The Futility of Plot: Michael Bay and Transformers 2

So, I am a Michael Bay fan. Yes. It's out there. I said it. I think that he makes films that are undeniably visceral and thrilling, but which also bear a distinct personality and style. So what if that style and personality are resolutely juvenile and shallow? He is a frat-boy auteur, possessed with a keen eye for the visual and an admirable economy in his storytelling which happens to be exclusively in service of ridiculous and bombastic action spectacles.

Which brings me to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It is, simply, Bay's best movie. Oh as a film it is pretty bad, failing in some of the most basic aspects of filmmaking, such as plot, characters and even basic shot to shot continuity. But it is so aggressive in its disregard for these tenets, so baldly uncaring in the way it discards them that it achieves an anarchic quality altogether missing from the staid American blockbuster scene.

Take the "plot" if you will. It makes literally zero sense in any traditional way, but this only serves Bay's greater purpose. Bay knows that the plots of these films are utterly inconsequential and only exist to frame the expensive action set pieces. By virtue of the plot being so incomprehensible as to be utterly void, Bay is both giving the audience exactly what they want and exposing the trappings of his chosen genre. While other films cynically pretend to be interested in the "plot", Bay gets right to the heart of the matter. The greasy, clogged arteries of modern blockbuster cinema.

The final battle of Transformers 2 is also instrumental in understanding the wonders of Bay's approach. It is almost hallucinatory in its flow of imagery; hundreds of indistinguishable robots clanging up against each other in an utterly incomprehensible spectacle. I've seen the film several times now and still I cannot explain what is supposed to be happening in those final 45 minutes. Something about a matrix and robot truck nuts. I don't know. But that's the brilliance of it. It's almost like watching an animated Dali painting while bombs go off in the background and someone pelts you with paintballs while you take unbelievable quantities of LSD. Bay has whittled every soulless blockbuster spectacle into its purest essence. While other blockbuster directors (lookin' at you Roland Emmerich) only flirt with the abyss, Bay dives headlong into it. Sheer genius.

Michael Bay has made good films (The Rock, The Island) and he has made bad films (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor). But Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is Bay's masterpiece. The summation of who he is as a director, his style, his themes etc. Those who say it isn't good are missing the point. Bay isn't concerned with your trivial concepts of good or bad. He's concerned with giving his audience what they want, but at such an absurd scale as to force us to contemplate what we are seeing, to recognize the absurdities inherent in things like story and character, especially within this genre. The man is an artist, and this is his Mona Lisa.