Everyone who writes about movies is now apparently required to hate Michael Bay. The ex-director of commercials and music videos, who has made some of the most successful films of the last decade—Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Transformers, etc.—has become, without a doubt, the bête noir of modern cinema; or at least of modern movie critics. The critical establishment has never really liked Michael Bay, but the recent release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which despite having been demolished by every respectable critic on both sides of the Atlantic, is hurtling swiftly toward the box-office stratosphere, was unquestionably the nail in the coffin. This week, Revenge became one of the top ten domestic films of all time with a gross surpassing two third-entries in modern film trilogies: Peter Jackson’s Return of the King and George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith — yet still, Bay is a man to be hated.

The best invective from this critical night of the long knives probably belongs to the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who described the film as “like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan.” He was hardly alone, however. The always reliable Roger Ebert went so far as to echo Bradshaw’s kitchenware allegory when he called the film “a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments…. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.” Manhola Dargis of the New York Times chose brevity over references to household implements, and described the film with the single word “cretinous.”

The ire directed toward the film, however, has mostly taken second place to an unabashed hysterical loathing of its director. For example, Salon.com’s Stephanie Zacharek’s review began:

“He’s here—I smell him.” That’s a line from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but funnily enough, it’s also what I think every time I sit down to watch a Michael Bay movie…. Bay is a purveyor of clunky, occasionally enjoyable crap: I sometimes get pleasure out of his movies by marveling at the astonishingly low level of craftsmanship that he consistently gets away with…. And maybe Revenge of the Fallen is no worse than any other Bay movie: You probably can’t sink much lower after making a piece of pseudo-historical hokum like Pearl Harbor. Still, big, dumb and clumsy is no way to go through life.

Referring to Bay’s treatment of star Megan Fox, Zarachek continued “She makes her entrance crouched on the seat of a motorcycle, her pert butt aimed at the heavens. Later in the movie, a once-aggressive robot she’s befriended and tamed eagerly humps her leg. This is what it means, in the Bay universe, to be a movie sex symbol.”

Incompetence, barbarism, and misogyny, however, were least among the various complaints. Robert Wilonsky of the Village Voice accused the director of jingoistic self-plagiarism and outright cinematic sadism.

You may recall that its 2007 predecessor was a mostly capable commercial for Transformers toys and Bay’s previous films, from which most of the iconography was lifted as the man continues to pay homage to his favorite filmmaker. (Has he ever made a movie without the image of fluttering American flags?)…. But why speak when you can SCREAM [sic] for almost two and a half hours? Why go subtle when there’s shit to blow up…? But a respite’s not to be—not when the Fallen’s gotten back up after a 19,000-year rest somewhere in orbit around the earth, which he’s looking to destroy, just because he can. Kind of like Michael Bay.

Wilonsky’s final hint that Bay is not only a bad filmmaker, but a threat to civilization itself was made explicit by Chris Tookey in the Daily Mail, who remarked that “Bay is at his most obnoxious when he shows gigantic machines casually destroying icons of Ancient Egyptian civilization. Some may find this a depressingly accurate metaphor for what people like him are doing to our own culture.”

It must be admitted that almost everything the critics have said about Revenge of the Fallen is true to a certain extent. It is not a particularly good film, even by Hollywood blockbuster standards, and Bay is most certainly unsubtle, lowbrow, and unapologetically mercenary. Ironically, however, the critics’ belief that Bay is also a threat to all things decent and civilized in the world, the unabashed critical contempt and hatred that has been directed his way from the beginning of his career, says very little about Bay himself. Instead, it says almost everything about the pathetic state of American film criticism.

It was probably dissident film critic Armond White who sounded the first alarm in 2000, when he went to the barricades for controversial director Brian De Palma and his much-maligned Mission to Mars.

Brian De Palma’s critical drubbing over Mission to Mars—reminiscent of the scene in Airplane! where passengers line up to smack an old lady—is the clearest evidence of the catastrophe that has befallen contemporary film criticism. Mission to Mars is a litmus test. It can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans it does not understand movies, let alone like them. They’d be better off reviewing static, juvenile media like television or comic books.

White, while unquestionably correct, was somewhat premature. As has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, the real litmus test is Michael Bay.

Michael Bay’s films are not great. Most of them are not even particularly good in any serious way, but with the exception of Pearl Harbor—the director’s one misbegotten bid for mainstream respectability—it is impossible to actively dislike any of them. The reason for this, I think, is that while Bay is certainly a hack in terms of story, character, and even plausibility, he is most certainly not a hack in the one area that really matters in cinema: visual spectacle.

Put simply, Michael Bay’s films look extraordinary. One can go even further than that, and say that at certain points his images achieve moments of beauty that can only be described as transcendent. The fact that these images are couched in the idiom of the modern blockbuster action film, with all of their shortcomings, should not, as it does for so many, distract us from an appreciation of the fact that Bay may well be a hack in many areas, but he is not a hack—or even a gifted journeyman—in the realm of visual spectacle. He is, in fact, an artist, and an extraordinarily gifted one.

