Another franchise ruined

Rating: Null/10 (3 June 2010)

If you want a short review of Transformers here it is: it's a loud, badly written disjointed mess of a movie with a nonsensical plot that ruins yet another potentially good franchise.
So what? Well that's pretty much Michael Bay's reaction. If you read his biography page he defends himself in two ways which I'd like to address in relation to this movie.
He's made a lot of money. That's his first point. Well, yes but you'll notice that most artistic people don't make a huge amount of money and when they do they generally don't see that as being their primary motivation. This movie has made a lot of money from 13 year old kids because that is who Hollywood markets their films to. In fact if you spend enough on marketing it's virtually impossible to lose money on a film, though obviously it does happen from time to time. If you went to the cinema ten years ago you'd see people of all ages enjoying the spectacle of the big screen. Now you only see kids and their weary looking parents because there's virtually nothing for a discerning adult to enjoy. This brings us to point two of this hacks justification for creating drivel like this.
I make movies for 13 year old kids - big deal! Yeah, in fact it is a big deal because takings are now down 20% and it's part of a consistent pattern over the past ten years or so. The more you alienate the adult market by making crappy PG13 guff like this the narrower the market becomes and the more you have to pander to their taste.
People like Micheal Bay are poisoning Hollywood for everyone and if people disagree bear in mind that you aren't 13 forever, your taste will become more complex and there will be literally nothing to see at the cinema. Hollywood would like to pretend that their abysmal takings are down to piracy of their product and to some extent I'm sure that's true, but the main reason is that the films on offer are generally awful and if you get stung by a few utterly awful movies in a row you have little motivation to keep going to the cinema.
In short he's an idiot and so are the people who only see cinema as a financial concern. It's an art form, we go to see art and this is about as far from art as you can get. It's not even financially viable in the long term because the people most likely to pirate movies are teenagers.
In short, it's moronic crap like this that is killing cinema.