Michael Bay's Reused Shots

image via SheKnows

Film-making is tough. It takes months of work and millions of dollars for big budget studios to release a complete film to the public. Fortunately, one film-maker has managed to figure out a way to cut a corner.

Michael Bay, known for slowly making all millennials deaf via movie explosions, has gotten into the habit of simply reusing footage from his previous films. Because if you've seen one explosion you've seen them all, right?

image via MovieBoozer

A screen-cap from Pearl Harbor, or is it Bad Boys? Hell if I know.

The shots that he reuses from film to film aren't necessarily key to the film. They're normally just establishing shots or quick little scenes that to any passing viewer they may not notice, but to the keen movie watcher will bother the shit out of them.

Some of it is practical, because after all, it's not everyday that you get to film an aircraft carrier. This is the reason that the aircraft carrier that launched B-25s in Pearl Harbor is the exact same one destroyed in Transformers 2. 

image via SlashFilm

 And she was two days away from retirement.

But sometimes it seems to be out of sheer laziness. For instance: in Transformers there is an establishing shot of the Autobots landing on Earth:

image via Youtube

Which, knowing Bay, might also be from Armageddon.

And in Transformers 2 there is a shot of the Decepticons landing on earth. But rather than create a new shot, Bay apparently opted to simply use the copy/paste function and hope nobody noticed:

image via Youtube

Given the level of intelligence required to enjoy his films, it was a safe bet.

And that's not the only instance. The drone launched to assist the special ops team in Transformers is the same damn drone in Transformers 2.

video via Youtube

Just in case you think I'm reusing the same screenshots, here's a video.

But none of these are on the level of the scene he reused from his film The Island. Instead of a brief shot from the film he managed to recycle an entire car crash sequence and reused it with most of the audience none the wiser. How? He threw some transformers on top of it. 

But Bay underestimated the power of the internet:

video via Youtube

I don't know whether to be impressed or not.

With Michael Bay's newest film 13 Hours coming out, it'll be interesting to see if he decided to actually shoot the movie, or cobble it from shots of Transformers and Bad Boys II.