This can be difficult for the average critic to grasp, because like most commercial filmmakers, Bay’s art is one of pieces and not the whole. His gift appears in fragmentary moments for which the film—that is, the story, the characters, etc.—are merely a vehicle, not the thing in itself. In Bay’s case, these moments are almost all images; whether the opening sequence of The Rock, with its rain-drenched images of a military funeral played over Ed Harris’ narration, or Armageddon’s penultimate montage of sun-drenched images of all those threatened by the end of the world. Moreover, some of these images are achieved through pure light and shade, with none of the slow-motion or computer-generated pyrotechnics with which Bay’s name is constantly associated: the image of a newly redeemed Djimon Honsou emerging from underground into the brightness of a liberation he has helped engineer in The Island, or the extraordinary close-up of Admiral Yamamoto’s sunken visage, defeated in his moment of triumph, as he intones the apocryphal line about awakening a sleeping giant in Pearl Harbor. Nonetheless, Bay’s talent for the visceral power of images is sometimes contained in those very pyrotechnics the critics so despise. As adolescent as such pleasures may be, it cannot be denied that the scene in Transformers of Optimus Prime smashing through a truck, deploying a laser sword, and slashing his enemy’s throat is a dazzling piece of kinetic filmmaking. A hack, by definition, is incapable of such things.

Also rarely remarked upon is the fact that amidst the carnage and stupidity the critics decry, Bay’s films often contain some above-average acting. Ed Harris and Sean Connery in The Rock both deliver brilliant and at times surprisingly understated star turns; Sean Bean and Djimon Hounsou in The Island are both spellbinding, particularly Honsou, who gets a spine-tingling moment in which he tells Bean how he was marked as a child so that others would know he was less than human; Jon Voight frankly becomes FDR in Pearl Harbor, perfectly capturing the paralyzed statesman’s unique combination of pathos and gravitas; and a case be made for John Turturro’s comic turns in the Transformers films as masterpieces of modern camp.

Even the most-maligned of Bay’s sins, his treatment of women, is in fact one of his greatest strengths. Since the silent era, the transformation of women in glittering, iconic erotic objects has been essential to the language of cinema. Eschewing the ice-queen tradition perfected by Hitchcock, Bay shoots his women for an immediate, absolute carnal beauty, the raw maximization of the female embraced by directors like Howard Hawks. Megan Fox’s native charms are undeniable, but without Bay’s camera, which both distances the viewer and hones in on her feral sexuality like a microscope, she would not be the less-than-obscure object of desire she is today.

In short, whatever Michael Bay’s sins may be, the sum of his talents definitely adds up to a kind of cinema. This cinema is what Sergio Leone referred to as “cinema cinema,” that is, cinema for its own sake, cinema in and for itself, cinema that exists for no other reason than to be cinema. Cinema as cinema is best expressed by the famous quote from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou: “A film is like a battleground. It has love, hate, action, violence and death. In one word: emotion.”

Michael Bay’s entire cinematic language consists of nothing but love, hate, action, violence, and death, and every one of his films is self-evidently a battleground. They are pure visual pageantry, possessed of an élan that seems to be nothing less than a cry of love for cinema as cinema. And this is precisely why the critics hate him.

White was certainly on to something when he said that most film critics do not “understand movies, let alone like them,” but he did not go far enough. The truth is that most film critics hate movies. The type of cinema that most critics love is, essentially, a kind of anti-cinema. It is a cinema that hates itself, that cannot abide being cinema, and wants desperately to be something else. It shares something, then, with its champions, most of whom would prefer to be something other than movie critics, and who see film as — at best — a lowbrow substitute for more substantial art forms, such as literature, painting, dance, etc. In their eyes, cinema is clumsy, immature, populist, and corrupted by earthly success. This is how execrable illustrated novels like The English Patient or profoundly asinine works of pseudo social commentary like American Beauty managed to garner critical raves and Oscar nominations while genuine cinematic poetry like Once Upon a Time in the West and 2001 were savaged upon release. It is no coincidence that the current critical worship of Stanley Kubrick — the greatest of all the masters of cinema cinema — is overwhelmingly revisionist in nature; when his films first came out, the critics hated almost every single one of them.

This collective degradation and derangement of the critical establishment—of which Bay is hardly the only victim—may ultimately turn out to be a positive development. It is not impossible that something like the 1950s nouvelle vague, in which a younger generation of French film critics like Francois Truffaut and the aforementioned Godard stepped forward to defend cinema as cinema, may occur in the Anglophone world. They may not love Michael Bay, but they will hopefully recognize his esoteric virtues, just as their predecessors sang the praises of Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock, once also derided as mere journeymen technicians. Until then, we must be content with the schadenfreude that comes from watching the continuing meltdown of a decadent establishment, as they heap their praises on the next excruciatingly dull adaptation of a Jane Austen novel or the latest utterly artless documentary by Michael Moore. The rest of us will be too busy attending Michael Bay or Zack Snyder’s newest blockbuster, happily sharpening our oyster knives.

Benjamin Kerstein is assistant editor of Azure.