Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn’t impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there’s I Watched This On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward and a good time.
I’ve never enjoyed a Michael Bay movie, but I’ve come to grudgingly respect that he must be on to something. I skipped Bad Boys, but caught The Rock in the theater in 1996, and found nearly every aspect of it hugely off-putting, starting with the rapid cutting, and carrying on through the disorienting action, the one-note characters, and the hokey and/or borderline-hateful humor. It was like a Tony Scott movie, but cranked up and dumbed down, which was no mean feat. I hoped never to see anything like it again. Most of the rest of the world disagreed, however. And so began the season of the Bay.
I used to toss around an article idea in my head called “The Rise And Fall Of The Summer Blockbuster,” tracing the progress of the big summer movie from the clever likes of Jaws to the prefab spectacle of the late ’90s and early ’00s, when Bay loomed large both with the movies he directed—Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, etc.—and the movies he influenced. Jerry Bruckheimer produced all of Bay’s movies up through Bad Boys II. When he wasn’t making Bay movies, he farmed out the Bay aesthetic to other directors, who repurposed it in movies like Gone In 60 Seconds and Con Air.
It was a long headache for those of us not taken with the Michael Bay magic. And while I remain unenchanted, I think I’ve started to understand how that magic works. Try watching one of Bay’s movies and pausing on every shot. (Beware carpal-tunnel syndrome.) Bay has a hell of an eye and a nice sense of composition. There’s a lot of effort behind each shot, and a lot of shots to house that effort. My mind boggles at the amount of work that goes into a Michael Bay movie, and I’ve got no doubt that he’s the hardest-working part of the machine.
On a second-by-second basis, Bay knows how to make exciting movies. But it’s the absence of connective tissue between those seconds—I have no idea what was going on in that final fight scene in Transformers—that always pulls me out of the movie. Well, that and an overwhelming sense that all the effort being applied to the movie’s spectacle neglects things at the core, like story and character. I always get the sense that more thought has been put into the way smoke spreads against the side of a building following a mammoth explosion, or the texture of objects visible for milliseconds as they fly at the camera, than why stuff is blowing up, or who’s fleeing those flying objects and that fireball.
Cultural infamy and curiosity factor: Which brings us, at last, to The Island, which I watched on purpose. Why? I could plead some combination of masochism and morbid curiosity. It is, after all, a notorious flop—err, financial disappointment—that momentarily ended Bay’s winning streak at the U.S. box office. (Overseas audiences were more intrigued.) It probably has more to do with my willingness, even eagerness, to watch anything involving spaceships or monsters or dystopias or whatnot. My co-worker Kyle Ryan is on record as being averse to anything involving “wizards and shit.” That isn’t a view I share.
The viewing experience: The Island is science fiction in more than just window-dressing, too. Its premise plays with some pretty interesting ideas. (Although the source for those ideas proved a matter of some contention.) Caspian Tredwell-Owen wrote the first screenplay, which was then rewritten by the team of Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci. They wrote Bay’s Transformers, but are also responsible for the promising-looking forthcoming Star Trek movie, and they’re writers and executive producers behind the reasonably clever TV series Fringe. Regardless of how much the film owes to other sources, the first hour or so of The Island delves into the ideas at hand in with more depth than Bay usually brings to his film’s stories.