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For Bay, the (lack of an) answer comes in his movies themselves. There may be a lot of directors whose work might not suffice to answer the question “Why are you doing this?” (most of Adam Sandler’s directors come to mind), but none of them have such an obviously distinct style that cuts through genres and renders them moot. “A Film by Michael Bay” is the genre for better and for worse (they go hand in hand) much as “A Film by Tony Scott” was. But with Scott, I would feel more equipped to have answered that question, and attempted to in my column a month ago. With Bay, well, an answer is what I hope to find.

Going back to the first paraphrase at top, what is Bay’s collaborator really saying about him? I think he is (unintentionally but helpfully) identifying as what “genre” Bay’s movies might best be described. They’re not sci-fi (although they might be SyFy if not for the $200 million budgets) and they’re not speculative fiction, but with their glitz and their sheen and a steady current of misogyny and a love for phallic symbols and substitutes, they posit a 15 minutes from now where strippers and firearms are go-to plot devices/diversions/a dude’s greatest assets. In films like Bad Boys and Bad Boys II, this makes complete sense. But it takes a certain kind of hubris and gusto to work both those elements into an asteroid-hitting-the-earth movie. This is the kind of combination that can only be articulated in print with certain punctuation.

To wit: Armageddon has deep rig oil driller boss Bruce Willis taking aim at underling Ben Affleck (caught with Willis’ daughter Liv Tyler under the covers) with a shotgun… on an oil rig out in the middle of the ocean! Later, there is a tense gun to the head standoff situation… on a space shuttle in outer space! And last but not least, Steve Buscemi (whose character Rockhound is both brilliant and has an unquenchable thirst for female flesh) suffers a bout of “space dementia” and winds up setting off a military prototype machine gun… on a moving asteroid! And before Willis’ motley crew (including a fresh-faced Owen Wilson, dispatched too soon and given but naught to do) takes flight, their last night on earth consists of… an ill-advised $100,000 loan from the mob and strippers, strippers, strippers as far as the eye can see! Firearms are also heavily prevalent in the science fiction-ish The Island, but in all fairness, it may be a dive bar and not a strip club that clones on the run Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson pop into to seek help from… Steve Buscemi.

What I have found in watching Armageddon (for the first time since July 3, 1998) and The Rock (for the first time in over a decade, although I have seen it about half a dozen times) is how poorly they seem to hold up in some regards. I am tempted to label this the “self-defeating side effects of sensory overload” but since I have apparently become immune to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-a-couple of cuts style of editing on display, the answer may lie elsewhere. I do think Armageddon suffers the worst in a comparison of this week’s pair (it may be the most disposable and least involving blockbuster of the ‘90s), although to be fair there isn’t a scene involving Nicolas Cage playing with animal crackers on Sean Connery’s tummy in The Rock. Many of the action scenes in these two movies are rendered with impressive technical precision and a great reliance on old-fashioned ingenuity coupled with digital magic (the explosion of the streetcar at the climax of the streets of San Francisco chase in The Rock or the annihilation of Paris from the vantage point of a Notre Dame gargoyle in Armageddon) but even these two examples can also serve to illustrate the conundrum at the heart of many of Bay’s films.

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