I Watched As Many Michael Bay Movies as Possible For Some Reason

BY JACOB SILBERMAN-BARON

MICHAEL BAY is one of the great oddities of Wesleyan. On one hand, he’s one of our most commercially successful alumni. On the other hand, I can’t imagine anyone walking out of one of his movies extolling the virtues of a liberal arts education. At Wesleyan, Bay didn’t fit in much. In describing it, he said, “Wesleyan was very cliquey. They all wore dark clothing, and they were always uggghhhhh .” It’s unclear to me exactly what “ ugggghhhh ” means, but it’s quite clear that he didn’t fit in with the artsy, pretentious vibe of this fine institution. He wanted to make something commercial. Personally, I’m quite an ugggghhhh person. I like Charlie Kaufman movies and Oscar bait. I hadn’t seen many Michael Bay movies, and, prompted by a different writing project which this turned out to be completely unnecessary for, I decided to watch as many Michael Bay movies as possible. It wouldn’t be enough, however, to settle for a shallow mockery of Bay: I had to understand him.

The popular vision of Michael Bay can be summed up in one word: explosions. It is with mixed emotions that I report that, although that description might be reductive, it isn’t exactly wrong. Bay also likes gunfire, cars, helicopters, and hot women. Bay started as a music video director, and these early videos show a bold visual style. He even directed the original Got Milk? com - mercial, where an Aaron Burr expert misses a trivia question about who shot Alexander Hamilton because he runs out of milk. (Chalk the Hamilton thing up to a little Wesleyan coincidence.) After making some waves with his bold visual sensibility, he made his first feature film with Bad Boys . I had always thought of this movie as a Will Smith vehicle, but the opposite is actually true. Before, Will Smith was a sitcom actor. Afterward, he became a real movie star. I didn’t love Bad Boys. The plotting spent too much time on a tired “one of them pretending to be the other” dynamic, and it wasn’t all that funny. I should also note that, with the busy life of a college sophomore, I watched it over the course of days, and the energy of a Michael Bay movie isn’t conducive to stopping and starting. Still, a Bay craziness shone through occasionally. The Bay visual style feels like being on an intense psychedelic drug that is sometimes composed of metal. Cuts are quick, cameras move fast, and there are strange metallic sounds in the background. Why isn’t there more nuttiness in Bad Boys ? According to Bay, he didn’t have enough money. Thankfully, that was remedied with Armageddon , which centers on a team of oil drillers trying to stop world destruction. These days, the world ending in a movie is an almost banal threat, but Bay makes it quite real with short montages of ran - dom destruction. I found myself cackling with delight at the sheer magnitude of it.

Not only is Armageddon a movie of big explosions, it’s also a movie of big emotions. In order to introduce the characters, Bay has Bruce Willis fire a rifle at Ben Affleck while running through a collapsing oil rig. All that he needed to do was tell us that Willis’s character isn’t happy about his daughter dating Affleck’s character, but Bay chooses violent excess. It’s glorious. It’s a mistake to watch a Michael Bay movie and sneer at it for being dumb. Stupidity is the point. Gyllenhaal commented in an interview that he knew Bay liked a take when he would shake his head and say “That’s so stupid.” When a Michael Bay movie was working, I found myself aghast at the utter scale of its stupidity.

The problem with Bay’s next movie, Pearl Harbor , is that it isn’t dumb enough. The scenes of Pearl Harbor being destroyed are spectacular (if quite disrespectful to the real-life tragedy). The rest of the movie passes at a crawl. Some bright studio suit wanted Bay to make a Titanic -style historical epic and win an Oscar for it. (The film won an Oscar for sound editing, but received terrible reviews.) Someone thought Bay could pull off an epic love story, but as a stunt coordinator for Bay told GQ, “Michael Bay is not gonna tell a love story.” So, the first hour and a half of the movie is stuffed with dull romantic scenes. He gets to fly some planes and have some hot women stab needles into men’s asses (a Bay motif), but the scenes of characters talking to each other about their emotions feel seven times their length. I could almost hear Bay saying “I don’t give a shit about any of this.”

