Michael Bay is an unparalleled conductor of destruction, that much we know. He likes his set pieces big, his explosions bigger, his bass deep, his music cues thundering and his subtext bold, highlighted and rendered in all caps. At the screening of his forthcoming Transformers that I attended, he welcomed the audience and said he was on hand, just recently back from Australia, “to make sure it’s fucking loud,” with all appropriate exclamation.

The film certainly delivers in terms of its effects work, from Industrial Light & Magic, and Bay trades in the typical sort of emphatic, canted close-ups and adrenalized style
that have been his hallmark throughout his career. The
problem is that Bay, for
all his arguable skill as a conjurer of sugar-rush catharsis,
has little sense of spatial coherence. He’s a top-notch imagist, as all those Clio Awards somewhat attest (that also explains the segments of Transformers that come off as car commercials), but his basic aesthetic sensibility doesn’t seem to have advanced that much beyond his swirling, shadow-inflected work on Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” music video.

It sounds hackneyed to say, but Bay truly does play by his own cinematic rules, collapsing established spaces to suit momentary need, and frequently creating escape through reverse shots rather than any sort of
sensible internal story logic. The resultant action can be eye-popping, but also wholly devoid of any true or artful tension. He’s kind of like a home run hitter in baseball, in my opinion — always swinging for the fence with iconic images and “cool-factor” explosions. Frequently he strikes out, but sometimes he smacks one the bejesus out of the park… often within the same movie.

That said, as fun as it sometimes is letting the action of Bay’s movies wash over you, it’s generally the
cinematic equivalent of a false show-and-tell exercise — bravura
demonstration lacking any rooted emotional weight or
involvement. I know it has the air-quote disadvantage of being less grounded in reality than Live Free or Die Hard, but for all its state-of-the-art, tech-assisted carnage, the action in Transformers matters less, and is less involving, than that of the Bourne films. As with the worst moments of Bad Boys II, the ending of Transformers just feels like you’re being ejaculated upon.