Michael Bay takes a swipe at Terminator: Salvation
Promising to rock the world with his upcoming release Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, director Michael Bay has announced in his forum that between now and the release date of his new Transformers movie there will be a ’steady onslaught’ of Transformers related promotion. The ‘onslaught’ began today with the release of a new teaser poster (view it in our poster gallery).
It also began with a not-so-subtle swipe at Terminator: Salvation and, thereby indirectly at director McG.
“We’ve seen certain movies coming out even try to duplicate Transformer size robots in their ads.” Bay states, continuing, “Please, come on.”
Please, come on? I wonder why the need for a back handed comment? Perhaps it relates to the fact that both movies are essentially about robots, yet it is Terminator: Salvation that will get all the fanfare by nature of its earlier release date (Terminator: Salvation kicks off on 22 May 2009, whilst Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen comes out a month later on 26 June 2009.) Perhaps he feels that a top class movie with a giant robot could negatively impact the response to his own movie at the box office. Personally, I’d say the first Transformers movie was enough to do that and he should learn from the mistakes of that movie rather than worry about other directors movies.
I’m also skeptical on the idea that McG is trying to duplicate Transformer style robots for Terminator: Salvation. Terminator is its own franchise with its own history and there’s nothing about Terminator that needs to be borrowed from any other in terms of the robot stakes. I think people would go see a Terminator movie if the Terminators were 20 feet tall or 2 feet tall. When I first saw the trailer to Salvation and saw the giant Terminator I immediately thought, “Cool!” and not “Ah its just a Transformer!”. But if there is a valid argument to be made here I would suggest it is still largely irrelevant, for both movies appeal in the main to a completely different audience: one to a more mature audience, one to a more childish audience. There’s no need to spell out which is which.
The first Transformers movie had a great deal of potential in both the storyline and the robot-battle action stakes, but let’s be honest, it was a dud. The robot action sequences were all performed with a shaky camera style that made it difficult to really see what was happening and which effectively ruined the action of the film. With chronic action sequences, the story wasn’t sufficient to hold it up on its own. The only thing that held it all together was the absolutely brilliant score by Steve Jablonsky (who, incidentally, will also be scoring Transformers 2).
Terminator: Salvation, with Christian Bale and Sam Worthington in the lead roles, is going to be a box office smash hit. The Terminator franchise is strong and it doesn’t need to borrow from elsewhere to do well. I predict that Transformers 2, on the other hand, won’t do as well as the first movie because there’s going to be a lot of people who went to the first movie and who have’nt forgotten the lack of depth, lack of maturity, and above all else the brain crushing shaky camera work. Even though Revenge of the Fallen is being billed as a mega robot-battle movie, I’m betting a fair portion of the original films $701M box office tally will this time go instead to DVD sales. And it will have nothing to do with giant robots in competing movie previews.
January 10th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
I respect your opinion but I’m going with Michael Bay mainly for experience.
McG has little to none.
At least Michael Bay creates entertaining movies and tries not to depend too heavily on CGI.