december 23, 2005I finished watching Michael ("The Rock", "Armageddon", "Bad Boys", "Bad Boys II", "Pearl Harbor") Bay's "The Island" this afternoon. It was on par with what I was expecting from Michael Bay: Action shlock that is way too long for its own good, cut and edited like a two and a half hour commercial. In other words: Same Michael Bay crap (resisting harsher word), different movie.
If you don't know what I am talking about, here's a typical Michael Bay movie:
- Super-gloss: Everything in the movie is shot like a commercial. From the slow motion to the overly lit scenes to the washed out cinematography to the over-the-top action that makes no sense. This is a glossy two hours and sixteen minute commercial.
- Long running time: Michael Bay movies, as dumb as they are, show some genius in the action sequences. Too bad that 90 minute movie is always padded with another 60 minutes of talking and "character development". Bay could not direct a drama scene to save his life, he needs to learn that. And when he does learn that he really can direct, he can then start making the movies that he is supposed to be making: 90-minute long B-grade direct-to-DVD action flicks.
- The uncontrollable editing and cinematography: Please Michael, wake up to the reality that you are only talented at shooting action scenes. And even then your "kinetic" editing ruins most of those scenes because no one can see what is happening between the extreme close-ups, shaking camera, and 1-second cuts during the action shots. The mixture of those three bad habits are enough to make people seasick!
- Louder is not better: Everything in a Bay film is loud. Even when walking through aisles, you can hear a loud "whoosh" sound. Please Michael: Louder is not better. After watching a Bay film in the theatres, you will have lost some hearing due to the extreme (there is that word again) volumes during all of the film.
Now, that is not to say that The Island is bad film. See, I think the one film that Bay made and was enjoyable was The Rock. And The Island falls into a distant second place. I did not like it a lot, but it was still entertaining. It is not as horrifyingly bad as either of the Bad Boys films, it is not as back-achingly long as Pearl Harbor, and it certainly does not contain all the fake melodrama of Armageddon. Yet, it is not as good as The Rock. The movie rips off just about any sci-fi film that you can name. It has some characters, but not really characters -- they are just actors and stuntmen running around. There is one entertaining chase scene involving dumb bells (and no, I am not referring to the characters). But, overall, it feels just like any other Michael Bay film and that "Michael Bay film" is getting old really fast.
Michael Bay: You need to go back to film school and unlearn all that stuff you learned while making commercials. Then come back to Hollywood and see if you can't reinvent yourself as a real Hollywood director -- because this shlock you are putting out nowadays, if it were not for the big budgets and actors who need a paycheck between Oscar roles, would be direct-to-DVD releases.
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