n Hollywood last week, the skies darkened, the streams ran bitter and a green haze rose from the soil. Strange creatures slunk from the woods, their laughter borne on a foul-smelling wind, and danced horribly while the moon was gibbous.
And close to the hour of midnight, the wise men consulted their books, and asked what the meaning of these baleful signs could be. And then their eyes fell on the following words, scratched by ancient hands in a spidery script: “Michael Bay has used a metaphor.”
The new Transformers film, which contains robots that turn into dinosaurs and a weapon that makes people explode, freeze and burst into flames all at the same time, begins with something that is – and there is no other word for it – clever.
It’s a funny, throwaway sequence about the state of the movies, and it suggests that Bay, the director of four Transformers films, Pearl Harbor and Armageddon, and a man credited more often with killing popular cinema than any other filmmaker working today, is ready to fight for his place in the pantheon.