Mr. Bay's Wild Ride

Transformers: Age of Extinction

We all have come to know the Transformers over the past 7 years. Financially, the Transformers is one of the most successful film franchises of all time. Director Michael Bay (Bad Boys) has taken the toy line turned cartoon series into a grand special effects spectacle that is hard not to be in awe of. However, the plot lines for a couple of these films are somewhat nonexistent.  So here in lies the question…Should amazing special effects trump the fact that a movie’s plot is terrible? Is the movie good the more explosions you have? Does the movie need to make sense for it to still be considered fun? Sorry I know I said one question, but I think those others are valid as well. These questions were what I was asking myself as I watched the latest installment in Michael Bay’s film series, Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Set after the events of Dark of the Moon, Extinction finds the Autobots being hunted down by a black-ops CIA team alongside another Transformer who is not an Autobot nor a Decepticon.  The Bot, Lockdown, is on the hunt for Optimus Prime to take him back to The Creators. For aiding him in his pursuit, Lockdown has promised a ‘seed’ to the humans that turns a very large portion of the Earth into the same technology as the Transformers. The ‘seed’ will be handed over to a tech guru who has created Transformers of his own by using the decapitated heads of Decepticons (mainly of the evil Megatron). Now with all of that going on Optimus Prime, beaten and injured, has been hiding out and found himself in the care of a new set of human characters. The excitement begins when all these storylines converge together.

The Good: The special effects of this film are as amazing as ever and nobody choreographs action scenes quite like Michael Bay. Along with his action scenes, Bay has a great eye behind the camera. Bay uses the crane shot magnificently, giving the audience a beautiful panoramic view of the scene. I also loved the Shia LaBeouf was not in this film. LaBeouf’s character became whiny and kind of annoying and I found myself routing for him to die in the other films.

The Bad: Every one of those plotlines! Each one of the stories drag out to long to a point where they start to not make any sense and because they drag out,  the film becomes 2 hours and 40 minutes long. I completely understand that the first film was about the same running time, but the story flowed well and it makes the movie not feel that long. Maybe if the filmmakers stuck with one plot and made it as interesting as possible the film wouldn’t have been that bad. The film’s human cast was, of course, over shadowed (no pun intended) by the giant robots. Not that it really matters, the villain of the film (Kelsey Grammer) comes across as a spoiled child throwing a tantrum and the ‘hero’ (Mark Wahlberg) goes through the movie not really fitting into his role. Wahlberg plays an inventor trying to support his teenage daughter before being sucked up into the events of the film. The weird part is that Wahlberg is very muscular for a nerd/inventor; he is also very capable of handling himself in a fight. To me, Wahlberg just seemed miscast. Cast Wahlberg as something that fits like an ex-cop or ex-military guy, not a Big Bang Theory genius with muscle. Plus, the writers kill off the most promising human character within the first 20 minutes.

Opinion: Michael Bay needs to take another break from the over-CGI’ed summer blockbusters for just a tick. Bay directed Pain & Gain in between the 3^rd and 4^th Transformers films and Pain turned out pretty decent.  Pain was in the same essence as Bad Boys and The Rock, films that made Michael Bay famous.

               

                Mr. Bay,

                        Give Transformers a break; go back to your roots for a bit and then come back when you remember that story matters over special effects. OH! And get a better writer. The one you have is not making sense anymore. Suggestions: Rian Johnson (Looper), Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past), Nicole Perlman (Guardians of the Galaxy), and heck bring back the writers you had on the first film Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. One more thing Mr. Bay (sorry I know I’m getting annoying) can we limit the amount of times we use the slow motion. Understandably used for dramatic effect, but do we need to use slow-mo for every action scene? I can almost create a drinking game out of how many times slow-mo is used in this movie.

                                                            Thank You for your time.

P.S: Next time Optimus Prime is riding on the back of Grimlock, can we please not have Optimus smack Grimlock on the butt with his sword…it’s unsettling.

Sorry, I’m back in reality. I know that I am in the minority of people that didn’t like this film, so I will end with this: If you enjoyed the others, you will enjoy this one.

The Verdict: See Paragraph Above.