(Michael Bay, 2014, USA)
At first, it seems like Michael Bay might have grown up – or, at least, grown more self-conscious. Barely ten minutes into the fourth entry in the much-reviled director’s Transformers franchise, a background character (specifically, the owner of a old rundown movie house) waxes nostalgically on the state of contemporary cinema. “Sequels and remakes, bunch of crap,” he states deridingly, before referring to a worn poster of Howard Hawks’ 1966 Western El Dorado, starring John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, and asserting, “I liked this one.” It’s ironic for a few reasons; the most obscure of which is that El Dorado is essentially a remake of Hawks’ earlier Rio Bravo, and the most obvious, of course, being that Bay is one of the prime facilitators of modern movies’ crappiness. This brief moment of self-reflexive filmmaking engenders an entire array of questions. After the vicious satire of last year’s Pain & Gain, has Bay finally embraced his inner Jean-Luc Godard and begun openly mocking himself? Is Transformers: Age of Extinction poised to become a classic of meta-cinema, alongside Man with a Movie Camera, Persona, and Funny Games? Has the director’s entire oeuvre been one, elongated joke?
Cinema Charchuk 