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Friday, June 27, 2014

Transformers: Age of Extinction- Review (spoiler alert)

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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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