Is Michael Bay underrated?

Michael Bay is a master filmmaker. To create and maintain the tension, pace, flow and entertainment value that he does, requires a great deal of thought and a great deal of skill. To suggest otherwise is simply ridiculous! If you think Michael Bay films are just about blowing shit up and don't require great skill or thought, why don't you just edit together a series of explosions and see for yourself how easy it is to gross $700m? No matter what genre or style of films you make or aspire to make, there's a great deal of what Michael Bay does so successfully that you need to apply to your filmmaking!

I'm not really in the target demographic for Michael Bay films and so I don't always enjoy them and there are some aspects of his filmmaking which I personally feel could be better but as a filmmaker I have to appreciate his great ability and learn from his films. To say or do otherwise is either pure ignorance or disingenuous envy.

G
 
I like some of his films, but mostly his earlier ones, as pure escapist entertainment. Unfortunately the transformers films have turned me off to him. I'm cautiously optimistic about Pain & Gain - the true story that it's based on is so crazy that I think it almost requires someone like Bay to pull it off.

PaulGriffith said:
Transformers 1 is a great movie. [...] They couldn't make it all about giant space robots, nobody can relate to that. Instead, they made it an incredibly relatable story: A boy, his first car, his first girlfriend. Giant space robots just happened to show up and throw a wrench in the works haha.
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See, that's part of the problem I have with transformers - a whole generation of people had no problem relating to giant space robots, which is what made it such a potentially valuable franchise. If they'd put the time into creating relatable characters for the robots, as the original cartoons did, and developed the CGI with less complexity and more recognizable, humanistic features to the faces, they certainly could have focused the story on them. Then you could have had a transformers movie that was actually about the transformers, not a whiney teenage kid and his first-world problems.
 
I think it is easy to write off Michael Bay. He is a director of action adventure and sometimes the genre can be action heavy story and character development light. But I think that is the easier way out.

If you really look at Michael Bay's action sequences you would see that they are beautifully staged and carefully thought out pieces of chaos. Some of this is perhaps computer generated but the sequence still need to be thought out and still need to be shot at some level.

Michael Bay's work can be compared to the Odessa Steps Montage in Battleship Potemkin or the Train Station Montage in The Untouchables. Action adventure can be good get , Steven Stielberg taught me that.

Rob Bettencourt
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