“I don’t change my style for anybody. Pussies do that.”
The above is a quote from a GQ article with Michael Bay*, and it’s fairly representative of his body of work. Say what you want about Bay’s shortcomings (which I fully intend to do below), but he’s one of the few filmmakers working today that you can truly refer to as an “auteur.” The same article quotes several filmmakers and actors, including Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and George Lucas, who all state that Michael Bay’s style is unmissable, that he stages large action sequences like nobody else, and that you can easily ascertain that a film is directed by Michael Bay from only five minutes of footage.
*You can find the GQ article here.
I’m not about to argue with Lucas and Spielberg about Bay’s strengths: he is clearly one of the most skilled technical directors in Hollywood. However, when it comes to character motivation and plot development, he’s completely out of his element. Michael Bay’s ego on-set and his characters’ behavior suggest a man who has little understanding of how other people think or feel. If you just accept that Bay is a sociopath, emotionally incapable of feeling empathy, his whole oeuvre begins to make more sense.
Transformers 4: Age of Extinction is no exception to the rule. While it’s hard to fault the action sequences, the plot makes very little sense and all characters, including the heroes, are remarkably unlikable. All Transformers, including the Autobots, are interested primarily in killing things in this installment. Even Optimus Prime, the one who supposedly dictated that autobots do not kill humans, threatens to murder Mark Wahlberg the first moment he sees him. Later, he threatens to murder the Dinobots if they don’t do his bidding. What a hero!
Wahlberg (his character name is “Cade,” so I’m just going to keep calling him Wahlberg) isn’t much better. He threatens to beat innocent people with baseball bats, steals things he wants and can’t afford, has no sympathy for other humans, and has entirely unrealistic (and often creepy) expectations regarding his seventeen-year-old daughter and boys. His daughter barely registers as a character, and mostly functions to give her boyfriend and her father a conflict. The boyfriend registers as a total creep, who literally keeps a card stating a legal statute in his pocket to explain why it’s okay that he’s a twenty-year-old race car driver who is sexually involved with a seventeen-year-old high school student. Kelsey Grammar and Titus Welliver are both one-note government stooges, Stanley Tucci has little-to-no motivation at all, and there’s no reason to care about anything onscreen.
Beyond this, the plot is muddled beyond comprehension. The first hour of the film sets up a primary threat in which the creator of the Transformers has sent a bounty hunter to trick the government into killing all of the Transformers. This is never made particularly clear, but at least it’s a single, unified threat. Then, an hour into the film, Tucci’s character is introduced and we learn of a completely separate threat, in which a tech company (Tucci is notably modeled after Steve Jobs) has accidentally revived and upgraded Megatron, who was killed in Transformers 3. The two threats never actually align in the plot, aside from both showing up in Shanghai for the third act, when all of the Transformers start killing each other for about an hour. If you’ve been following the Transformers movies up to this point, you may be starting to see a pattern.
The nicest thing I can say about this movie, outside of the previously-stated well-shot destruction, is that the first 45 minutes are generally functional. I don’t mean that they’re good, I just mean that they track logically and scenes are generally there for a reason. Due to this alone, Age of Extinction is a slight improvement over the last two films in the series.
Given Bay’s strengths with visuals and complete failure to understand anything else about filmmaking, I would love to see Michael Bay work as a cinematographer for a different director’s movie. Alas, that would never happen. Only a pussy would do that.