DEAF PROOF Bay demands things to be awesome.

He’s tried his hand at historical epic (Pearl Harbor) and philosophical sci-fi (The Island), but deep down, Michael Bay was born to make a movie about giant hunks of metal whaling on each other. In Transformers, he finally found his perfect match of material: Here was a story that actually called for deafening noise, pointlessly distended action sequences and a relentlessly adolescent POV. The aesthetic is all of a piece—Bay’s actresses are as waxed as his cars. We’ll be lucky if Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which the studio declined to screen before our deadline, turns out to be more of the same.

Is Bay the anti-auteur? Hardly. He’ll never be mistaken for a Joel Schumacher, a director who mangles any script he touches. Although Bay’s name has become synonymous with steroidal hackery, he’s simply a filmmaker with what we might term a narrow range of interests. As Bay says in the Verizon commercial, he demands “things to be awesome.” A good director would not have extended Pearl Harbor by nearly an hour to show us the Doolittle Raid, obliterating the sense of tragedy. But with Bay, the ra-ra jingoism is consistent with the ambience. His films consistently elicit comparisons to military recruitment commercials.

Like Steven Soderbergh, Bay favors oranges and blues. Like Terry Gilliam, he likes canted frames. Like Hitchcock, he has an obvious passion for destroying monuments. This may help account for the dullest stretch of Armageddon, which was shot on an unconvincing moon set. (If it isn’t real, it isn’t awesome.) Perhaps the closest Bay has come to a career statement was the appalling coup de cinéma of Bad Boys II, in which the leveling of a Cuban shantytown was somehow deemed justifiable in the name of a psychotic (but awesome!) car chase.

This is, to put it bluntly, a type of filmmaking that rises above guilty pleasure but also falls short of what we might call defensible. Bay’s penchant for plundering lowbrow classics—producing remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th—has inspired justifiable eye rolling; his flirtations with remaking The Birds and Rosemary’s Baby have prompted something closer to dread. Predictably, some writers have proposed joke Bay remakes, a theme that actually makes a serviceable party game. Imagine Bay’s Gone with the Wind (more war scenes, but digitally blurred to prevent an R-rating). Or The Rules of the Game (bigger guns in the hunting scene; Lisette now a full-blown hussy; Jean Renoir role played by Michael Chiklis). What about Chinatown (Jake gets in the car with Evelyn and destroys South L.A. in a high-speed chase), or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (dinner fucking ends, now)?

Still, Bay is a director whose passion for overdrive makes his movies strangely irresistible, even unmissable. His old professor at Wesleyan, Jeanine Basinger, has made a convincing case for him as an abstract filmmaker. It’s certainly preferable to see his signature—will he use that guitar wail again?—in almost any movie than it is to watch the pileups in, say, Quantum of Solace. The action in that movie is also impossible to follow. It just doesn’t seem to be that way intentionally.

Bay may even be an underrated director of actors, his collaboration with the lunkhead Affleck notwithstanding. Certainly, Nicolas Cage’s nimble comic work in The Rock is preferable to the majority of the movies he’s made since Leaving Las Vegas, and Bay gets good buddy comedy out of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in the Bad Boys films. What exactly John Turturro is attempting in Transformers isn’t clear, but we’ve never seen him do it before—and are unlikely to see it again. Which makes the release of a Transformers sequel all the more cause for rowdy celebration.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is in theaters now.

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