Dear Escapist friends,
I've decided to watch Michael Bay's Transformers movies because... well, for one because I have never seen them and was curious, but also because I always felt it's interesting to look at works usually dimissed as, you know, bad. Now, I knew for a fact that Bay's a pretty talented guy. Pain and Gain is one of my favourite movies of the past decade and proves quite conclusively that he's not by any means the immature overgrown fratboy detractors often make him out to be. Crass and vulgar as it was, Pain and Gain was in many ways a pretty introspective and socially aware movie. It didn't exactly paint a very favourable picture of the society it's aware of but I can't blame it for that. So I was very eager to see if the Transformers series deserved the reputation it had.
So, let me start this off saying that I have absolutely no experience with the Transformers franchise outside of these movies and I don't care to. I'm vaguely aware that there's a group of sentimental Gen Xers who maintain that the animated movie from the 80s still holds up but quite frankly, I don't give a dang, for what it's worth, the backstory of the actual robots was the least interesting thing about these movies. What I will say is that they were interesting.
Most modern franchise movies are a pretty homogenized affair. You watch any given Marvel movie and they have more or less the same style of writing and more or less the same look, same goes, to a lesser extent, for Star Wars and post-BvS DC. The actual directors feels quite incidental to them. The Transformers movies feel like Michael Bay movies through and through, there's absolutely no attempt made to dial back his style to please the studio. All of Bay's obsessions, the sports cars, the women in tight hot pants, the sunsets, the explosions and the vulgar humor, are right there. He's neither expected, nor willing to make any concessions to political correctness, accesibility or good taste. Every single one of these movies is unapologetically indulgent and I can't help but admire them for it. Bay creates some of the most colourful, elaborate, shamelessly sexual and visually pleasing images I have ever seen, all for the sake of a series of dumb movies about fighting toy robots.
Those movies technically have characters, both human and mechanical and they technically have stories, though it'd be hard for me to tell you more than the broad strokes of them. If pressed on it I'd even go as far as to say they have themes, first and foremost about the relationship between man and machine but all of that takes a backseat to Bay's baroque excesses.
The movies have become the go to example for disposable Hollywood trash, sound and fury, signifying nothing, but I don't think that quite does them justice. I don't think any one of them has a screenplay that's better than awful but one thing they're not is soulless. They are gorgeuosly shot and have some absolutely breathtaking imagery. We live in a world where someone like Joss Whedon can film superheroes as if they were office drones, without any sense of passion, wonder or excitement whatsoever. Almost each frame of Transformers is dripping with style. The iconic image of Megan Fox seductively opening up a car. Mark Wahlberg, playing an idealistic inventor, looking out at the sunset. The squeaky clean interior of a futuristic office building. The explosive fights between two groups of alien robots as buildings collapse around them. Bay lends a painterly sensibility to the most lowbrow of subject matters.
As poorly written as they are, there's a sense of mad genius to these movies. At their best they are a display of breathtaking futurism and boundless ambition, of blurring the line between realism and pop-art, at once stunningly beautiful and throughly disposable. Trash arranged as a work of art. The last movie, Last Knight in particular, almost experimental in it's editing. It's a movie where the aspect ratio can change with almost every single cut. No concern for visual coherency, only for what would look best in the moment, for one particular image. It's explosive climax easily among the most visually impressive sequences ever put to film, making Star Wars: Last Jedi and even Blade Runner 2049, both of which came out roughly around the same time, look quaint in comparison.
The Transformers movies are fascinating works, beautiful, vulgar, insane, sleazy, offensive and, in the end, utterly vapid. I don't regret seeing them, quite the opposite, I was entertained almost all the way through. There's a type of art in how utterly, uncompromisably indulgent they are. It's like watching a child play with his action figures which might make them a truer adaptation of the toys they are based on than any other ones. I'm not entirely sure if Bay is too good for this franchise but god knows he directed the shit out of those movies and if these screenplays had been adapted by anyone else, they never would have become the phenomenon they are. They are auteur trash. Science Fiction as imagined by Andy Warhol. A display of massive quantities of talent, money, time and labour used to create something utterly meaningless. 5 2,5 hour epics of pure mindless decadence.
Basically, what I'm saying is, I really liked them. 7.5/10
