Transformers: Age Of Extinction - 10 Ways Michael Bay Stole Your Money

How the great Satan took your money - for the fourth time.

Dubbed €œthe reigning deity of all that is loathsome, putrid and soul-destroying about modern blockbuster entertainment€ by Mark Kermode and called, rather less charitably, €œa bit of a c**t€ by Phil Russell, Michael Bay is the director critics love to hate, the filmmaker they claim wrecked cinema with a series of loud, flashy megamovies. Whatever your personal opinion of Bay, though, his movies all have a certain consistency and an easily recognisable style. €œEvery movie he makes reflects his creative vision,€ Ben Affleck has said. €œYou may like it, you may not. But those movies are him without compromise.€ Unfortunately for audiences, Bay is more interested in hardware than people, prefers explosions to narrative and chooses his projects with the eye of a marketer, not a filmmaker, which allows him to indulge his true passion: making as much money as possible. If you accept William Goldman€™s belief that €œsequels are whores€™ movies€, then with four Transformers to his credit (plus Bad Boys II and his Platinum Dunes reboots) Bay emerges as one of the biggest pimps of modern multiplex cinema, his greed matched only by his contempt for audiences. In Transformers: Age Of Extinction, his greed reaches King Midas proportions.
Contributor

Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'