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 Bay
When there’s a dearth of legit, calculated, gel-lensed,
brightly-colored, written-by-committee blockbusters for a
half-decade, it’s time to call in the fucking Master.
Enter MICHAEL BAY. Genius. Auteur. Visionary. A guy who’s
never met a landscape he can’t drench in gold, an interior
sequence that wasn’t begging for blue or green filters,
a Ferrari he can’t blow up, a hot pouty actress he can’t
dress in an Asian gown, or a pair of leading men who can’t
inflict massive collateral damage upon the city of Miami.
After five years of relative absence, Simpson and Bruckheimer
re-emerged in 1995 with Bay’s late-spring hit Bad
Boys, followed shortly thereafter by Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide, and the mostly unremarkable
but hugely successful Dangerous Minds. The
MTV-inspired template they had struck nearly a decade earlier
had come full circle, culminating the following year with
Bay’s first true epic, The Rock. (Sadly,
Simpson passed away that same year.)
Whereas earlier Bruckheimer-fests like Beverly Hills
Cop and Top Gun had at least some
basis in reality and human emotion, the Bay flicks and their
brethren (Simon West’s Con Air, John
Woo’s Face/Off) were over-the-top epics
where the heroes had almost supernatural powers, where the
action scenes where smash-cut to the point where applying
logic and reason to what was on-screen seemed like curmudgeonly
nit-picking.
 Meanwhile,
vying for “overblown spectacle” bragging rights
were Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, who had worked their
way up from grungy B-list sci-fi works like Universal
Soldier and Stargate to grungy A-list
epics like Independence Day, the box-office
behemoth of 1996. As attention spans shortened, a byproduct
of the blockbuster mentality, so did loyalty for a favorite
auteur or genre: The same multiplex droves who lined up for ID4 turned on Emmerich and Devlin a mere
two years later, when the not-dissimilar Godzilla was booed off the screen for the same cinematic transgressions
as its predecessor. The same “guilty pleasure”
attitude eventually affected Bay’s movies, albeit belatedly: Armageddon earned roughly a zillion dollars
in the summer of 1998, yet somehow became the poster-child
for all that was wrong with Hollywood within the same calendar
year.
 Superheroes!!!!
And then, somewhere around 1999, all of America became one
giant comic-book obsessed, Internet-loving dork. Instead of
cheering on some fascistic Stallone-Schwarzenegger type wreaking
havoc, instead of wanting to see Ben Affleck and Will Smith
and Tom Cruise saving the neon-lit planet, all of the world
decided they wanted … a bunch of misunderstood nerds,
geeks, Hobbits, and “Mutants” saving the world.
The Matrix was released in spring of 1999,
but the huge box-office success was a sign of things to come:
Nerds were the new superheroes. Even the most put-upon, misunderstood,
or net-savvy among us were capable of strapping on a Wolverine
claw or a black trenchcoat and saving the world from the jocks
who beat us up in high school. X-Men re-iterated
this the following year, and the Lord Of The Rings trilogy and Spider-Man solidified it.
The new summer hero, still alive and kickin’ six years
later, is Spidey, Wolverine, The Thing, Frodo, even tortured
ol’ Anakin (at least in his younger, more conflicted
form): The confused comic-book nerd as bad-ass action star.
Where the ‘80s gave us what-me-worry Maverick or no-emotion
Rambo or blue-collar slob John McClane, now it’s all
about the sheltered, inexperienced, undersexed white doofus-next-door
just waiting to break out and show that even HE can be a superhero.
The popularity of this narrative is not surprising, really,
given the world-changing impact of the Internet and the way
it empowers even the humblest Podunk message board goofball
into thinking he’s some kind of superstar. In the  misunderstood
comic heroes, there’s a world of resonance that wasn’t
necessarily there in the blockbusters of old.
Does
this mean we’ve regressed or progressed in 20 years?
Does this mean the “blockbusters” have become
dorkier, or that they’ve become more cerebral and less
two-dimensional? Is a rah-rah, patriotic Tom Cruise in 1986
kicking foreign ass somehow superior to a bunch of “Mutants”
standing around a Canadian forest in 2006 and kicking foreign
ass? Is he superior to a 2006 Tom Cruise kicking
ass in MI:3, for that matter?
I have no idea. I just know that one way or another, I want
my blockbusters to be louder, faster, dumber, and brighter
than they were last year. Whether it’s Cruise, Stallone,
Gibson, Willis, the Diceman, Clint, Smith, Affleck, or Maguire,
I just want my colors loud, the female love interest to be
hot, and I want to see good-looking people getting the job
done, and looking cool doing it.
And if any of this sounds like I know jack shit about what
really makes a blockbuster a blockbuster, what makes a summer
movie successful, or what any of these fickle trends mean,
keep one thing in mind:
I’m still holding my breath for Cobra 2.
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