Pearl Harbor is such a terrible movie that it inspired a love song in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America with lyrics like: “I need you like Ben Affleck needs acting school.” Bay doesn’t seem fazed by the criticism. His response: “I think I dated that guy’s girlfriend.” Sadly, I was unable to cross-reference a list of Parker and Stone’s girlfriends with Bay’s, so I have no idea who he is referring to or if it is at all true.

After a forgotten flop, Bay reclaimed commercial success with the Transformers series, then made Pain and Gain in 2013. If Pearl Harbor is a pale James Cameron impression, Pain and Gain is a somewhat more successful Martin Scorsese impression. Released the same year as Wolf of Wall Street , the film follows the rise-and-fall template of Goodfellas or Raging Bull , complete with narration. Claiming to be based on a true story, we follow a team of bodybuilders who kidnap a rich man to steal his money. In addition to hav - ing a unique visual style, Bay has also developed a trademark style of acting. It involves yelling as loudly as possible at another actor or, often, directly into the camera. There’s no room for subtle buildup or cool anger: it’s best to stay as loud as possible as often as possible. Sometimes, this is played for humor, and it never really started being funny. This style of acting is part of the reason Pain and Gain doesn’t entirely work. Bay’s visual panache is appreciated here, and the editing keeps things moving obnoxiously quick. The script, by two guys who went on to write Avengers: Endgame , is competent enough, even if it relies too much on voiceover narration. Bay beats you over the head sometimes, but I didn’t expect subtlety. Plus, Ed Harris shows up halfway through the movie to play a private investigator, and he gives a deliciously un-Bay performance with a noir detective feel. I might have been getting exhausted by Bay. There are only so many times in a week you can be amazed by an explosion. His hyperactive editing style was starting to tire out my eyes. When I saw 6 Underground , a movie that qualifies as pure chaos by any reasonable definition, I was nodding off. Thank - fully, there’s still a masterpiece left in the Bay chronology: Ambulance . Made for a comparatively pithy $40 million, the film is a 140-minute car chase set in an ambulance. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the most insane man you have ever seen on film–we’re told he robbed 37 banks in the past ten years–whose heist goes wrong. His performance is so positively unhinged that it seems like he’s trying to one-up Bay himself. In general, Bay likes to let his actors improvise, but Gyllenhaal apparently directed entire scenes. Like the best Bay fare, Ambulance is spectacularly dumb. The greatest hits include Gyllenhaal firing at helicopters with a machine gun from the moving ambulance and a surgery that involves both an exploding spleen and patching an artery with a hair clip. Ambulance also relies less on explosions (don’t worry: there are still a bunch of them) and more on subtler forms of violence like gunfire, breaking glass, fire extinguishers, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s face. Oddly, Ambulance seems to break the pattern of Bay’s career. Most of his movies get terrible reviews and go on to gross hundreds of millions of dollars. Ambulance is one of two entries in the Bay canon to get a positive Rotten Tomatoes score (68% positive reviews), but it flopped at the box office, making $51 million worldwide against a $40 million budget, losing money for the studio. In the grand scheme of his career, however, I’m sure Michael Bay will be fine.

I’m not sure exactly what to take away from this experiment. Watching a substantial proportion of most directors’ filmography generally gives me a sense of their interests, themes, and a deeper understanding of craft. Bay, however, has a remarkably rigid set of interests: violence, destruction, hot guys, hot girls, America, and, of course, explosions. He’s good at a few things (action setpieces and frenetic editing) but terrible at more important ones (story and character).

I’m one of the ugghhhhh Wesleyan students that he so hated, but I’m not immune to the charms of Bay. When a Michael Bay movie was really working, it was a case for a different approach to film. Forget about the idea that movies should have some social or political importance, forget about plot holes, forget about three-dimensional characters, forget about the Rotten Tomatoes score and what your friends say on Letterboxd, and sit back, be amazed, and shout: “This is awesome!”