7 Cliches from Michael Bay Movies

Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” was released this week, and we are once again faced with the baffling continued success of an action director whose output is pretty consistently overblown, loud, dumb, and difficult to watch. Sure, many of us have a weakness for one of his films or another (I have met several defenders of “The Rock,” some people like to pair up “Point Break” with Bay’s “Bad Boys II,” and more than one of my peers has said “The first Transformers movie wasn’t that bad!”), but many agree that he’s largely a director of clunky, melodramatic operas with dumb love triangles, bad performances from good actors, and hundreds of explosions. His ability to blow shit up real good seems to be his only virtue.

And while I have a modicum of faith that one day he’ll make something a bit more soulful and personal, he seems to be stuck in a mold of a very specific kind of action flick. I understand that a man like Bay is essentially an industry in himself; he can’t make a movie without having to hire the same 800-person team of effects technicians and military consultants, but his so-called Industry films are all very similar in their level of technical competence and visual confusion.

And every one of his films to date (he has made nine features) has contained the following cliches, whether by design, or just by Bay’s own subconscious interests. Most directors have a visual flare, a style all their own, that they bring to each of their films. The better directors (or at least the more interesting ones) have a unique vision of the world, that they’re constantly trying to share with the world. Bay’s interests and style seem to skew in the following directions:

Power Ballads 

In “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” there seem to be no scenes at all that are entirely quiet. If the scene is even remotely warm or emotional, the soundtrack will drop to its knees like a Christian rocker, and wait away on its microphone about the pain it has in its heart. The layered guitars and high-pitched white guy power rock is ever-present in each of Bay’s film, with the exception of “Pearl Harbor,” which, to be fair, took place in the ’30s and ’40s.

I do have to admit, I often have a weakness for a good power ballad, and I am guilty of being the one to take the stage at karaoke and sing “Come Sail Away.” Indeed, Bay’s inclusion of Aerosmith’s song “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” on the soundtrack to “Armageddon” was kind of a brilliant move, earning Aerosmith an Oscar nomination, and effectively bringing them back into the public eye. I support this move.

However, Bay is so fond of the screamy version of power rock, that he stuffs it into every possible scene that doesn’t have an explosion in it. This is typical of Bay. Why have a quiet, subtle, moment of real human connection, when it can be EFFING HUGE?

Women as objects 

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and refrain from calling Bay a misogynist, as he got his start with Playboy Magazine, shooting documentaries about monthly Centerfolds. Whatever you think of the people who shoot softcore smut, this was Bay’s original idiom. And I’ll give him this: he sure knows how to shoot a woman’s body. Early in “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” when we first see the film’s lead actress (former Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), Bay gives us a loving close-up of her tawny thigh and high, firm buttocks.

A fellow critic called this loving close up “date rape with a camera.” And while Bay is certainly not the worst director about objectifying and hurting women on camera (look to Lars Von Trier for that), there is a level of discomfort in the way he depicts the fairer sex on camera. In “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” Shia LeBeouf’s character goes to college for the first time, and the college campus looks like a cattle call for a Maxim Magazine shoot; each of the women is a professional model, who wears tight, skimpy clothing, and seems capable of shooting a beer bong with the fellas. When we first see Megan Fox in “Transformers,” the camera leers at her like a lecherous old man. Even Lisa Boyle in “Bad Boys” spends the bulk of the film parading around in a flimsy outfit.

I understand that these are films for teenage boys, and including sexy ladies in sexy outfits is a b-movie trope as old as cinema itself, but I would appreciate it if Bay included some female characters who were well-rounded human being, rather than mynx-like whores, or blushing virgins.

Too many closeups 

You’d think that a director known for action would be more keen in including long, distant shots of the action’s scenario. Like extended effects shots where we can see the car crashing, the building collapsing, the robots fighting. It’s like the difference between a long, single-take dance scene in an old musical, and a 100-time-edited dance scene in a more recent one.

But rather than let his action scenes play themselves out organically, Bay seem hellbent on including extreme closeups of his heroes faces, usually at an obnoxious Dutch angle, to imply intensity. The closeups are intended to, I suppose, convey that our hero, while in the midst of a noisy battle scene, is having a moment of panic, of real human emotions. But the way he incorporated them only shows a jarring edit to something outside the action.

Even when they’re not in an action scene, Bay seems to put his camera a little bit too close to his actors for comfort. Watch “Pearl Harbor,” and note how many mid-close-ups there are. The number is less than ten. Instead, he has over-the-shoulder shots aplenty, and extreme closeups that cut off the actors’ skullcaps and chins.

