BAYHEM!

Good morning Consumers, This is Please Consume, The newsletter that loves movies as much as David Cross hated being in Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.

6 Underground (2019)

Written by Tyler Clark

To close out this week, we are going to talk about one of the most recent opuses from one of my favorite working filmmakers. No, I'm not being a troll; I genuinely love the man known as Michael Bay, and today we're going to discuss it.

BAYHEM!

So, there is a great mythic aurua surrounding Michael Bay. The man is infamous in Hollywood! His large-scale action and "forget the screenplay" attitude have landed him on the proverbial cover of Hollywood's most-hated directors magazine for 17 years running. But why? The hatred for Bay is well-founded in a sense; the man makes absurd movies. However, I think it comes down to a major issue with film viewership today. 

Audiences think they are smarter than filmmakers. Don't get me wrong, there are some pretty dumb directors out there—Brett Ratner, anybody? Or how about Olivier Megaton? But Bay is not one of these guys. He has an incredible ability to map out the whole film in his head and execute it not through pre-vis or storyboards but by talking it through with his team. That is impressive! You can say whatever you want about the man, but the level of communication and understanding of each department needed to create a cohesive scene is wild! 

On top of that, his understanding of color, lighting, cameras, and the editing process maximizes every image, making a film like Ambulance, which costs 40 million dollars, look like it cost an easy 150 million. His films are sleek, sexy, and as maximalist as they come, but they aren't very funny, so why are we talking about it?

Psst… He Knows He's in a Michael Bay Movie

Okay, so we need to address the 800lb Deadpool in the room. This film not only stars Ryan Reynolds but is also written by Rhett Reese & Paul Warnick, the writers of the first two Deadpools and the Zombieland films. When you watch this, that fact is very apparent. It's playing on all the tropes of a Michael Bay movie and is commenting on it within the same scene. With most films, I find this postmodern trope to be very tiresome, but in a film like this, it helps to have someone who can step outside the film, telling Bay to chill out a little bit. 

When you watch this, it feels like the most Michael Bay, and that's because it is. Reese & Warnick set out to write the most Michael Bay movie, and when Bay read it (being the egomaniac that he so clearly is), he loved it and immediately fast-tracked it, taking it to Netflix. The film maxes out maximalism, doubling down on the revved-up energy. Bay is fully in on the joke while also pushing his craft to the limit, and it's... well, it's a lot, I'm not gonna lie.

Today’s Clip

This scene is crazy. I watch the full twenty-minute version of this sequence all the time when I'm frustrated while editing work for corporate clients because it gets me so amped up. But the brilliance of it lies in how they pulled it off—mixing live action and digital assets. Bay loves to use real scenery and add effects later, so when he shot this, he did specific and targeted flooding of the space, then added water VFX courtesy of ILM later to round out the visuals of the scene. Or to quote ILM's website:

"In addition, a few hundred gallons of water were simulated as a stunning glass-encased cantilevered rooftop pool gets shot up and rapidly empties over the side of the building, all created in the digital realm."