Michael Bay Built The 'Mother Of All Bombs' For Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen
Michael Bay's 2009 sci-fi actioner "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a curious animal. A sequel to the 2007 "Transformers" film, "Revenge of the Fallen" was penned in the midst of a prolonged writers' strike. The resulting film copied a lot of the same plot beats as the 2007 original but somehow was 15 minutes longer and way, way less coherent. Critics hated "Revenge," which, as of this writing, enjoys a mere 20% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert famously called the film "a horrible experience of unbearable length," a phrase he eventually used as a book title. More than a few critics also noticed that several of the film's robot characters were brazenly racist caricatures. It would go on to win Worst Picture at the Razzie Awards.
The film was a massive hit, making over $836 million worldwide.
Bay was wholly committed to making "Revenge of the Fallen," and brought his signature sense of explosive chaos to the film. "Revenge of the Fallen" is not bad because the director half-assed it. Indeed, one might say that his issue was he ass-and-a-halfed it, bringing the action and mayhem to a chaotic fever pitch. And, yes, Bay really wanted to blow up everything on set using real bombs, real gasoline, and real peril.
Indeed, according to a behind-the-scenes documentary from the "Revenge of the Fallen" DVD, Bay constructed what he called the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB, to construct ... well, the mother of all bombs. Using anywhere between 500 and 600 gallons of gasoline (reports vary), Bay aimed to set the world on fire. The film's cast and crew recall one bomb in particular which left scars on everyone's memories.
Boom boom boom. That's how I get my mojo going.
L.A. denizens might recall an ad for the Los Angeles Times that played in theaters about 15 years ago. In it, Michael Bay was briefly interviewed about his style, and he admitted out loud what we always suspected; he just loves explosions and has no ambitions beyond destruction and being awesome. "Boom, boom, boom," he said, "That's how I get my mojo going." It stands to reason, then, that for Bay, the bigger the explosions, the better the movie. By that gauge, "Revenge of the Fallen" is his best movie yet. The robot characters may have been realized with CGI, but most of the explosions were very real, a fact that shocked actor Julie White, who played Judy Witwicky in the movie. She wondered, "A lot of the things that I thought, 'They're not really blowing this up.' Yes, they do. They really blow it up."
Megan Fox, who played Mikaela in two "Transformers movies" confirmed, saying:
"Michael doesn't like to leave everything to ILM, he likes it to be as realistic as possible. So they put together these gas bombs that were 600 gallons of gas total. [...] MOAB, apparently, is what it is called. [...] The bomb was two feet from where Shia [LaBoeuf] and I were starting. And Mike kept backing us up closer and closer to where the bomb was."
ILM, incidentally, is Industrial Light and Magic, the popular special effects house founded by George Lucas. Fox's co-star LaBeouf, who played Sam Witwicky in the film, recalled the MOAB as well, including how close everyone stood to it.
The Mother of All Bombs
Shia LaBeouf said:
"It's terrifying really, to be standing next to a trash can that's full of 100 gallons of gasoline, knowing that there's a trigger attached to it. You're literally standing next to it like this, like, 'Hi death!' Because if something goes wrong and somebody triggers it at the wrong moment you're dead, for sure. There's no coming back from that."
No doubt, the most stringent precautions were taken to make sure that no actors, stunt performers, or crew members were harmed during the explosions, but that doesn't mean it wasn't terrifying for the cast. Real explosions meant real peril. Real fire meant real damage. Megan Fox recalled that the actors were in the most danger, as they had to be standing closest to the MOAB when it goes off. Fox resented that the filmmakers were huddled far away from the explosion while she wasn't. She recalled:
"You're f***ed. Like, you're f***ed, your movie's done, I don't have a face anymore, we're finished. And we're looking for all of our special effects guys and we're like, 'Where are they?' Because usually they're close by monitoring everything, making sure it's going okay, and they were like six football fields away huddled together in a group with like umbrellas and things to shield themselves from whatever might fall from the sky after it went off. But we're standing right next to it."
No actors were harmed in the explosion of the MOAB, and the shots were all captured. If one wants to see a lot of fighting robots, visual chaos, and real-world fireballs the size of a blimp, one can't do much better than "Revenge of the Fallen." Michael Bay really did get his mojo going.