In a much-publicized interview with Empire, director Michael Bay definitely refrained from celebrating his accomplishments on “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” but contrary to various reports, he did not exactly call the film “crap.
Multiple respected outlets are going with that headline, but the reality is that Bay only used that word to describe a specific film making decision.
“We made some mistakes,” says Bay in the interview. “The real fault with [“Revenge of the Fallen”] 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.”
Bay’s regret primarily deals with how they rushed to put the film together with a limited writing calendar. “I was prepping a movie for months where I only had 14 pages of some idea of whatthe movie was…It’s a BS way to make a movie, do you know what I’m saying?”
As far as the critics are concerned, Bay acknowledges the terrible reviews for the sequel but also claims that the fan-favorite original film, which ended up receiving tremendous word-of-mouth for its mix of comedy and action, was “slammed” as well.
Though “slammed” might be a stretch, the first “Transformers” did only garner a 57% Fresh Rotten Tomatoes rating. “Revenge of the Fallen” sits at a much-worse 20%.
