Michael Bay has heard the criticism of his film "Transformers 2". And now, he admits to agreeing with it. Not that he's taking all the blame.
The director spoke with British film journal Empire Magazine about his explosion-heavy film series, which will debut its third movie this summer. The second film was critically panned, criticism Bay understands, and can explain.
"We made some mistakes," Bay told the magazine. "The real fault with ["Transformers 2"] is that it ran into a mystical world. When I look back at it, that was crap. The writers' strike was coming hard and fast. It was just terrible to do a movie where you've got to have a story in three weeks."
So he admits it was the writing. And he explains just how hamstrung he was.
"I was prepping a movie for months where I only had 14 pages of some idea of what the movie was," Bay goes on. "It's a BS way to make a movie, do you know what I'm saying?"
Most people may say yes. But the movie was still a hit at the box office -- as he said, critics have lost sight of a movie's main purpose: to entertain. And he's got a lot in store for "Transformers 3" -- and star Shia LeBeouf, never one to mince words, says this one "won't be so bad," which was his own way of saying the second movie failed. Which he then explicitly said.
"We got lost. We tried to get bigger. It's what happens to sequels. It's like, how do you top the first one? You've got to go bigger," LaBeouf said. "Mike went so big that it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie. ... You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn't matter. Then it's just a bunch of robots fighting each other."
A trailer for the third film debuted during the Super Bowl -- see it here.