I touched upon this previously in a brief piece on Michael Bay, but Jonathan Foster also has up an excellent piece on the excess of Bay’s canon, writing this of the filmmaker:

“In all of Bay’s work, there’s forward momentum to the
imagery and, by linking one shot to the next, a story seems to occur (emphasis mine). But
there’s nothing cinematic about the way he accumulates moving pictures. That’s
one of the reasons his films always have excellent trailers — every shot is
powerful by itself, and yet they’re all inherently meaningless. He might be the
greatest second-unit director film has ever seen.”

Foster is right, really. Bay is an imagist; he only understands story in the most cursory sense. He’s there to make it move and, more often than not, glisten in the sun. I’d wholeheartedly disagree with Foster about the ending of Transformers, though. The story was so warped at that point, and the accumulated mind-numbingness of its images so discombobulating, that it felt like “pop shot” action, nothing more — certainly not (emotionally) involving action.