Nerd Movie Reviews

Transformers: Age of Extinction 3D Review #Transformers

Proof that only thing in danger of extinction is quality movie making.

There’s a cartoon from a few years ago on Adult Swim called Frisky Dingo.  It is the story of an alien named Killface who plans to destroy the Earth but feels a bizarre compulsion to market that fact to the population of the planet with the help of some incompetent henchmen (If you don’t want to take my recommnedation and watch it but want to understand the humor it can be more or less summed up by the fact that Killface’s arch nemisis is Awesome X and his team is called the Xtacles).  At one point while explaining to his marketing team why he doesn’t have the budget for a media buy Killface flies into a rage and one of the team says “Please don’t kill us!” to which Killface replies “Please don’t make it so appealing!”

That pretty much sums up my feelings about Michael Bay and his Transformers series.  I really don’t want to hate it and him on all levels (even subatomically) but he just makes it so, so very easy to disgorge a lifetimes of bile and disgust all over my keyboard.  It’s like I’m a lion and his movies are a gazelle that he cuts two of the legs off of and then covers the thing in ranch dressing and throws in a side salad and basket of dinner rolls.  He produces the most rote crap ever.  He’s like a bizarre alien from an illiterate dimension who can only survive by breathing in and recycling corny cliches.  He must take meetings with his market research people daily and craft his films based on their recommendations to the nth degree.  Explosions, stereotypes, annoying humans, and dialog that would sound hackneyed and childish to a Speak & Spell must all be trending positively in marketing these days, although Heaven knows where they are finding their marketing demographic.  Maybe from the top 50 contestants in the National Lead Paint Chip Eating Contest.

The good news is that this is not the worst Transformer movie of the series.  All things are relative however and even if this were the best of the series (which it isn’t) it would still be the equivalent of being dissolved alive in 18 molar acid instead of 25 molar acid.  As a kid I loved the Dinobots and while their character and heritage was treated with the same respect Bay and Hollywood treats all of my childhood toys (not well.  Kind of like if you took the Declaration of Independence and tweaked it into a jingle to sell Happy Meals) it was fun to see them on the screen.  Of course in spite of the fact that they were featured in every single trailer and there was a huge cardboard cut out of Grimlock in the lobby of the local theater they only occupied about 10 of the 165 minutes this film ran.

(Note-if by some bizarre coincidence Mr. Bay is reading this I challenge you to name the Dinobots.  There were only 5 (6 if you read the comic) and they all had very simple names.  Plus I just gave you one of them.  If you cannot name the other four you should not be making movies about them.  Learn your source material is advice I would give any movie maker)

If you have ever studied great art you know that many paintings are judged not only by what is on the canvas but how the negative spaces are treated.  In this (one and only) regard this Transformers movie is similar in that what is great about this film is not what is in it but rather what is not.  Specifically Shia LaBouf.  I can only dream a scenario of shortly after the last movie where the Autobots got together and collectively decided that Sam Witwiky was a douche of astounding magnitude and Optimus Prime reenacted a Hitcher scene with him then used his skin to reupholster his interior.  If Micheal Bay were to release a 20 minute short of that happening my attitude might thaw just a bit.  The film also dispensed with four other character blights: Agent Simmons, Ron and Judy Witwicky, and the dog (you know it takes a lot for me to hate a dog character).  Sometimes less is indeed more.

Of course that is not to say the replacement humans are good or even tolerable.  Collectively they are like getting sand in the crotch of your bicycle pants and this movie as per usual suffers from the signature Michael Bay too many humans, not enough Transformers syndrome.  Does he really think we want to see a teenage daughter coming of age/statutory rape subplot with an overbearing father and boyfriend who look like they both were in the same frat in college together?  Obviously he does since he subjected us to about a full hour of that excitement (I mean excrement).  The characters were comically motivationless and depthless; cliche stereotypes drawn from the minds of idiots who read the Websters definition of character (char·ac·ter /ˈkariktər/-a person in a novel, play, or movie.) and then ran off to party with the pyrotechnics crew.  Awful to a man and woman (and yet given the absolute worst in dialog, direction, or story all put way more effort into their diaphanous roles than it deserved.  Kudos to the actors).

Naturally since they made this movie for the extremely lucrative foreign entertainment market the bad guys in this film are once again rogue CIA elements.  It’s getting laughable.  We can’t use the Chinese or Russians because they spend money in theaters.  We can’t use any other country because God forbid the producers miss out on .012% of the gross by insulting the Mongolian people by having the descendant of Genghis Khan be the bad guy.  We can’t use the US Military because we have to support the troops.  We can’t use the current President because that might shake Americans faith in our political system.  We can’t use corporate America because…well I guess that might hit too close to the truth.  So we are stuck with one of three remaining groups; rogue CIA, Mexican cartel, and white trash racists.

