Alumni Watch: Michael Bay Bashes Transformers 2

Shia LaBeouf is kinda sorry, too.

Poor Michael Bay ’86. The more he does what Michael Bay does best (namely: bazillion-dollar blockbusters with action, explosions, and Megan Fox), the more he gets beat on. Remember that time he threatened to quit Transformers because the naysayers just don’t understand? “It’s easy to go shoot an art movie in a winery in the South of France,” Bay protested in 2009. “But people have no idea how hard it is to create something like Transformers.”

Now he’s saying maybe the critics were right: Transformers 2 really did suck. Not that it was all his fault—in an interview with Empire Magazine this week, the 46-year-old director sets the record straight:

“We made some mistakes,” admits Bay. “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.”

“I was prepping a movie for months where I only had 14 pages of some idea of whatthe movie was,” Bay goes on. “It’s a BS way to make a movie, do you know what I’m saying?”

But Transformers 3, which debuts this summer, “won’t be so bad,” claimed star Shia LaBeouf  last May. In fact, it’ll be totally deep, with real “relationships” instead of just “robots fighting each other”:

“We got lost. We tried to get bigger. It’s what happens to sequels. It’s like, how do you top the first one? You’ve got to go bigger,” LaBeouf said. “Mike went so big that it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie. … You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a bunch of robots fighting each other.”

[Huff Post]

Do we really want more than “a bunch of robots fighting each other”? Isn’t that what Transformer is really about? Won’t this attempt at cinematic respectability just garner Bay another round of critical ridicule? Is this like McDonalds acknowledging that its food is “sort of unhealthy” and trying to promote its “classy” array of “elegant” salads?

We’ll find out when Transformers: Dark of the Moon drops this summer. In the meantime, you can get your Michael Bay fix by reading the full Empire interview here. And if you’ve always wondered what a Victoria’s Secret ad looks like if directed by Michael Bay, you’re in luck.