THE "Transformers" concept is simple: In the blink of an eye, some innocuous thing -- a car, for instance -- morphs into an alien-whupping killing machine.
Director Michael Bay has undergone his own transformation, and while it's hardly as dramatic as what happens in his new movie, his turnabout does suggest that he is about to have a much sunnier summer than his last time around.
When Bay was previously putting the finishing touches on a summer movie, he wasn't having that grand a time. The year was 2005 and the movie was "The Island." Bay was battling with DreamWorks over the movie's advertising campaign, but the ads were only a part of the problem. Moviegoers didn't seem to know what the movie's title meant (there's no island in "The Island") and the $125-million anti-utopian drama was opening on the heels of three box-office hits: "Wedding Crashers," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Fantastic Four."
"The Island" was routed. It sold just $35.8 million worth of tickets in its entire domestic release, and while "The Island" performed better overseas -- grossing more than $124 million -- it was Bay's first flop. After an uninterrupted run of solid and whopper hits ("Bad Boys," "The Rock," "Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor" and "Bad Boys II"), Bay's winning streak was in tatters.
Still, he went back to work three weeks after "The Island" opened and closed. Rather than make a smaller, more personal movie as he has long talked about, he jumped into another huge and challenging summer movie, with two of the same screenwriters -- Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci -- who penned "The Island," and he was returning to DreamWorks, the same studio behind "The Island" (and which is now owned by Paramount Pictures).
Bay didn't have a screenplay or a cast, but a July 4 release date had already been set and it was looming. He wasn't all that familiar with Hasbro's Transformers toys. And he knew he'd be following massive sequels to "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Spider-Man" and "Shrek."
But Bay believed he could make a "Transformers" movie work. "I just thought," he said, "it could be something new and different that I could do well."
It was a certainty he didn't always feel.
SERIOUS? FUNNY? BOTH?
"WHY should I do this movie?" Bay found himself asking, not once or even twice. He asked it repeatedly, both of himself and his collaborators: Kurtzman and Orci, and producers Steven Spielberg (who came up with the idea to make the film) and Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