Also can someone tell me when the decision to have Transformers stop transforming occurred?  I noticed this early on.  For whatever reason the producers of this film decided that the coolest part of the Transformers-transforming from robot to vehicle-was either passe or just too expensive to CGI.  Now we see a robot standing around looking like he has to go somewhere quick.  We cut to a scene of Mark Wahlberg scratching his ass (or more likely Nichola Peltz’s ass in uber short shorts), and then cut to a vehicle the same color as the robot driving off.  I guess the original edit was like four hours or something and they decided that transforming was unnecessary, but after the second hour of seeing this I was really getting annoyed.

You can always spot the movies I really hate when I go over 1,000 words without going into the “story”.  The film starts off four years after the battle at the end of Dark of the Moon.  Decepticons are now being hunted down by the CIA (apparently Transformers fall down like bowling pins when faced with the military might of a bunch of yahoos with submachine guns and RPGs.  Weren’t these guys supposed to armored robotic warriors of some kind?).  However the first Transfomer taken down turns out to be Ironside of the Autobots.  He goes down with the help of a bad robot (haw!) named…something?  He’s typical Decepticon grey and has a big ship where he keeps things prisoner, although he looks more like a fleshless T-800 than a Transformer.  I swear they named him at some point but he so blended into the story that I can’t remember it.  Also he is not really a Decepticon or Autobot and doesn’t do a lot of Transforming so I don’t know what the hell he was here for.  For the purposes of this review I will call him Badguyatron.

Anyway, cut to Texas where struggling inventor Cade Yaeger (Mark Wahlberg-Pain and Gain, Lone Survivor, Prisoners) and his employee Lucas (T.J. Miller-Cloverfield, Unstoppable, Our Idiot Brother) are hired to do…something in an old movie theater filled with oddball characters who vanish into the ether (you know, if they had just cut out the whole movie theater football scene they probably could have had all the time they needed to show all the missing transformations.  I’m just saying).  I guess repair some antique projectors?  While there they discover a beat up old Mack truck rusting backstage (anyone else think that was strange?).

Cade buys the wreck and hauls it back to his gadget filled barn.  Meanwhile his super hot daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz-the Last Airbender, Deck the Halls, Bates Motel) takes a few minutes to prance around wearing short shorts and a crop top (this wouldn’t be a Michael Bay film if he didn’t take the opportunity to be the creepiest director ever) comes home and bitches him out for spending money one more junk when they are literally about to lose the house (oh, yeah.  Bay filled another five minutes of screen time with Cade chasing a real estate agent off the property with a baseball bat.  I’m sure that was a critical scene, well worth dropping some of the coolest visuals) and she can’t afford to go to college.  Cade apparently spent several years in an overprotective father Skinner box where his only entertainment was reruns of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter and wants her to be a nun or something.

(By the way, this whole overprotective father schtick would continue for the entire duration of the film and get more pointless and agonizingly drawn out as the film progressed.  It must have occupied about 40 minutes of screen time and by the end of the film a piece of me was secretly hoping that Tessa somehow ended up a crystal meth whore.  I’m not proud of that thought but there it is.  Date my Daughter image courtesy of the cheap t shirt category)

So he starts tinkering with the truck and finds it full of large caliber brass casings (wait a minute.  Aren’t all the Transformers weapons either missiles or energy based?  Why would Optimus Prime have shell casings, and if he did why would his gun eject them into the crew cab of his truck form?  Unless he somehow collected human ones in battle but in order for that to happen the humans would have had to be firing the casings rather than the shells at him.  I guess “continuity” is NOT a word the writers looked up on Webster) and it turns out to be a Transformer of some kind.  In spite of about 100,000 PSAs about how dangerous Transfomers are and a posted reward of $25,000 for finding one Cade decides to keep messing with it and naturally he pulls the missile in the power supply out, reactivating it.

It’s Optimus Prime, of course, and Cade decides to help him for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON WHATSOEVER.  Prime says that he needs his fellow Autobots to get repaired but it looks like Cade equipped with a torch and a ball-peen hammer can do the job.  Lucas calls in for the reward and a bunch of CIA guys show up and threaten to kill everyone.  They escape inside Optimus Prime (I guess the CIA helicopter previously seen was off getting donuts) with the help of Tessa’s verboten boyfriend Shane Dyson (Jack Reyner-Delivery Man, Cold, What Richard Did), who happens to be a rally car driver and the subject of Cade’s “No one is good enough to date my daughter” rage.  Optimus somehow completely repairs himself and they meet up with the rest of the surviving Autobots.

Ugh this story is ponderous.  I’m going into speed mode.  The head rogue CIA guy is Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer-Cheers, Toy Story 2, X-Men Last Stand) who is out to destroy all Transformers in spite of working with Badguyatron.  He is working with billionaire industrialist James Savoy (Titus Welliver-Argo, the Town, Gone Baby Gone).  The plan is to collect all the metal (called in this film Tranformium (no joke)) from the dead robots in order to make their own Transformers.

