I will say, yes, I detest Michael Bay movies because, yes, he embodies almost ALL of the worst tropes of sleazy, greedy, stupid, ignorant Hollywood, turning minorities into wacky stereotypes, women into interchangeable sex objects, and "action" from something dynamic and interesting into unbearably boring, dull, sense-numbing meaninglessness.
But he's not alone. Yes, we hate on Michael Bay, but people are plenty upset at Brett Ratner as well, or Uwe Boll, or any other direct that has taken something positive and beloved and sucked the heart, soul, and joy out of it.
Yes, audiences are chiefly the problem (How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Edge of Tomorrow struggle at the box office, while Transformers 4 opens to record numbers...). This is the FOURTH stupid awful Transformers movie. Fool us once, shame on Michael Bay. Fool us twice, shame on us. Fool us three times, we're dribbling idiots. Fool us FOUR times, we're proof to aliens that intelligent life doesn't exist on earth.
From Optimus Prime vowing to leave humanity to die, "Tranformium" making Avatar's "unobtanium" look sensible by comparison, My Little Pony machine guns, and STATUTORY RAPE (seriously, Michael Bay?!) involving two of the lead human characters... the movie is bad, and the audience is bad for supporting it.
I haven't. I had enough. I'm done. A trailer of Optimus Prime riding a robot dinosaur into battle with a broadsword may sell tickets, but people aren't paying to see the rest of the crap. They are paying for a mountain of crap to find the gold nuggets buried inside, because that SHOULD be awesome and yet somehow isn't, or it's surrounded by so much filth that it doesn't matter.
I believe audiences pay for it because there's nothing else. No one else is making a Transformers movie. No one has been given that chance. The series, at heart, is beloved, if mutated by another man's juvenile vision involving robot testicles and humping dogs. It's like if the ONLY Batman movies you could ever see were directed by Joel Schaumacher and you never even knew a film like The Dark Knight could ever or would ever exist, so you pay to see your favorite hero on the big screen because nobody else is doing it and it's better than nothing, right?
I'll stick with nothing. Marvel has proved you can respect your material, respect your audience, and make more money than Transformers has at the box office. IMAGINE a Transformers film with the same level of sharp writing, joyful celebration of its history and fanbase, and tell me it would somehow make less money than what we continue to settle for.
Michael Bay is neither THE problem nor THE victim. He's one broken cog in a giant broken machine. He's an enabler. He's a contributor. He's not alone, but he's not someone I'll ever "leave alone".
Because how dare I stand against the masses, against him, and demand of him better quality. To demand he show my race, my culture, my gender, more respect than any of his movies have ever portrayed them as. How dare I sit back and let him peddle his wares and reap his millions while intelligent, thoughtful, creative directors out there struggle to pitch ideas outside of the "transformers" safe money zone.
So, welcome to our hell, MovieBob. Welcome to the same disgust and sad ambivalence you felt watching Amazing Spider-man 2 and realize, for us, that something like Transformers will not EVER get better because his films make money, while at least ASM2 under-performed. There is hope for Spider-man, and you can even tell, for all its flaws, that the people involved are TRYING not to suck, but just lack the talent or time to make it happen. Michael Bay, in his own words, "doesn't care" if you like the movie. His writer openly admitted "I don't care about making sense". Nobody cared...
... but I do. And it sucks to see both the industry and the audience give him a pass.
