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.