Bad editing 

Bay has hired mostly different editors for each of his films (indeed, there were three on “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” and “Armageddon,” respectively), but each of his films seems to be edited in the same way: incoherently. While the action scenes are edited in such a way that we can see cars being pulled in half, Japanese bombers hitting ships, and trains rolling off of enormous trucks, the editing throughout the rest of the films all seem to have the same frantic, bombastic quality that the power ballads do.

Note to Michael Bay: Not every scene in your film has to be a climax. Climaxes only work when they are spaced out. When they have been punctuated by drama and a slow build up. Not when they’re loud and fast, and thrown about any which way in your film. I recall a scene in “The Island” when Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are going to kiss for the first time, and the scene gives up some weird obscuring edits to make sure the tender moment of two being discovering their sexuality for the first time is completely toothless.

It’s one thing to edit an action scene like an action scene (the weird close-ups notwithstanding). It’s another to edit your entire film as if it’s an action scene.

Vehicle fetish 

“Bad Boys II” had that scene where the Hum-V crashes through a slum. “The Island” had that train thing on the back of a truck. “The Rock” had another Hum-V. “Armageddon” was all about drills and ships and spacecraft. And what are the “Transformers” movies if not a prolonged fetishistic look at our cars and planes? Michael Bay has the biggest hardon for cars and trucks in the history of the entertainment industry, and I include David Cronenberg in that statement.

It’s been said that action directors make noisy and explodey films in order to sort of restack the mental deck away from actual sexuality, using a kind of ultra-violent substitution. Rather than showing people having real sex, we’ll have our release in the form of a car flying to pieces, a tank crushing a truck, or, most embarrassingly, the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Even when they can’t turn into talking robots, the cars and trucks in Bay’s films are all noisy, powerful, heavy, metal monstrosities that seem all-powerful. Bay gives the same loving attention to shiny cars, speedy jets, and bulky cargo planes that he does to women’s thighs and buttocks. Perhaps he’s just trying to hit all the bases, and make sure he films all the things teenage boys are interested in (loud cars and lithe bodies are often equal passions to young men), but the Venn diagram, in Bay’s case, seems to overlap to a discomforting degree.

Military fetish 

Even more than his loving, sexual attention given to cars and planes, Bay seems to have a powerfully sexual interest in the military. Every single one of his feature films features the military in a prominent role. Seriously. A;ll of them. Large, burly men in black-ops outfits, running in teams, making formations, giving hand signals, and leveling their weapons at whatever the bad guy is today… this seems to be Bay’s version of foreplay.

Again, a gunfight is all well and good, but Bay ratchets his gunfight scenes up to such a degree that they take on an orgiastic quality. He doesn’t sexualize the men like a more sexual director would (Paul Verhoeven, for instance, would make sure to show the military guys with their shirts off), but seems much more interested in the details of military tactics, the shape, gait and fighting stances of the men when they’re in the heat of action. It’s essentially pornography, featuring only men, intended for straight guys, and only incidentally having no sex.

Any film to feature the military often needs direct co-operation with the U.S. armed forces. How else are you going to get access to real tanks, planes and uniforms? It’d cost a lot to rent such things. So many film producers merely ask for help from the actual USMC. As a result, the films have to be slightly pro-military by default; it’d be hard to work with real general and tank marshals if you’re making a film about how horrible those men are. Bay not only makes sure the military is depicted as a heroic force of big-biceped badasses, but goes one step further, showing that they’re the only REAL men in the world.

Helicopters at sunrise 

Every single one of Bay’s films (again, every single one, without exception) features the following shot: A group of helicopters swits silently by (in slow-motion), while the warming orange glow of the sunrise (or sunset) filters through their spinning blades. It’s said that most directors have a shot they like to return to, or an angle they’re kind of fond of. If Bay has any trademark, it’s the helicopters at sunrise shot.

Indeed, I was so familiar with this shot, that when I went into “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” I was looking for it. It only happens briefly in that film, but there is a shot of circling helicopters against an orange sky. It’s like clockwork with that guy.

It was one of the first shots in “The Rock.” It was used at the launch in “Armageddon,” The “Bad Boys” movies are almost completely orange. My goodness. It’s like Bay saw “Apocalypse Now” at an early age, and fell in love with it to an irrational degree. This is a shot that no other director has taken, and no other director would have the chutzpah to take. This is distinctly Bay’s, and always will be. 

Witney Seibold is a film critic and theater worker living in Los Angeles. When he’s not writing bitter, troll-baiting articles for Geekscape, he’s writing equally bitter film reviews over on his ‘blog Three Cheers for Darkened Years!, or being the more sour half of The B-Movies Podcast on Crave Online. He’ll be going to the San Diego Comic Convention in a few weeks, so keep an eye out for him, as you’ll be able to insult him to his face, and likely make him cry.