![]() ![]() Looking back on this sequence, you can see how Bay’s inclination for practical destruction found a productive match with the CGI action of the Transformers. It’s even got some now-classic Bay product placement, like when a Mountain Dew vending machine turns into an evil robot. With grounded emotional work from Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox as they help secure the AllSpark for the Autobots, the scene finds a strength in limiting its robo-battling to a few streets. The final battle scene in the first Transformers movie finds Bay taking after the sci-fi spectacle of his executive producer and longtime validator, Steven Spielberg, mashing it up with his own brand of PG-13 chaos. Of course, the showiest explosion comes last, with the hangar’s destruction - marking the first of his many captivating wide shots where an entire landscape seems colored with Bay’s beloved bright, fiery orange. It plays like a chamber piece in the context of his oeuvre, with select explosions in this gunfight (featuring Martin Lawrence and Will Smith) brilliantly building tension, getting bigger and bigger with each dramatic development. ( Bay later reused some of this destruction for Transformers: Dark of the Moon.)īay made a full evolution from music-video director to explosive action director with this finale in Bad Boys. Inspired destruction arises when our heroes push giant metal train wheels from the back of the truck onto the freeway, which rip through the cars of the bad guys in pursuit. The film’s center chase is the highlight, taking its protagonists from the back of a Mack truck to a hover bike (dodging air monorails!) to the side of a tall building. In Bay’s 2005 rip-off of Logan’s Run, sexy clones played by Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor spend a lot of time on the lam, causing the director’s thrill-ride inclinations kick in. Within the chaos and questionable politics of 13 Hours, Bay’s visual relationship to warfare stands out. Then, it’s a soldier (played by James Badge Dale), running in extreme slow motion, sparks flying in his face, right before another one drops and creates a visceral explosion that Bay shows from multiple angles. The mortar-attack scene best captures it - first, it’s the shot that follows a mortar from its launch to its target, just like the bomb in Pearl Harbor (also on this list). ![]() ![]() With in-your-face filmmaking and a constant air of combat, it’s prime Bay. Though 13 Hours sits out awkwardly in Bay’s filmography as a bungled attempt to be taken seriously, his take on the incident at Benghazi leads with his signature style. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi The climactic, dazzling air strike toward the end of this scene is like Bay’s own Apocalypse Now, and even won him a Guinness World Record for the largest explosion with actors present ( a record that has since been beat by the 2015 James Bond movie Spectre).ġ7. But the biggest takeaway - other than the robot balls joke that John Turturro makes while clinging to the Great Pyramid of Giza - is one very special, record-breaking explosion. ![]() This battle royale set among Egyptian ruins has a lot of Bay qualities that can be numbing - massive robots fighting over some literal plot device, American soldiers adding to the fire power, and Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox screaming as they dash away from one big boom to the next. That includes all of his Transformers movies, Bad Boys, The Rock, and plenty of other films that have brought mayhem to screens across the country. In honor of 6 Underground and its mastermind, we’ve assembled a list of 18 moments from Michael Bay’s directorial career that define his unique place in action cinema. Love or hate his movies, it’s impossible to deny that Bay doesn’t have his own aesthetic, which is something that plenty of directors - even Bay’s fellow filmmakers in the Criterion Collection - can’t readily claim. His latest movie, Netflix’s ensemble assassin movie 6 Underground, starring Ryan Reynolds, is a reckless blast specifically because it is filled with that movie magic known as “Bayhem” - action and destruction that only Bay could deliver on the scale that he does, whether it’s an extensive car chase that destroys Italian art in the process, or a big high-rise sequence seemingly built around his love of smashing glass. They’re about going through the looking glass of American grotesquerie, where the cinematic indulgence is the point. Watching a Michael Bay movie is not only about witnessing the many things he likes: fast cars, big explosions, blue and teal color palettes, hot bods, low angles, American flags. ![]()
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