Investigation: Can We Trust Michael Bay's Assertion That Transformers 3 Won't Suck as Much as 2?

In case you missed it the first time, Michael Bay has recently reiterated that, like most of us, he realizes that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was pretty awful and again vowed that Transformers: Dark of the Moon will be the opposite of that. But does this candor about the last film mean we can take Bay at his word? To investigate, let's take a look back at what Bay was saying about the last film before the reviews came in.

Based on Bay's larger than life persona, his praise for the Revenge of the Fallen at this Showest press conference seems a little lacking in um, confidence:

"I'm very confident in the movie. It's way different. It's epic in scale, it goes around the world...it feels different, it feels...i don't know, I'm confident with it."

Then, from a February 2009 interview with Collider"

"What I like about this movie...it's not trying to be bigger just to be bigger...It's a great adventure, but the thing that i like about it is that the robots have much more personality...It's darker. I know the fans wanted it darker, we made it darker."

I suppose the robots did have more personality...though that kind of turned out to be a problem. Also, he emphasizes the "darker" aspect in a few other soundbytes, which does seem a bit puzzling after seeing the film and also in context of this interview about the sit-com aspects of the film with Hero Complex:

"People I've shown this to instantly feel like, 'Hey, I know that family, they're fun to watch.' It's like when you watch a favorite TV series, there are things about familiarity you like and it can be satisfying...Movies do take a life. Things spark and take a life, things you thought would be important drop away and a tone is set. With the sequels, you know the tone. That's a huge thing."

All right, I'm going to call B.S. on the tone thing. I kind of want to call B.S. on this MTV interview too, but I guess there's nothing totally dishonest about this doozy of a quote...

"There's a lot of different types of action. In some movies, it's the same action throughout the entire movie. There's a lot of different types of action in this one, and that makes it interesting."

Honestly, there was not a ton of other pre-release hype coming directly from Bay. At least nothing that rivals most of his Dark of the Moon interviews, especially this gem of a quote. This actually makes me inclined to sort of trust Bay! Comparatively speaking, his interviews about the last film resisted most hyperbole and talked about specific aspects of the film rather than the overall quality. And it's not like he could tell everyone that the previous film was a mess right out of the gate.

Though, that didn't stop him from re-posting hyperbole from famous friends though:

"Steven Spielberg sat next to me in a big 100 person theater at Sony today. There were 98 empty seats. The lights came up after we just watched my cut of Revenge of the Fallen. He turned to me and said "It's awesome". He felt this movie was better then the first - and probably my best, who knows - at this point in a movie you start to lose your objectivity. I just hope the fans like it. I'm going to start putting it in front of audiences in a few weeks - no you are not invited, yet."

In any case, let's give Bay the benefit of the doubt! Most politicians pull bigger 180s on a weekly basis. Of course, this still leaves the question of how much better the new sequel will be, especially given how low the last one set the bar. So maybe don't too crazy with your expectations yet.

·Michael Bay on his Transformers 2 Regret [Empire]