Michael Bay Must Die -- a rant
Okay, so I gave him a pass when it was said that he would be handling the Transformers franchise of movies. Sure, he had laid the unwatchable rotten eggs that were Pearl Harbor, Mystery Men and Armageddon, but had also given us the Bad Boys films as well.
Coyote Ugly wasn’t very good either, but the T&A aspect was apparently the saving grace in my then 21-year-old mind. Bastardization of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm St franchises have shown audiences that Michael Bay is obsessed with 3 things, apparently.
- Explody/blowuppy slow-motion scenes
- Titties
- Aliens
As kids, we were fine with the Transformers as robots from a land that we did not understand, but did not need to have a reason for their existence as long as we got good cartoons and bomb-ass toys out of it. To make a movie out of them, though, Michael Bay had to make them into “alien life forms.”
Fair enough, he maintained the story and told it well enough, and the generally violent nature of the cartoon battles left it to that he could HAVE his explosions and probably use the spinning camera and slow motion to get it… fine.
The first of the three transformers movies was fine by me, I loved it so much that I saw it in theaters three times, bought the DVD when it came out, then gave that away and bought the Blu Ray when I got a PS3. The bloodlust for what Michael Bay may attempt on my childhood was eased.
… for a moment…
The second movie was STRICTLY “explody/blowupy” in nature and included some T&A as well, with the slow-mo of Megan Fox (for which I do not complain), but the movie had nothing to do with nothing. “hey, let’s go to fucking AFRICA this time!” and there we have it.
The third one featured a plot and story so convoluted that it took too long to get off the ground for anything that matters and I STILL haven’t been able to finish the movie in one sitting.
So now, after taking the Japanese in Pearl Harbor and making them damn near into aliens to take creative liberties with a historical event so unrealistic it did not need them, doing the same with THREE horror franchises with built-in audiences and now my generation’s (age 27-40, roughly) beloved Transformers and killing that in the face, what was left?
That’s right, for those who pay attention to nerd news or sometimes even the regular liberal media, you know that he has apparently fixed his crosshairs on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… except now, you can remove that “Mutant” part from it.
[link]
While the story as presented was wholly unrealistic – about as realistic as aliens, perhaps – it was written, accepted and pretty much canonized comic book and 1987-96 cartoon series. That means we have ALL accepted one insult upon our intelligence and might react badly to any new ones.
That, and we’ve already had 3 live-actor and one CGI film in the series, what new could he possibly look to gain or present in this? Will it be a remake of the very first film with some retconning of the story to something now, or will he lean heavily on his revisionist approach to film-making and simply change history, then challenge you to question it?
I think we all know what we need to do, here.
At some point, Michael Bay has made a film that has bastardized some presentation of something in our pasts, and it is time we stopped giving him a free pass for it. I cannot realistically expect that a blog with only the two of you reading to set any kind of boycott that would matter into motion, so we have to take the next best step.
Michael Bay must die.
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