Producer Don Murphy has a message board, and believe it or not I actually visit it. I don’t post, it’s a rancor pit in there, but he’s fond of dropping interesting tidbits if you keep an eye out for them. The reason I’m interested in him is because he’s involved in making the long discussed, occasionally delayed Transformers movie. The latest word? Transform and roll out.

Transformers has a director, and we’re lucky it isn’t Roland Emmerich. Instead, Murphy has announced that it’ll be Michael Bay, whom you may remember from such travesties as Bad Boys II. But forced to choose between Bay and Emmerich, I think they’ve gone the right direction. Emmerich’s version would have invariably been Godzilla with Autobots. I can just see his camera zooming in to languish over some mundane bit of falling rubble while all the Autobot versus Decepticon action happens off screen. No thanks.

Despite his recent track record, Bay is actually a decent director with the right kind of sensibility for a summer tentpole flick like this. His Ewan McGregor Scarlett Johansson vehicle The Island looks like it may be a decent release for this summer, and he’s done other good work in the past. Hell, even the original Bad Boys was a fun little effort. The Rock, Armageddon, it’s easy to trash them but they’re well crafted, energetic and yes here’s that word again: fun summer movies. Transformers isn’t Lord of the Rings, that’s exactly the sort of movie it should be.

Bay, who is still finishing up work on The Island won’t start work on every geek’s favorite robot opus for awhile yet, but that’s ok since they still don’t have a script. Murphy notes that he expects a screenplay soon, in fact he was supposed to have it last week. Presumably that’s the script being written by Alex Kurtzman (since John Rogers reported handing his version in back in February), but with the way things have fluctuated on this project, who knows.