critical enough

 

I think runtime has a lot to do with it. Critics will accept some mindless fun in the right dosage. GvK felt a LOT like a Bayformers movie to me, but every Bayformers movie is needlessly at least a half-hour longer than GvK.

I'm not saying long movies can't be good movies, but when your story is just a threadbare excuse for some stylish CGI action, economy of storytelling counts for a lot.

 

I think this is a big part of it.

I will still never understand why TF1 only got a 57%. But it's the type of movie where critics' reviews don't really matter. People clearly enjoyed it and turned out for it in troves.

But the sequels' runtimes kept getting longer and longer and DOTM, even though I do enjoy it, was especially blatant in its lengthy, lengthy table-setting for its final battle.

I actually was pleasantly surprised and happy that Godzilla vs. Kong was a crisp sub-2 hours, and I thought the movie was better for it. And even then, I thought the Millie Bobby Brown / podcaster storyline took up too much time. But it was still better than Godzilla KOTM which was 2 hours 15 mins.

 

Until they didn't.

Like, it's pretty obvious that the film Battleship was an attempt to make a Bayformers style adaptation of a board game but that film bombed hard. But it had bombastic CGI action and aliens and even Beyonce' in a lead role. If you would be so kind as to humor me, why did Battleship fail despite following what was effectively the same formula as any given Bayformers film?

The film critics aren't trapped, it's the fact people seem to expect something out of the critics which film critics don't exist to give in the first place. The whole idea isn't that these films are trying to please everybody, that's a fool's errand. The idea with critics is to find one or a few that you actually agree with, so they can be used as a measuring stick to evaluate if you think you would like a film.

More often than not when it comes to Bayformers, the opinions of critics are irrelevant on these boards as it's pretty obvious people have already made up their minds about wanting to see it or not because of the 'Transformers' label slapped on it. Whining about people not liking the film completely misses the point of having critics in the first place.

 

There's a couple factors; part of it is the length, the Transformers movies are all really bloated. In a tighter movie, Arrival to Earth happens at the thirty minute mark, not an hour in. And those movies only get longer and more drawn out from there. When your job is seeing and talking about movies you probably wouldn't ever think about otherwise, something really loud and dumb becomes super grating when it's the same length as Goodfellas.

But the landscape has also changed in a big way. This stuff has become the face of the business, so on the aggregators, you've got reviews from Den of Geek and Bleeding Cool weighted equally with the New York Times now. And with fansites, the reviews aren't so much about "Does this movie work, does it accomplish what it set out to, etc," but whether or not they think fans of this or that property will like the movie. In this brave new world, a comic book movie has to be really suspect to drift below 70% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it wasn't that way in 2007. But aggregates aren't peer reviewed objective truths, because that's impossible, they're just interesting, possibly flawed data points. That's why it's so funny when people get so bent out of shape about them; they don't matter.

 

Because transformers was very popular and people had a lot of nostalgia for the franchise so they went to see the first movie which was impressive for the time and decent enough until they started getting worse and people got tired of the same thing.

 

Except Battleship was a 2012 film.

By that logic, Age of Extinction should have flopped as that was a 2014 release.

 

It is entirely different than the Bayverse movies.

GvK wasn't a great movie, nor was it particularly intelligent, but it wasn't utterly braindead like the Transformers movies almost always were. It also wasn't as obnoxious or, pardon my french, "douchey" as the Bay films, where everyone is a fast-talking asshole saying the downright stupidest shit imaginable.

GvK also had clear, awesome, satisfying action. It wasn't a blur of random bullshit and sounds. The amount of messiness to the action in the Bay movies just makes watching them unsatisfying. Things happen randomly, unclearly, and the characters often move with no sense of weight or direction. They look like ragdolls being flung around, going through moves with a speed that makes it all look false.

Transformers also has a propensity to waste time o things nobody wants to see, and fly through the things we do. Human drama goes on forever, only for the robot fights to last minutes or seconds. GvK kept the humans to an almost bare-minimum, with the title characters firmly taking center stage. The movie rarely lost steam with them because it always felt like they were right in the action. (mostly, team Godzilla were pretty much pointless aside from exposition) There was no half hour spent watching Sam getting a job in DOTM, for example. GvK wasted little time getting to the good parts, and they were good. Transformers dragged just getting to the robot action, and half the time said action was fleeting or just boring.

Pretty much.

The Transformers movies were not just dumb action. They were dumb drama, dumb mystery, dumb thriller, dumb everything. GvK wasn't smart, but it wasn't dumb. It actually delivered on its promise of bombastic action and spectacle, rather than promising excitement and delivering mere noise.

AOE did pretty much flop, domestically, saved only by China.

 

A lot of people liked dark of the moon outside the Us,it got an A cinema score and it took aoe 3 years to come out until they saw how terrible it was and people turned away from the franchise.

 

And the thing about KOTM is that it really needed to be a three hour movie to do everything it wanted to without feeling like a Michael Bay fever dream. Essential plot elements are haphazardly mentioned as asides and usually told rather than shown. There's a really good movie buried in there somewhere...but I felt like I just got off a roller-coaster where I'm already over the hill before I could process the last drop. Just awful storytelling.

GvK at least slowed the plot down and, despite one glaring plot hole, tells a solid story.

 

If more people on the boards understood this, that AoE pretty much was a warning sign of the franchise's collapse as realized by TLK, then maybe they would understand that a movie making big numbers on the surface is not indicative of the actual quality nor popularity of said movie.

I've never seen a single film get a failing grade on Cinemascore so is it really a valid system when it just says everything is good?