If you’re suggesting, though, that films like this shouldn’t be thought about, I’d have to disagree. If they enter the cultural arena, they’re up for grabs from whatever perspective people want to view them.

When did light hearted cinema become so serious??

Why does every film that doesnt have some deep and hidden meaning all of a sudden become bad??

It is what it is, intense, fast paced and great special effects! If you wanted to see a life revealing deep and meaningful film why not watch something designed to be that?

For what it was, it was a good film. Good to sit down after coming home from a stressfull day and slapping something light-hearted and amusing on.

To date my experience of Michael Bay’s directorial oeuvre amounts to watching half of Armageddon at a mate’s house when I was 14, and ditching it to play footy or something in a then-rare act of exercise. I suppose he’s done wonders for the physical fitness of burgeoning adolescent film geeks.

There are perhaps limited comments one can make about his place in the cinematic apparatus. Mark Kermode often slags off the “Bayification” of cinema, and there’s a sense in which treating his films as unique entities of themselves is already to miss the point – Bay (along with, in my view, James Cameron) is simply at the leading edge of machine-cinema, in which the total elevation of meticulously constructed spectacle necessarily represses narrative, semic/ideological content and what I’d like to call ‘formal dynamics’ (in the sense of the dynamic range of a sound recording).

You can’t actually get rid of this stuff, however – all that happens is that what gets spliced in in different ways is the hegemonic forms/ideologemes. In Cameron, for example, the great advances in CGI represented by Titanic ride on the most utterly typical doomed romance fable, following the exact same narrative rhythm, with the McGuffin/framing narrative (the divers’ search for the amulet) sewn up with the technical logic of the film. The new 3d extravaganza whose name escapes me right now sounds very much of a piece. (His older work doesn’t seem so bad…Terminator 2, despite being an Arnie action extravaganza, has ‘dynamic range’ and uses it to play with predestination and time travel with a little more sophistication than your average shotgun fest; and Strange Days, which he scripted and produced, has a more complex relation to genre, though the ending is schmaltz personified.) For Bay, the result seems to be gun-porn, military-porn, and (in the case of Megan Fox) porn-porn.

I wouldn’t want to say that this is necessarily ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than older forms of crass cinema (the chronological distance we have from those older forms actually makes it very difficult to judge – just as Linkin Park strikes us as qualitatively worse than Ratt, simply because we still have to put up with them!). But it certainly seems to be the animating spirit of blockbuster films now – an acute technological prometheanism which acts as the unlikely avatar for aesthetic reaction.

JT