Oscar-certified actor and unlikely Mudcrutch video fella Sir Anthony Hopkins has some rather glowing praise for his Transformers boss. Seeing as said boss is Michael Bay, your mileage may vary on the Westworld star’s assessment.
Hopkins had tons of praise for Bay and his cinematic take on Transformers when he spoke with Yahoo! Movies at last week’s CinemaCon. Hopkins plays the Autobot friendly historian/astronomer Sir Edmund Burton in the upcoming fifth instalment in the spectacle-heavy series.
“All those machines and those Transformers are created by Michael. And he was telling me about the work he did on them – how he would refine them and go into the special effects guys and design them and get all the details of light on metal and all that,” explained Hopkins. “He told me all that at breakfast before I started on the film. I thought ‘This guy’s a genius. He really is.’ He’s the same ilk as Oliver Stone and Spielberg and Scorsese. Brilliance. Savants, really, they are. He’s a savant.”
Unpack the Spielberg, Scorsese, Stone & Bay savant pairing how you will. (Hopkins also labeled the Transformers films as “terrific.”) Michael Bay gets clowned on a fair bit, but there is a case to be made for Bay being a genius. From a visual spectacle filmmaking standpoint, the dude is brilliant if bombastic. A genius can still dink around with robo-explosion movies and still be incredible at a number of technical elements, right? *throws DVD copy of Bad Boys II at the sky* RIGHT? *13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi Blu-Ray falls back from the sky* Hmm… Maybe not.
Transformers: The Last Knight will arrive in theaters on June 23.
(Via Yahoo! Movies)
