Transfomers: Age of Extinction

"Sigh"...Where do I begin?

This was not a good movie. In fact, it was just plain terrible. As a movie enthusiast it is always my hope that every film I watch will be generally entertaining and leave me with a positive feeling. Unfortunately reality doesn't permit that and once in a while I'll stumble upon a sub-par movie; this is one of them. I'll try not to spend too much time on this, I fear if I go on for too long I'll talk myself into a rage, which is never healthy.

I guess I'll start by talking about the movie franchise itself. When the first Transformers movie came it, it was actually decent, and I still enjoyed it even on repeated viewings. Because of this, I had this expectation that its sequel would be of a similar standard, but that was not to be so. All the Transformers movies that came after the first one were nothing but disappointments, and this latest addition is no different; it may be the worst yet.

First of all, they've obviously changed the entire human cast, which can actually be a good thing for a franchise that is in need of changes. But in this case it didn't really help and it definitely wasn't enough to save the movie. I personally like Mark Wahlberg as an actor, especially after I saw him in the movie The Other Guys, but his role in Transformers really wasn't his best performance. In the movie he is supposed to be an overprotective father of a teenage daughter, and we're supposed to believe that because a lot of his dialogue revolves around this issue. But that's all we're given, just dialogue. Throughout the whole movie his actions never screamed "overbearing dad" to me. The end result is a poorly developed character who is all talk but no show. The rest of the cast is similarly shallow in regards to their character depths (or lack thereof), and many of them are quite stereotypical in nature. One final thought on the changed cast: I find it really odd and disappointing that none of the characters in this film make any sort of reference to the original main human characters from the previous trilogy. This may be an attempt on the movie makers' part to try and distance this film from its predecessors, but given that some of the transformers actually had a prominent friendship with the original humans, this conscious ignoring just comes off as lazy. Honestly I would have been happy with just a passing mention in one of their conversations, but they didn't even do that.

Plot wise, the movie is...well, there wasn't much of it. I would like to direct you now to this parodic video on how to make a Michael Bay film (don't worry, it's only 3 mins long). This basically sums up the content of this and all other Michael Bay films, with a very, very thin plot line to tie them all together. The rest of this paragraph will contain some spoilers (not that I think anyone would care but just in case). About one third into the movie, the location is suddenly moved to Beijing, and it's blatantly obvious that this was only done to appeal to the growing Asian market in China. And though the movie has Age of Extinction in its title, the Dinobots that were used as the main advertisement for this movie only appeared in a total of around 15 minutes near the end of this over-2-hour-long movie; and they even managed to screw up that up. We're talking about a fire-breathing mechanical T-rex. How do you even go wrong with that? Well somehow they did. I don't know how bu they did. They made robotic dinosaurs look and feel unimpressive. It's almost like they were a last minute add on to the movie because they couldn't decide what else to do with those 15 minutes. I'm not sure what else I can tell you about the story because I'm not really sure there is one; at least not a logical, cohesive, well thought out one.

Some people who actually enjoyed the movie argue that they didn't come into the theater expecting a deep, meaningful storyline, and that it is intended to be a fun, summer movie where we get to turn our brains off and enjoy the action. Now granted this is not supposed to be an intelligent film, but still there's a limit. No one was expecting this to be some thought provoking masterpiece like the works of Christopher Nolan, but the movie should at least make sense in a general way. I'm not talking about those nitty gritty details that can be overcome with some suspension of disbelief. I'm talking about when the movie decides to throw all its rationale and logic out the window and thinks that giving us some decent cgi scenes would be enough to compensate.

I hate giving negative comments, I really do, but this film was just too disappointing on so many levels. Hopefully this will be the last bad movie review I have to do here.I highly recommend those of you who have not watched this film to never, ever even consider watching it. It'll be 165 minutes of your life that you'll never get back, and trust me, it'll be a terrible 165 minutes.