I agree, in the scale of Michael Bay films it is a pretty good one. He's probably apologising because he feels that he sort of has an excuse for this one. He apparently feels he has no excuse for the truly dire ones like Pearl Harbour and the Transformers sequels.

Fair enough.

For the record, I mostly enjoyed the Transformers sequels.

My theory is that anything with Colonel Lennox and Chief Epps was fun to watch and enjoyable, but anything with Shia LeBeouf was when I would take my bathroom break. (I saw both 2 and 3 pretty well liquored up)

I'll give him a break on the first Transformers movie. As I said before, it was close to being about as good as we could expect from a live-action Transformers movie. (Seeing the GI Joe movie only made it look better.)

I think the problem with Pearl Harbor was that Bay was trying to make it his version of Titanic (love story over big effects movie) but missed that in Titanic the event is what brings the two together and then threatens them. In Pearl Harbor you know the movie isn't over for a long while after the raid itself, which means Kate can't die in it, and you know Ben and Josh aren't going to die in the raid itself because then you'd be coasting the entire Doolittle Raid with the B plot already resolved.

Not to mention the entire B plot is impossible because it relies on Ben being listed as killed in action in a situation where he was missing in action.

I don't know, you'd think that he'd get the core "it's about robots fighting" part down a bit better and have less of the boring puny humans and extremely awkward physical comedy. Plus the confuso-cam fight scenes where it seem the cameraman is the third combatant are entirely his fault.

I would have been far happier with Colonel Lennox and Chief Epps as the basis for the G.I. Joe team than Channing Tatum and Dwayne Johnson.

A gritty reboot for G.I. Joe perhaps?

I went back and watched a few episodes of the original Sunbow series. By today's standards, it wasn't great, and it definitely benefitted from the rose colored glasses of nostalgia. (Sepia colored glasses?) Given the source material, I think the writers and Bay did a decent job of it.

Oh yeah, I mean the old series is goofy as hell when you're not a kid anymore, but nostalgia is about remembering things as they should have been, not as they are. Though some of those episodes were utterly hilarious.

"It will take more than your puny arm to stop Devastator!"
"Riiight...Which is why it's lucky that the hand at the end of that arm...Is holding a gun!"

City of Steel, goddamn wonderful it was.

Anyway, I don't think it's as much a case study in point-missing as, say, John Frakes' absolutely godawful Thunderbirds movie, I'd just rather have had a director who was willing to let me see what was going on in fight scenes and mechanical designs that weren't confusing jumbles of tens of thousands of tiny moving parts. And for Bay to sign a declaration that he does not understand comedy and will stop trying to perpetrate it anyway.

Or race relations.

My God, "City of Steel" was TERRRRRIBLE. It had to be some of the worst animation of the entire series, and that's saying a lot given the hit or miss quality of the animation. (If you want a really gorgeous episode, check out "Call of the Primitives.")

Who exactly was the intended audience for the Thunderbirds film? And if you were going to make one, why wouldn't you make it with marionettes?

Oh, it's bad, but there's also the one part in Atlantis, Arise! where Optimus watches Optimus run towards the Washington Monument, and of course this shot for your dose of "wasn't there supposed to be one more cel here eh probably doesn't matter."

Could be worse, could be Energon. That cartoon is truly amazing in its limitless ability to find new ways of sucking.

My theory has always been that it was conceived of as a Spy Kids knock-off and the script hastily adapted when they got the Thunderbirds licence. It's either that or the standard belief in media that kids can't identify with a movie unless there's a kid character, even though everyone who was ever a fan of Thunderbirds as a kid wanted to be one of the pilots, not some kid tagging along and getting in the way. And I guess it's the same live-action-uber-alles idea that's made Hollywood do any number of cartoon adaptation movies that only really showed why the original was a cartoon to begin with.

I forget, was this before or after Team America?