My Transformers: Age of Extinction Review

I was hoping the critics would be proved wrong when I saw Transformers: Age of Extinction this weekend in IMAX 3D. In a bunch of different ways they collectively essentially said that Transformers 4 was the same as the three previous movies – all visual effects with no story and no characterization that was nearly an hour too long. Sadly I have to agree. While the movie looked great on an IMAX screen, frankly I wish I had just stayed home and used the ticket money to rent the movie in a few months or watch it as a cheaper matinee. Actually, in a weird way this movie is almost the worst of the four because it achieved something that only Revenge of the Fallen came close to – it actually bored me.

The movie opens with a past sequence that shows what exposition later covers again. Back to a post-Dark of the Moon Texas, Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) discovers a rusted truck that turns out to be Optimus Prime. Prime is more or less near death from an ambush by a CIA black-ops group called Cemetery Wind that were created as a response to the Battle of Chicago. Led by desk jockey Harold Attinger (Harold Attinger) and his field agent James Savoy (Titus Welliver), neither of who have met a Transformer that they don’t want to kill so to break them down into “Transformium” so that Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) can use the material to create their own army of human controlled Transformers. Since dead Autobots are not providing enough of the stuff, they are working with bounty hunter Lockdown who offers to provide them with “The Seed” that can create more of the stuff. Through a series of action sequences we learn that Cade is an awful father to his daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) whose race car boyfriend Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor) comes to the rescue and joins their adventure as Optimus Prime seeks out to kill Harold (yep that is his motivation for the entire movie) for hunting down his friends. After various actions dots get connected, two hours later we wind up in China and eventually get to see Grimlock and the Dinobots (for all of about five minutes total and movie origin comes down to Hasbro has some toys to sell) as everyone tries to stop Lockdown’s Seed from going off as it would destroy Hong Kong.

Let us be honest, none of us expect a good story from a Michael Bay film. Even more we all expect stereotypical characters, weak motivations, no character arcs delivered with lots of great visual eye candy that entertains you from beginning to end. The problem with Transformers: Age of Extinction is we have seen variations of nearly everything in this movie in the previous three. If not for the different look of the characters involved, I would not be surprised if the non-movie fan gets confused over which movie they are watching.

The road chase, quick transformation and random cars being destroyed? Check. Optimus Prime somehow being left alone to battle the odds gets severely damaged and something bad happens to him before his Autobot friends can arrive to help? Check. A McGuffin that everyone covets and whoever controls it can destroy stuff? Check. Over the top action scenes, with lots of stuff exploding for no other reason than looks cool? Check. Random Decepticons getting easily defeated in some ninja like fight sequences. Check. And finally bad guys that are simply bad guys because you need bad guys. Check. And of course the now obligatory final Prime speech that is only different cause he is still on a path of revenge, only the target changed. Check.

It might seem like the movie has twists and turns but it really doesn’t. It’s a straight line with illusions of curves. It is very clear that the Bay approach was once again used here. That is where the action scenes are designed first and then the story is molded to connect the dots of those action scenes. Only in this case Paramount decided to see if between China and various marketing departments (in some cases you start to expect the actors to look at the camera and say the product slogan to the audience) that maybe they could pay for the films production so a few more irrelevant dots were added. It is no surprise when the sum total is a meaningless series of action bits of what might as well be random robots (being a Transformer really isn't relevant either) attacking each other as humans pretend they are part of the fight (again).

If you only want eye candy, this film will more than meet your needs. It is wall to wall eye candy. If it isn’t coming from the big explosions, then you get it from the pretty cars. The required human eye candy is easily filled by Nicola Peltz with the camera enjoying her short shorts often. While she still has a lot to learn, she easily surpasses her predecessors in acting skills and her character does a bit more than look gorgeous. Still a bit baffled on why Bay put her age at a slightly creepy 17 years old especially when it seemed to require a scene to explain why her boyfriend isn’t committing statutory rape (complete with laminated card). ILM does their usual fantastic jobs with the visual effects and is really the only reason the film is watchable.

As for the characters, none have a meaningful character arc and the Autobots themselves are really irrelevant to the story. I don’t even know why they bother giving them names. “Blue bot”, “green bot”, “yellow bot”, etc. is really all you need because the characters have no depth and what they are doing in the movie is irrelevant to them as an individual. You could swap about ‘Bee in a scene with any other random Transformer and there is no reason it wouldn't play the same because that character’s uniqueness is never on display because they story can’t be bothered to make them unique. They exist to be expensive visual eye candy and nothing else. Even the always heroic Optimus Prime, who characterization comes down to “always does heroic things” (and so should be right up Bay’s alley) begins the movie seeking revenge and ends the movie in the same place with his motivations has anything to do with heroism.

As for the human characters, frankly who would have cared if they all died with a building landing on them. Cade is a crappy father, Tessa is a horny teenager with her horny boyfriend and everyone else just wants money and power. That is really the summation of the characters and their arcs. Having said that, through their usual effortless skill Tucci and Grammer elevated every scene they were in but frankly they could have been just randomly reading spam from their phones and accomplished the same thing for all that mattered for the scenes they were in.

The complaints that remained with the previous three films remain with Transformers: Age of Extinction. Where Michael Bay at least had the excuse of even bigger and better action sequences to hide his lack of storytelling skills, he no longer even has that has he retreads the same ground over and over again. The result is a visual effects feast that is all fat and no meat as the Transformers as individual characters are irrelevant, the human element is just various levels of boring or jerk, and story literally just exists to move from one action sequence to the next. Bay is clearly out of ideas and its time the franchise moved beyond him. About the only credit I can give film writer Ehren Kruger is he managed to insert a few dangling plot ideas that hopefully a new writer could make use of if they can’t come up with something better. Which should be a very easy hurdle to jump over at this point.

A Transformer film, cartoon episode, comic book etc. that does not treat key Transformer characters as uniquely as would any human character completely misses the point. As always it comes down to the characters and the story around them. Eye candy and gimmicks might get people curious but that alone does little to keep them around. Especially not for 30 years. Bay and Kruger remain all gimmick, devoid of story and character so the result is a forgone conclusion – yet another empty VFX movie of robots fighting robots.