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Kim Hollis: How do you explain the disconnect between the scathing critical reviews for Transformers 4 and its A- Cinemascore?

Edwin Davies: I think it's because Michael Bay is a lowest common denominator filmmaker, and that his style is one of pretty shameless excess designed to appeal to as many people as possible. That means that he is able to connect with audiences when the subject matter is right - i.e. people are more likely to watch his films about giant robots hitting each other than his ham-fisted satire about Miami bodybuilders - especially because he pretty explicitly positions himself as a purveyor of turn-your-brain-off entertainment. Critics, or at least the ones who aren't among his defenders, look at his films and see them as crass and pandering, with no interest in being anything other than loud and kinetic. In short, critics watch the Transformers films and ask "Why isn't this better?" and audiences watch them and ask "It's giant robots, what did you expect?"

Bruce Hall: Agreed. On the one hand, it's easy to agree with critics who say "It took nine months and spent $175 million to make this movie, would it really have taken THAT much more effort to write a better story?"

No. It probably wouldn't. But these movies are the way they are because this is what people continue to approve of with their hard earned dollars.

Critics tend to watch movies for the purpose of immersing themselves in an engaging narrative. If the next $200 million movie about Giant Robots vs Aliens vs Predators vs the Kardashians starring Tom Cruise Running has a $150 million opening weekend, and exit tracking indicates a demand for thoughtful, poignant narrative in action movies, then they would start making those kinds of films the next morning.

If enough of us stayed away from the next Avengers flick and went to a Tyler Perry film instead, every African-American screenwriter in America would be working on the Justice League movie by sundown.

But what Joe Moviegoer seems to want is little more than a visceral diversion from every day life. Most of the people I know can't tell me what a movie is about when they like it, let alone when they don't. I don't think it matters to them any more than it does what the names of all the fish are when they look at an aquarium. I realize how cynical that sounds, but I wouldn't say it if I didn't see it reflected in the increasingly bland, homogenized, action packed - but event free action movies that we keep getting.

If one wanted to be even more cynical, one could argue that Bay and the majority of the decision makers in Hollywood are not artists, but business people. Bay knows what he is, freely admits why he does what he does, and consistently lives up to those expectations on both sides of the screen. And, audiences reward him for it almost every time. This is what he's paid to do, because no matter what audiences say with their mouths, it's what they say with their wallets that really matters.

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