I'm sorry, I just don't see how any of that addresses my point. I know you're a big cartoon guy - did you think I was trashing them? My point about ID4 being all FX/no story wasn't that it was a *bad* movie. And this isn't exactly a controversial or uncommon POV: Most critics will agree that ID4 ushered in an era of blockbuster movie making and part of this new era is that plot/story/dialog isn't nearly as important as it was prior to ID4. In that context, it's easy to understand how Michael Bay's Transformer movies (and again, I'm not saying anything you can't read in lots of places) could be made. Those screenplays are film-school-drop-out compared to ID4 but because of their incredible FX still made a ton of money. That is a pretty good definition of cash grab: Spend more money on FX to get more money in the box office. Thankfully, there are still blockbuster movies that love the story and the characters as much as the explosions (as examples, I think a lot of the recent DC and Marvel movies stand out).