Okay, not really. The Dark Knight is better. But I would like to say that Michael Bay actually has his strong points and things that he does better than Christopher Nolan. Nolan actually gets a lot wrong with his fight scenes that he hides in post-production through his editing. Bay does a better job of putting together large action sequences on-set. He gets the logistics right. He also consults the military on how to make action scenes with the military as realistic as possible, so in that sense, such scenes are remarkably well thought out and pretty intelligent. As far as military action is concerned, he creates some of the most realistic stuff that I know of, whereas Christopher Nolan's action looks more like it's something that he imagined in his head and what he thinks action should look like, and then put it onscreen. Yes, Michael Bay later ruins it all through terrible editing and some awful humor, but he is a better on-set director. He also does a great job of finishing his movies on-time and under-budget, which takes some remarkable skills.

And does he have any other skills worth noting? Well, there's his consistently amazing, Oscar-level sound mixing. He really holds his team up to some pretty high standards, and they always deliver.

And then...well, Christopher Nolan is better in most other regards, and I'm saying this as someone who doesn't care much for Nolan.

But the point is, I'm not a Michael Bay hater. I do appreciate his strengths, and he has put out a few good movies, and I would really love it if he began to try something more serious, more for the art. I'm pretty sure that he has it in him. After all, he's friends with Steven Spielberg, so I'm pretty sure that he has some appreciation for classic cinema. It's just that I don't think that he's had much of a desire to create anything more sincere for the last several years, because he's been paid to create Transformers after Transformers. I think that for the last decade he hasn't seen himself as a creative type so much the head mechanic in an auto repair shop. Or perhaps a better analogy, instead of a director, he kind of views his job as being similar to that of a coach of a football team. He gets everyone together and dictates the formations, and gets his team to score points. Others might consider it art, but to him it's a 9 to 5 industrial job that he gets paid to do, like an actual normal job. I honestly think that's the mentality that he has. But when he changes his mentality and actually cares about his projects, I really do think that his talent shows through.

So this is just me personally speaking, but I'm still interested in seeing future Michael Bay movies, specifically ones where he challenges himself and makes something that he really cares about, like 13 Hours. I'd love for him to find a story that he really loves and make it his passion project, and then hire a good editor, because there's a lot that this guy can contribute to cinema.