Sparky Prime wrote:The director interprets the story, but in Bay's case he also gave guidance of what he wanted.
I know what a director does, but when the story is poorly written in the first place, that makes it hard to come up with a good interpretation for that story. And again, making a movie involves a lot of people. Not everything wrong with the Transformers films is because of him alone.
Again, he guided them to write a story that suited his demands, so the problems with the script started with the man who directed and produced the things.
And look at TF'07, that movie's script isn't exactly bad, it's not great and it's certainly not good Transformers, but it's relatively linear plotting and character development; yet Bay's hand turned that script into an awful, awful movie. The director, unless he's subverted by his producers, is where the buck is supposed to stop -- Bay was one of his own producers on Transformers.
would argue that The Da Vinci Code and I Robot were adequate popcorn films, but they weren't "good movies", and the aggregate opinion seems to agree: The Da Vinci Code has an IMDB score of 6.5 and 25% on Rotten Tomatoes with an audience score of 57%; I Robot fares better with 7.1 IMDB, a 58% Rotten Tomatoes critics score and a 70% audience score. Now compare that to A Beautiful Mind which has an 8.2 IMDB, 75% RT and 93% audience score; Cinderella Man with an 8 IMDB, 80% RT and 91% audience score. We can like those movies, but I don't think they're universally-acceptable as examples of "good movies".
And now you're nitpicking what constitutes a good movie... In my book, a good popcorn flick is still a good movie. I mean, look at the gaps between the critics and audience in those statistics for The Da Vinci Code and I, Robot you posted. The critics may not have been big fans but the general audience was clearly much more favorable of them. Action movies like those generally don't sit well with critics but that doesn't make them bad movies.
Yes... it is
I who is clearly the one that is nitpicking and not
you.
I didn't say they were good popcorn films, I said they were adequate popcorn films.
Also, one more factor against Akiva Goldsman in my eyes is that as the head of a writers room, he doesn't seem to be the right kind of writer since he adapts other works, mainly from successful books. Unless he starts pulling heavy elements from IDW and Sunbow and Marvel, he's going to be out in the weeds adapting new ideas from whole cloth for these existing characters... the last time he did that? Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.
Like none of the other writers in the room will be allowed to express original ideas? Again, he's going to have a pretty big team working with him on Transformers, many of which are successful comic book movie and TV show writers. Even if Goldsman is only good at adaptations as you've suggested, he's not going to be the only writer for that to really matter.
That came off contrary for the sake of being contrary, it has nothing to do with what I said. You are making an ungrounded "what if" scenario that doesn't have a foot in the reality of the point. Regardless of who else is there, Goldsman is the showrunner when it comes to the writers room, he is going to be the filter through which ideas flow.
Almighty Unicron wrote:I'd say that he has more duds than hits in his career, honestly. I don't think I've seen a single thing by him that I've enjoyed.
To each their own, but even if you don't like any films he's written there are plenty of people that did like several of them, as some of the statistics Jedi posted goes to show.
Batman & Robin made money, it doesn't mean the majority of people who saw it liked it. In my book, an "eh" audience score means people liked the popcorn and the loud shiny things, there has to be more to it than that to say the audience actually liked the film. There was a screening of Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 on opening weekend that a buddy of mine went to where there was a singular laugh in the audience, literally one person laughed once during the whole screening, making that comedy an absolute failure, yet people walking out of the theater afterwards actually were having conversations about how they liked it. How could they say the liked it if that COMEDY MOVIE didn't make them laugh once? Because when they paid their money, they made a decision, they bet on a candidate and invested their time, the film didn't entertain them but it also didn't offend them, so they subconsciously wanted to talk themselves into believing they made the right choice. If a movie gets a 6/10, that generally means they didn't poke their eyes out.
Transformers - 7.1 imdb, 57% RT, 86% AS (Rotten Tomatoes audience score)
TF:ROTF - 6 IMDB, 19% RT, 56% AS -- more than half of the people who use Rotten Tomatoes said they LIKED Revenge of the Fallen enough!
TF:DOTM - 6.3 imdb, 35% RT, 56% AS
TF:AOE - 5.8 imdb, 18% RT, 52% AS -- is AOE the worst movie in the series? Most people I have heard from say it's not, yet audiences have grown tired of throwing their money at this series and are reacting against it. Either that or it really is the worst one, but there's stiff competition in that claim.
So which of those is the good movie and which is the bad? All of them are over 50% on audience scores, nearly all of them are over a 6 on IMDB, reviewers liked DOTM more than 2 and 4 yet audiences didn't agree. It's almost as if these movies are interchangeable junk and none of them are good at all, yet audiences still give them a mountain of leeway because they are big and loud and shiny and waste a few hours of their lives watching sexy dames and fast-talking heroes and giant alien robots punching each other, and no matter how the movies actually made them feel they want to justify a decision to drop money on a ticket.