Michael Bay to Megan Fox: Just look hot ok?
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I want it precisely this awesome.Michael Bay.
I don't have to tell you who he is or what he's all about; you already know that. Those two little words will send action aficionados into the upper ionosphere, as if the hype frothing from inside the production of the Transformers sequel weren't bad enough.
Cliched criticism aside -- and boy is there more than enough to go around with Bay -- there are valid concerns floating around right now. Bay supposedly wrote the script himself during the writers strike, making him a de facto scab of epic proportions, and if what rising star Megan Fox says is true, they found said script in dire need of doctoring right in the middle of production.
That is, in and of itself, nothing new to Hollywood. Scripts are tinkered with at virtually every stage of production right up until any reshoots have been completed, and in some ways it is still rewritten in the editing from for several weeks after that.
What bothers me is that such high expectations have been set for a sequel to a film that wasn't exactly a literary masterpiece itself, and it's going in the direction for the return trip. Fox told MTV that Rise of the Fallen would be "10 times as big, 10 times as many set pieces, explosions, and acrobatic stunts." For a film that was probably 90% special effects even before conception -- that's just a foregone conclusion -- what we're talking about now is only having 1% left for the actual story. Arguably Bay is pushing things so far that it may have made more sense to dispatch with all the on-screen actors and just focus on a bunch of robots fighting each other.
Screw the humans, they can't explode or smash through bridges. Call it the evolution of acting in the digital age, if you want.
Fox said that some of the script changes have focused on finding more time for the relationship between her character and the one played by Shia LaBeouf to develop, but in reality I think what she really means is that they are having trouble finding a way to fit them in at all. That tracks with what Michael Bay does and yet it didn't seem to dissuade anyone from seeing the first Transformers, but now that they've actually seen what he has to offer, will they opt to save the follow-up for watching on DVD instead?
Alas, I can't bail without mentioning this last little bit: "His main note to me is just to look hot; so I try my best." We already knew how Michael Bay likes his movies, and now we know how he treats his actresses too.
What a swell guy.
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