This is not so much a review as a collection of random observations.
I had sworn to never ever watch this thing for a number of reasons, but I was bored and depressed today and it happened to be on and, well, I watched it. From now on, I will be keeping a lethal amount of white horse in my house for the next time I'm that bored and depressed.
God LORD. It was like they tried to make the dialog as unbearable as possible.
Now, my experience with Michael Bay has been minimal I saw The Rock years ago and I didn't like it very much. This was back before he was considered the cinematic antichrist. I saw Armageddon, which I didn't mind as much as everyone else. And I watched Transformers just now. That is pretty much it for his directing. I didn't even watch his Playboy videos.
I did, however, kind of watch The Island, but not really. I wasn't watching it, but my roommate was. I was in and out of the room doing other things, only watching it occasionally. As it happens, I missed all the action scenes but caught most of the dialog scenes. I felt like I didn't miss a single thing. This means that all of the action sequences were completely extraneous. They had no bearing whatsoever on the plot.
Way I see it, most of the people working in Hollywood right now are looking for some formula to use when making films. Some sure-fire way to get a decent return on the investment. I can't say I blame them since films are incredibly expensive, but this does mean that quality has taken a nose dive in recent years. Sorry kids, but the movies you grew up on suck.
Bay's formula is a bit more apparent to me after watching Transformers. Let me see if i can explain it.
One, the film is briskly paced. We are constantly changing scenes and actions. This is not a bad thing because if the characters kept doing the same goddamned thing the entire movie, it would get boring. However, Bay uses a cheap method to keep things moving. It's almost a magic trick, narrative sleight-of-hand.
Also, he tends to have every single character deliver comic relief. Noah "Spoony" Antwiler said of the recent Transformers sequel that there were a lot of comic relief characters. I say they all are so that at the first opportunity any give character can quip something witty to get a cheap laugh out of the audience.
But the real magic is in the plot. The plot is filled with dead ends and cul-de-sacs but these things do not matter because they all point the same direction. For instance, a big plot point was made out of Sam's grandfather's glasses which they needed to find the All Spark, but they wind up taken to the government installation where the All Spark was hidden without use of the glasses. The glasses became completely irrelevant, but we still got to the ultimate goal anyway.
See what happened there? A goal was set up: find the All Spark, which looks like the Hellraiser cube incidentally. A means to that goal was put forth, finding Sam's grandfather's glasses. But the glasses were all but forgotten along the way but it didn't matter because the goal was completed anyway. The plot flows along but causality does not seem to matter. We get to that point regardless. Finding the glasses was just something to run out the clock.
The entire movie is filled with such dead ends and narrative busywork that gets abandoned when it is no longer necessary. If one were to model the plot of this movie with, say, a flow chart. It would require two structures. One would be the main plot and the second would be made of small segments detailing the inconsequential actions the characters take to try to follow the main plot, even though they really do not pan out.
I had sworn to never ever watch this thing for a number of reasons, but I was bored and depressed today and it happened to be on and, well, I watched it. From now on, I will be keeping a lethal amount of white horse in my house for the next time I'm that bored and depressed.
God LORD. It was like they tried to make the dialog as unbearable as possible.
Now, my experience with Michael Bay has been minimal I saw The Rock years ago and I didn't like it very much. This was back before he was considered the cinematic antichrist. I saw Armageddon, which I didn't mind as much as everyone else. And I watched Transformers just now. That is pretty much it for his directing. I didn't even watch his Playboy videos.
I did, however, kind of watch The Island, but not really. I wasn't watching it, but my roommate was. I was in and out of the room doing other things, only watching it occasionally. As it happens, I missed all the action scenes but caught most of the dialog scenes. I felt like I didn't miss a single thing. This means that all of the action sequences were completely extraneous. They had no bearing whatsoever on the plot.
Way I see it, most of the people working in Hollywood right now are looking for some formula to use when making films. Some sure-fire way to get a decent return on the investment. I can't say I blame them since films are incredibly expensive, but this does mean that quality has taken a nose dive in recent years. Sorry kids, but the movies you grew up on suck.
Bay's formula is a bit more apparent to me after watching Transformers. Let me see if i can explain it.
One, the film is briskly paced. We are constantly changing scenes and actions. This is not a bad thing because if the characters kept doing the same goddamned thing the entire movie, it would get boring. However, Bay uses a cheap method to keep things moving. It's almost a magic trick, narrative sleight-of-hand.
Also, he tends to have every single character deliver comic relief. Noah "Spoony" Antwiler said of the recent Transformers sequel that there were a lot of comic relief characters. I say they all are so that at the first opportunity any give character can quip something witty to get a cheap laugh out of the audience.
But the real magic is in the plot. The plot is filled with dead ends and cul-de-sacs but these things do not matter because they all point the same direction. For instance, a big plot point was made out of Sam's grandfather's glasses which they needed to find the All Spark, but they wind up taken to the government installation where the All Spark was hidden without use of the glasses. The glasses became completely irrelevant, but we still got to the ultimate goal anyway.
See what happened there? A goal was set up: find the All Spark, which looks like the Hellraiser cube incidentally. A means to that goal was put forth, finding Sam's grandfather's glasses. But the glasses were all but forgotten along the way but it didn't matter because the goal was completed anyway. The plot flows along but causality does not seem to matter. We get to that point regardless. Finding the glasses was just something to run out the clock.
The entire movie is filled with such dead ends and narrative busywork that gets abandoned when it is no longer necessary. If one were to model the plot of this movie with, say, a flow chart. It would require two structures. One would be the main plot and the second would be made of small segments detailing the inconsequential actions the characters take to try to follow the main plot, even though they really do not pan out.
