Why Michael Bay is the most important director in Hollywood

Robbie Collin leaps to the defence of Transformers director Michael Bay

If you are lying on the ground, looking up, and the sun-drenched sky is suddenly obscured by a beautiful woman or an enormous robot, you could be watching a Michael Bay film. 

Bay is the director of the Transformers franchise, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys and its sequel, and many other films that cinephiles love to hate. But one of the first things you notice when you binge on his work – and really, with Bay, even one film counts as a binge – is that he’s addicted to low angles, just as Scorsese is to the tracking shot, or Renoir and Mizoguchi were to deep focus. 

Bay keeps his camera close to the ground because it makes everything look larger than life – and also because it puts the viewer on their back, in a position of recumbent ease, like a Roman emperor waiting to be finger-fed his next grape.

It means that you see his films from a child’s-eye view, although if what he is filming is female, and her skirt is short enough, the view suddenly becomes that of a pervert. At ankle height, you’re either gawping or leering, and Bay’s approach to cinema can be summed up in a single word: phwoar. 

Is this an oddly generous way to talk about the film-maker routinely blamed for the downfall of blockbuster cinema? Bay’s films are maelstroms of fast cars, hot babes, big bangs and dumb clucks, all shot against a backdrop of broadest daylight. The editing is fast and feverish. His characters jabber like drug-users, and their faces are perpetually dewy with sweat, as if you’ve almost caught them in flagrante delicto. In Bad Boys, Bay’s 1995 feature debut, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s smart-mouthed police detectives glistened in the Miami heat. Eighteen years later, in Pain & Gain, a salacious true-crime caper set in the Florida city’s gym-bunny subculture, Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson are as puffed up and shiny as Jeff Koons’s balloon sculptures, Takashi Murakami’s fibreglass figures, or the male models at a San Fernando Valley porn shoot. Seldom has pop culture felt so on the verge of going pop.