Why Michael Bay admits ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ was “crap”
Whilst fans routinely flock to discuss the greatest filmmakers of all time, celebrating the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, the very worst filmmakers are left to counter-cultural obscurity. Operating on the opposite end of the spectrum, the likes of Paul W. S. Anderson, Uwe Boll and Michael Bay are often named in the latter category.
For Bay, this fan-given title seems somewhat unfair, particularly as his past efforts involve such cult favourites as the 1995 flick Bad Boys with Will Smith, the Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage-starring action film The Rock in 1996 and the bombastic disaster movie Armageddon with Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in 1998. Still, even if his early career started off with a small number of hits, his 21st-century efforts were where things would go wrong.
Whilst he made the war movie Pearl Harbor, the sequel Bad Boys II and the sci-fi oddity The Island all before 2005, life in the 21st century for Bay would be dominated by his contributions to the Transformers franchise.
Starting with Transformers in 2007, starring Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, Bay built an impressive box office titan, with sequels Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon following in 2009 and 2011. Though Mark Wahlberg took over from LaBeouf in the starring role for Age of Extinction in 2014, the series chugged along with commercial success, with the latest film, The Last Knight, being released in 2017.
Despite making well over $4 billion at the worldwide box office, no film in the series has managed to muster a Rotten Tomatoes score greater than 58% (ignoring 2018s Bumblebee), with the first sequel, Revenge of the Fallen, being one of the worst performers.
“We made some mistakes,” admits Bay, looking back on the undesirable legacy of the 2009 sequel in an interview with Empire. Regretting the way that the material was treated, Bay adds: “The real fault with [Transformers 2] is that it ran into a mystical world. When I look back at it, that was crap. The writers’ strike was coming hard and fast. It was just terrible to do a movie where you’ve got to have a story in three weeks”.
Continuing, the filmmaker further explains: “I was prepping a movie for months where I only had 14 pages of some idea of what the movie was,” Bay goes on. “It’s a BS way to make a movie, do you know what I’m saying?”.
The writers’ strike refers to the union action from 2007-2008 that saw all 12,000 film and television screenwriters of the American labour unions go on strike, causing major disruption across Hollywood. As a result of the imminent strike action, many studios rushed writers to get screenplays done so as not to disrupt the timeline of production, with such a decision resulting in Bay’s terrible Transformers sequel.
Take a look at the trailer for the awful 2009 movie at your own peril.
