Director: Michael Bay
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Kelsey Grammar, Titus Welliver, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Sophia Myles, Bingbing Li, T.J. Miller, Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, John Goodman, Ken Watanabe, Robert Foxworth, John DiMaggio, Mark Ryan, Reno Wilson
Here we go again. Another Transformers movie. I’m going to preface this review by saying that after the last film I said to my friends that I would only see the next one if it had Dinobots in it, and lo and behold they appear. So my expectations were pretty low going in. But let’s get on with the synopsis first.
There are quite a few things going on so it’s difficult to sum up in one paragraph like I usually do.
- Cade Yeager (Wahlberg) is a struggling inventor trying to give his daughter Tess (Peltz) a good life, but she’s continually annoyed with his seemingly blinkered view of life. While searching for the treasure in the junk he finds Optimus Prime, and saves the Autobot. This puts them on a collision course with a black ops operation sanctioned by the government and the ragtag team of Autobots and humans try to evade capture and figure out why the government is hunting them.
- Harold Attinger (Grammar) is in charge of a program that seeks to wrestle Earth back from the devastation that the presence of the Transformers have wrought. After the destruction of Chicago he’s implemented measures to destroy Autobots in order to wipe out aliens from Earth so that the events of Chicago will not be repeated. However, in a somewhat hypocritical turn he’s being aided by a Transforming bounty hunter called Lockdown.
- Lockdown has been sent to Earth to bring back Optimus Prime to the ‘Creators’. He’s made a deal with Attinger to give the humans the seed, a device that transforms matter into ‘Transformium’, in return for Attinger delivering him Optimus Prime.
- Joshua Joyce (Tucci) is a successful businessman who wants to make the world a better place and sees the Transformers technology as a way to do so. He’s being supplied parts by Attinger to reverse engineer the technology and create their own Transformers, but he needs the Seed to provide more material.
- Galvatron is secretly manipulating Joyce’s efforts in order to build a new Decepticon army.
I think that’s about it. Right. I have to say that I enjoyed this more than I thought I did but that’s because my expectations were set so low. I’ll start off with the good. The action is much, much clearer in Age of Extinction. I can actually tell who is fighting who and all the Autobots have distinct personalities and voices, so they actually seem to be characters rather than just visual effects. The crass humor is toned down a LOT, although there are some moments that are still really cringe-worthy. Mark Wahlberg is a big improvement on Shia LaBeouf and the relationship with his daughter is a nice change from the relationship drama seen in the previous films. Grammer, Welliver and Tucci are all good in their roles too. I also liked how the Autobots and humans came together at the end. Another thing is that the visuals were very bright, and in a time when it seems the in thing is to be dark and washed out (I’m looking at you Man of Steel) it was refreshing to see big action sequences in the sunshine. Oh, and of course DINOBOTS!
But it’s still really long. And it doesn’t need to be this long at all. I think there’s a very good two hour movie in there somewhere but there’s no need for these films to be the length they are. The action is relentless but by the end it’s just so draining and you’ve seen so much that it loses all impact. I mean a lot gets destroyed and so many innocent people must have lost their lives but there’s one big set piece after another and by the end it just doesn’t seem to matter.
All the plots are incoherent and the film isn’t cohesive at all. It feels like it wants to be about five different movies at once, it starts off with the Autobots being hunted by the government which is quite a cool angle, but then you have the family drama, then the love story between the daughter and her boyfriend, then it’s about an alien bounty hunter, then it’s about the dangers of using technology irresponsibly, then suddenly there’s the Seed and it becomes about the Transformers having to learn about their history. It shifts from one to the other with characters coming and going that it’s impossible to get a sense of the narrative.
The relationship between Tess and Shane is a bit creepy, I mean, he carries around a laminated card that basically says it’s okay for him to go out with a minor. Very bizarre and awkward. Also, I laughed out loud when they mentioned that Shane is Irish. The dude shifted between accents as quickly as the movie shifted through plots.
As for the characters, well, no-one is really that sympathetic. Joyce has a good arc. Sophia Myles is wasted as she’s a glorified extra. Wahlberg is decent but too much time is given to his family drama and it’s just not that interesting, especially because at the end nothing is really resolved between him and his daughter, one minute she’s mad at him, the next she’s oblivious of his heroics and is only concerned about her boyfriend, and then suddenly at the end everything is okay. The Autobots were cool but I don’t like how they’re so reliant on Optimus Prime to work together. Optimus Prime was kinda like Superman in Man of Steel as well, he was moping around for most of the film and then randomly spouted out one liners that gave me the impression he was going a bit mad.
Lockdown was a cool addition and his face turned into a massive gun! But he works for some mysterious creators that seem to be a big part of the story but it doesn’t go anywhere. Then you have Galvatron and his story doesn’t even intersect with Lockdown’s so it feels like separate films are meshed together and at the end nothing feels resolved, there was just more destruction around the world, which is surely only going to make people hate Autobots even more. And it kinda makes you think that Attinger has a point. Also, with Galvatron, he was set up to be a mirror of Optimus Prime but nothing was done with that.
So it’s pretty much more of the same really. The movie is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars, in two or three years the next one will come out and we’ll all be saying the same things as we have about the other films.
