The Netflix movie 6 Underground is Michael Bay in default feverish overload. If Bay possessed something like restraint, his films would improve exponentially.

There’s no question that Bay knows how to compose kinetic, visually stimulating sequences. Critics have called this style is Bayhem: wildly kinetic images with an overloaded frame and spinning camera spinning. This Bayhem overload is taken to the Nth degree in his Transformer movies where robots reconfigure their physical structure as they’re falling, flying and rolling at high speed and smashing through skyscrapers, bridges or other urban ephemera. The prolonged effect of Bay turning it up to 11 produces boredom, not excitement.

6 Underground has an opening car chase in the streets of Florence that’s 30% longer than it needs to be. But with $150 million budget, black Suburbans need smashing and Bay is happy to step up. A fellow film nerd noted that Bay has his car driving through the Uffizi gallery and smashing art. A wry bit of self commentary by Bay. He knows where he stands and revels in it.  

A signature use of the Bay style was in his retelling of the Japanese attack on Hawaii in 1941: Pearl Harbor. Here, the Bayhem not only turns the events into a chaotic visual mess, they also change the historical nature of the event. Bay shoots the air attack as if it carried out by thousands of aircraft. In Bay’s images we see Japanese planes at low altitude, medium altitude and up high. The sky is filled with planes. This might be considered more visually interesting, but it’s not close to what actually happened. The Japanese attacked with only 354 aircraft. and those were in two waves: 183 in the first wave and 171 in the second. Not the massive numbers Bay shows us.

Hey, it’s just a dramatic movie, not a documentary. It doesn’t have to be historically accurate, right? No. There’s never been an accuracy law in Hollywood. But Bay’s vision is unfortunate for two reasons: 1) it makes it seem that there was no stopping the massive Japanese onslaught, yet, in fact, if U.S. forces had been more competent and had gotten their aircraft airborne, they could have greatly blunted the attack; 2) it belittles the incredibly effective military operation carried out by only 354 planes. You don’t have to agree with the Japanese war aims to be impressed with what they accomplished via excellent planning and operational skill.