The Citizen Kane of camera shake

Rating: Null/10 (10 September 2007)

Michael Bay directs "Transformers", a film which takes the reactive camera work of Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and lathers it in feces. Spielberg's thinking at the time was that CGI special effects are no longer special. You now have to mask your CGI so as to give your film a sense of realism or even menace. This is nothing new, most "good special effects" subvert their own "specialness", playing themselves down.
But "Transformers" milks this trend to death. Bay's camera is constantly ducking, diving, hiding from CGI, catching fleeting glimpses of action and never seeing anything coherently. People complain that none of his robots are clearly framed. That none have distinct or memorable features. That they're all poorly and unimaginatively conceived. But what's the point when Bay's camera doesn't intended to watch them in the first place? Combine this scatter-shot camera-work with Bays scatter-shot storytelling and you have one pretty stupid movie.
Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" was released in 2005, and now here in 2007 we have an onslaught of similarly shot Spielbergian crap. The 2 year gap between "War of the Worlds (a Spielberg directed alien invasion movie; brilliantly shot, if you ignore all the xenophobic, "terrorists living under our cities" 9/11 baiting) and stuff like "Transformers" (a Spielberg produced alien invasion movie that uses your eyeballs as a toilet) is what I call the Hollywood/Spielberg gap.
Currently this gap is 2 years. The previous record was the three year period between "Black Hawk Down" and "Saving Private Ryan". I doubt the gap can get any smaller, as it takes roughly a year to get a big budget film out of pre-production.
In the market place, rival companies likewise have a similar gap between products, commodities reverse engineered, trends capitalised upon, rebuilt and renamed. Spielberg makes big money so people copy. And of course Bay's essentially Spielberg on speed, pushing the former's set-piece cinema to post-narrative hell. Bay's the ugly bridge between post-cinema and the blip-time of cyberspace, offering up the schizoid incoherence of mass-multiplayer mayhem to a giddy public too high and self excited to string together a thought. A Spielberg for alpha males, Bay's hated largely because his demographic doesn't pound defensive buttons on keyboards or get their geek out on digital forums. While Spielberg appeals to the quiet, introspective, curious, cautious, fantasy loving mommas boy, Bay appeals to the testosterone fuelled jock and his woman who just wants a quick testosterone fix and just want to see crap blow up good. Unsurprisingly, Bay's films make BILLIONS of dollars and are seen by millions of people REPEATEDLY. Interestingly, Bay's most feminine film (THE ISLAND) raked in no money.
4/10 - Boring despite its rapid-fire aesthetic. The best thing you can say about guys like Bay and Emmerich are that their films don't ever pretend to be anything other than wreckage, which makes them far less harmful than the world's Spielbergs and Camerons. See the original, animated "Transformers The Movie" instead, which, believe it or not, starred Orson Welles and Leonard Nimoy.