Make no mistake. I want you to see this movie.
To start, this film was total garbage from the treacherous
use of human characters to the abominable facial designs of the Autobots. When
it comes to Michael Bay’s directing style, I always defend his self indulgent
ways (cinematic masturbation) in terms of his use of action and wicked
immaturity when telling a story. That being said, Transformers: Age of Extinction surpassed his normal level of “masturbation”
and sailed right into “auto-fellatio” territory. It seems he couldn’t get
enough of himself this time around and it severely compromised the film’s
narrative.
Mark Wahlberg was forced into his unique style of sarcastic
acting, which hasn’t been seen since The
Happening. Many of his lines seemed so innocuous, that he had to say them
in a facetious tone just to keep the film going. It was only at the end of a
sentence that you could see he was serious. Nicola Peltz picked up where she
left off in The Last Airbender, her
acting unimproved. Stanley Tucci was given the undoable task of lifting the film
on an acting level. He stole show, of course, but like Jamie Foxx in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, it was too
much for the lad. I will become angry if I go into the human cast anymore.
Let’s go into why we go see Transformer films. Can you
believe I’m interested in only the Transformers in a Transformers film? What
the hell am I thinking?
Optimus Prime and Bumblebee (Batman and Robin) returned to
full action, and Ratchet returned to get his ass kicked. The new Autobots were
Hound, Crosshairs, and Drift, and basically were a discount version of the
Warriors Three. These new Autobots were nothing more than complete clowns whose
faces were quite disturbing. I guess the graphics interns who worked on them
never heard of the “uncanny valley,” because they laid down in it. It’s like
they saw Q in the previous film and hit it full throttle in this one. The next
film should have a sticky note on the door, “NO HUMAN FACES ON ROBOTS,” and it should
be written by Steven Spielberg.
Luckily, this film had some Dinobots, but they were given a
shamefully small amount of screen time (so no character development beyond “[So]
the legend exists”). None of the Dinobots spoke and none were given names, BUT
fans know that the T-Rex is Grimlock. I don’t know why the almighty Grimlock
went to his dino-mode to fight the more agile Optimus, BUT at least we got to
see his, and the others, robot forms. [At this point there weren’t many things
to like about the film, so I chose my battles.] When Optimus went charging in,
riding Grimlock, and took out several Decepticons, it was the greatest 15
seconds in a movie of its low quality. During the final battle, we see the
Dinobots take their robot forms one more time, but during a totally benign
bridge scene in which there was no fighting (I mean, not even any off-screen
fighting).
On the opposite side of things, was Lockdown, a bounty
hunter Transformer who was hired by the Transformers’ creators. He worked with
the government in order to place a seed on earth that would cause the extinction
of life on earth. Coincidentally, his facial canon represented Bay’s erection
at his own work. Whenever Lockdown had to take out a target, he did so with
precision and a ruthless approach. His weaponized form and strict demeanor made
him the best villain in any Transformers film, and he was such a MFWIC that
Optimus needed a lot of help to defeat him.
Lockdown’s ship, however, did not house any excitement,
narrative flow, or reality. The alien spacecraft was a total eye sore and every
second of every scene could have been cut from the film’s 165-minute runtime. [The
Balls of Death from Battleship (another Hasbro film) made an appearance on the
ship!]
Finally, we have the bastardized Decepticon brigade. These
Transformers were all made by the government and a tech conglomerate by
repurposing Cybertronian metal into “Transformium.” The name is not dumb enough
to describe how awful the Decepticons were. The tech conglomerate seized
control of damaged Decepticon parts and used Megatron’s head to program the new
fleet. This fleet was composed of Galvatron, Stinger, Junkheap and Traxes (a
drone type with many copies). All of these characters took a back seat to what
I assume was the main plot of this film. I’m not sure because it was highly
disjointed (a side effect of Bay’s “auto-fellatio”). These robots transformed
by breaking down into metal clouds of dust and coalescing into their alternate forms.
It looked worse than the CGI from every other film in the franchise, which is
sad because it’s what the audience hangs its hat on.
By the end of the film, Optimus became The Iron Giant,
Galvatron became Megatron, and the humans meant nothing to the story (what a
surprise in a Transformer’s film).
I would give this film a C-, but it’s not a standalone film,
and belongs to a series of films that are already C-‘s. When I recalculate,
this film is an F, because the negative qualities from the previous
installments were used to breathe life (or death) into this project.
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