(Oh, yeah.  The Transformers ability to transform now comes from this midichorlian metal Transformium, not from any high tech engineering.  Also this “genius” seems confused when they keep trying to use Decepticon programming from Megatron’s head to make a new Optimus Prime and it always ends up looking like Megatron.  This is just stupid x1000)

Badguyatron has promised Frasier Crane a super bomb that will transform a bunch of ground into Tranformium if they can help him capture Optimus Prime.  Badguyatron either works for some people who may or may not have made the first Transformers or is a collector because his ship is filled with captured aliens and robots (oh, yeah.  In addition to ripping off Badguyatron from Terminator they also “borrowed” very heavily from Aliens).  No danger of that deal going badly.  Anyway, the story moves along like a choo choo train missing all of its wheels and powered by plot holes.  Stuff gets blown up (a lot).  Savoy makes his own transformer from the head of Megatron and names it Galvatron (hey, what happened to Unicron?) and then acts surprised when it turns out to be evil Megatron reincarnated.  Prime pulls the Dinobots out of Badguyatron’s cage and beats Grimlock into submission.  Galvatron disappears like a girl after a second date with me leaving Badguyatron to fight it out with Prime.

The stars:

With the addition of the Dinobots this was the first film that felt like the old cartoon, at least in the action.  One star.  For all my hatred I do love the Transformers.  One star.  No Shia LaBouf (with any luck that will be the last time I have to type his name).  One star.  Acting was way better than this film deserved.  One black hole.  Um, that’s it I guess.  Four stars.

The black holes:

Geez, where to start.  I guess with the standard Transformers black holes.  Stupid story.  One black hole.  Less a script than an super powered plot hole generator.  One black hole.  Too much humans, not enough robots.  One black hole.  The human characters collectively make you wish that Megatron had successfully destroyed the human race at the end of the last film.  One black hole.  Racist robot characters return with a vengeance.  One black hole.  There was one Autobot who looked like Santa Claus and literally smoked a cigar.  Sorry but that just made me sad.  One star.  There was another scene early on where Optimus Prime is totally decrepit and (again, not joke) is coughing.  Um, when did Transformers get lungs and the need to process oxygen?  They later show Grimlock breathing, and let’s not forget the cigar guy.  One black hole.  A lot of the action got really stupid.  So Badguyatron and his minions shoot off a bunch of missiles at the fleeing Autobots.  Everyone one of them missed and then struck the pavement on either side in order to feed Michael Bays minimum explosions per minute addiction.  Also apparently the Transformers make human scale rifles with unlimited ammo that can take out other Tranformers.  One black hole.  Catering the story to foreign markets.  For some reason the CIA is cool with their new transformer technology being produced in China (also the city in danger of being blown up is Beijing).  One black hole.  The lack of transformations really got on my jock.  One black hole.  OMG was this movie long.  Most movies are either really long or just seem really long, but this one did the impossible and did both.  2 hours and 45 minutes that seem like 5 hours and 32 minutes.  One black hole.  To add insult to my injury there was literally about an hour of crap that not only wasn’t necessary but really shouldn’t have been in the film.  Five minutes of dealing with the local real estate agency could have been accomplished with a simple eviction notice (which they had in the film anyway).  On the other hand the agent was the closest thing to a person of color this film had (unless you count the racist robots) so I suppose they felt they needed something.  One black hole.  Dialog that made me want to stuff my Reeces Pieces into my ears.  One black hole.  There were scenes (mostly involving humans chasing each other around) that were flat out boring.  I had to struggle to stay awake for some of them.  One black hole.  Who the hell was Badguyatron and what was his agenda?  Why should I care about him?  When we wasn’t actually on screen I totally forgot about him.  One black hole.  Total: 16 black holes.

So a total of 12 black holes.   So close, but Hercules still retains my worst movie of the year at 13 black holes.  Let’s see how Hercules does next week.  Should you see it?  If you are a die hard fan of the movie franchise sure.  However, if you have seen any of the last three films you have seen this one.  If you are going to see it go for the biggest screen you can find.  If you aren’t there for the visuals you are wasting your time.  Date movie?  Probably not.  There is some human interaction and romance but it is so abysmally lame that I doubt your date will find it intriguing, and most likely find all the rest of it boring.  Bathroom break?  At 165 minutes you will need one.  There’s a scene in a bar where Shane is explaining to Cade why it is perfectly legal and moral for a 20 year old to have sex with a 17 year old that is 100% grade A worthless, except as another case study of Michael Bay being kind of creepy.  Go then.

Thanks for reading.  Not a lot for me to see.  Maybe I’ll check out Jersey Boys if I can find the motivation but meh.  I have other stuff I can write about.  Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu and if you have comments or questions on this movie please post them here.  Off topic stuff can be emailed to [email protected].  Talk to you soon.

the Infamous Dave Inman

Tags: cheap t shirts, Transformers Age of Extinction Review