Michael Bay: Supergenius
I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen last night, and I didn't understand any of it. Some people might attribute that to the movie being "dumb as balls" (Collin), or having "plot holes you could drive Optimus Prime through" (Yao) or to it being "the worst movie ever, bye" (Ben, as he left the theater about an hour into it).
But I think the real answer to why Transformers 2 was incomprehensible to the average viewer is that Michael Bay has a superpowered brain.
You know how the camera in Michael Bay movies is always moving? You know you can't take a full breath before the scene cuts to another shot, with the camera moving in another direction? I think that's how Michael Bay's eyeballs work. He sees everything, from all angles, in a flurry of visual information that his superpowered brain can instantly process into an organized, structured understanding of WHAT IS. Michael Bay sees all, and he's just trying to overcome the limits of a movie camera by constantly flinging it around on a crane and cutting between shots to approximate his personal godlike absorption of visual information.
Michael Bay's superpowers don't stop there. Michael Bay can hear sound in outer space! Michael Bay can see ambient light in the deepest depths of the ocean! Michael Bay can control his muscles well enough to survive impact after being thrown great distances by gigantic robot aliens!
This also explains the "excess" in Michael Bay movies. When you're experiencing the world on such a high level, what might seem impressive or entertaining to you or me seems dull and insignificant.
To Michael Bay, this explosion:
looks like:
This robot fight:
looks like:
This shot of Megan Fox:
looks like:
...and so on.
But I think Michael Bay is, to a certain extent, aware that he perceives the world differently than the rest of us. I point to his occassional use of slow motion (which is never quite as slow as your garden-variety slow motion, mind you), and to the “one shot in every Bay flick,” (per a recent A.V. Club write-up on the Bay oeuvre) "a low-angle, swooping camera move that frames the heroes, always looking upwards, in the center of the action till they nearly fill the screen."
That writer suggests the purpose of the shot is to make the heroes look “[l]ike gods, somehow, albeit very silly, mouth-breathing gods,” but my interpretation is that is what normal humans look like to Michael Bay at all times. When you or I looks up at the McDonald’s menu to figure out which Value Meal we want, the wheels in our head turning from “Big Mac?” to “No, McNuggets” appears to take HOURS to the supercharged Michael Bay. And to him, we also look exhausted from the decision. And maybe, in some benevolent way, Bay sees our ability to persevere in the fast food line with our puny little non-Bay brains heroic.
So, yes, I was terribly confused by the plot of Transformers, but I'm one of those slack-jawed slow-motion regular humans. To Michael Bay, a movie about the centuries of fallout from a civil war between a race of alien robots who disguise themselves as 20th-century methods of transportation arising over an energy crisis and ethical quandary related to a sun-harvesting machine inside a pyramid in ancient Egypt is as simple a plot as "Boy meets girl."
But I think the real answer to why Transformers 2 was incomprehensible to the average viewer is that Michael Bay has a superpowered brain.
You know how the camera in Michael Bay movies is always moving? You know you can't take a full breath before the scene cuts to another shot, with the camera moving in another direction? I think that's how Michael Bay's eyeballs work. He sees everything, from all angles, in a flurry of visual information that his superpowered brain can instantly process into an organized, structured understanding of WHAT IS. Michael Bay sees all, and he's just trying to overcome the limits of a movie camera by constantly flinging it around on a crane and cutting between shots to approximate his personal godlike absorption of visual information.
Michael Bay's superpowers don't stop there. Michael Bay can hear sound in outer space! Michael Bay can see ambient light in the deepest depths of the ocean! Michael Bay can control his muscles well enough to survive impact after being thrown great distances by gigantic robot aliens!
This also explains the "excess" in Michael Bay movies. When you're experiencing the world on such a high level, what might seem impressive or entertaining to you or me seems dull and insignificant.
To Michael Bay, this explosion:
looks like:
This robot fight:
looks like:
This shot of Megan Fox:
looks like:
...and so on.
But I think Michael Bay is, to a certain extent, aware that he perceives the world differently than the rest of us. I point to his occassional use of slow motion (which is never quite as slow as your garden-variety slow motion, mind you), and to the “one shot in every Bay flick,” (per a recent A.V. Club write-up on the Bay oeuvre) "a low-angle, swooping camera move that frames the heroes, always looking upwards, in the center of the action till they nearly fill the screen."
That writer suggests the purpose of the shot is to make the heroes look “[l]ike gods, somehow, albeit very silly, mouth-breathing gods,” but my interpretation is that is what normal humans look like to Michael Bay at all times. When you or I looks up at the McDonald’s menu to figure out which Value Meal we want, the wheels in our head turning from “Big Mac?” to “No, McNuggets” appears to take HOURS to the supercharged Michael Bay. And to him, we also look exhausted from the decision. And maybe, in some benevolent way, Bay sees our ability to persevere in the fast food line with our puny little non-Bay brains heroic.
So, yes, I was terribly confused by the plot of Transformers, but I'm one of those slack-jawed slow-motion regular humans. To Michael Bay, a movie about the centuries of fallout from a civil war between a race of alien robots who disguise themselves as 20th-century methods of transportation arising over an energy crisis and ethical quandary related to a sun-harvesting machine inside a pyramid in ancient Egypt is as simple a plot as "Boy meets girl."