You'd think that with a career as long and crazy as Michael Bay's, the man would have made pretty much every type of movie you'd expect him to make. He's threatened humanity with so many weapons and strategies of destruction, and he's even dipped his toe into crime stories – both real and fictionalized. Honestly, there's very little we can think of that the Bay-man hasn't touched in his supposed wheelhouse. Oh, how wrong we were though, as the Transformers director has attached himself to a new project: a time travel adventure!
The Wrap is reporting that Michael Bay is attached to direct the sci fi adaptation of Time Salvager, a novel that tells the story of a convict who's selected to be an agent of change through space and time. Naturally, he tries to save someone from the past, and before you know it he's being pursued by the people who hired him to do their temporal dirty work. The novel, written by author Wesley Chu, won't be on shelves until July 7th – but you can already see why this is a Michael Bay movie instead of, say, a Christopher Nolan movie.
Already, Time Salvager is a story that plays to the strengths of classic Michael Bay films. An ex-con/miscreant who's selected for a secret mission to save the world covers both The Rock and Armageddon in one fell swoop of a bald eagle. That ex-con/miscreant trying to save someone they're probably going to romantically become involved with is kind of like The Island, especially if they're being pursued by some sort of ruling body of authority and/or Sean Bean.
The point is, the story to Time Salvager sounds so Michael Bay, we're surprised that he hasn't already gone back in time to 1998 and convinced Nicolas Cage to star in it. Of course, there's plenty of time to get Cage, and even Sean Bean, involved in this little venture if he so desires – and why wouldn't he? The possibilities for this project are endless in both positive and negative fashion, but this does make us wonder – what happened to that other Michael Bay movie we were supposed to be getting, Cosmic Motors? While neither film seems to be ahead of the other in terms of likelihood, we'd be willing to bet Time Salvager has the upper hand as, again, Paramount and Bay are in a pretty good relationship at this moment.
Should Michael Bay make Time Salvager his next very important project, however, we have a little of advice we'd like to share from Community's own Dean Pelton:
In the past, the guy hasn’t exactly demonstrated a strength in the narrative department, and the complexity of something as problematic as time travel could prove to be an issue in his hands. Hopefully he winds up getting a good enough script going into production that the whole thing won’t end up being a mess when it comes out the exit door of the editing room.
While we wait for Time Salvager, you can catch Michael Bay's attempt at producing a time travel movie, as Project Almanac is going to be released on Blu-ray and DVD on June 9th.
