Looking at: Transformers: age of extinction

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Lies, all lies.

Michael Bay, etc. 

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Please, please, just let me die. 

Michael Bay has sort of become a joke within the film world, seen as nothing more then a hack director that likes blowing things up. While he certainly does have an affinity for explosives, I've always regarded him as one of the better action directors to come out of Hollywood. There's no denying Bay's ability to craft an action scene and make it big. Huge, sprawling battles with tonnes of things going on at once. It's not that Micheal Bay is a bad director, certainly not after his surprisingly entertaining Pain&Gain back in 2013. My theory is that he's an angry director, and he's decided to take out his frustration on all of us. 

Transformers: Age of Extinction is the latest in a long, slow rape of the iconic Hasbro toy line from the eighties, and a soft not-reboot of the film franchise. To be honest, I didn't watch transformers as a kid, none of my friends watched it, and I have only a very limited knowledge of the franchise outside the movies. What I do know about Transformers is that the Micheal Bay movies suck, Optimus Prime is awesome, and there is such a thing as a good Transformers movie. Age of Extinction carries on this proud tradition, insofar as it's terrible, Optimus prime is awesome, and it remindes you of better movies throughout. 

Markey Mark and the Funky Bunch

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The good, the bad, and Jack Reynor.

Blessedly this time around we don't have to listen to Shia Labeouf, who, frankly, has bigger problems to deal with, and might be a cannibal. Instead we get Mark Wallberg being... well... Mark Wallberg. Actually, in general there's an ok cast at work here. There's no denying Wallberg's chops are better then a young Labeouf, and he just sort of oozes American badass through and through; Meghan Fox has been supplemented by Nicola Peltz, a better actress playing a just-as-shitty character; Kelsey Grammer is here just having a ball with his evil CIA director, and there's some dude named Jack playing some dude named Shane that doesn't matter at all. Look, you can replace the actors, but there's no accounting for a shitty script, and that certainly seems to be a long running issue with the series. At one point the characters are suspended in the air on a tightrope and Peltz's character literally says "I'm going back to the ship" referring to a giant alien ship filled with things that want her dead. The stuff that pours out of the character's mouth in AoE is so stupid that I began to scream profanity at them hoping for it all to end. 

Shiny happy robots

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Barely invited. 

Oh yeah, there's robots too. Yeah, I know, I forgot too, and so does the film half the time. I've never understood this idea that we as viewers need humans in the movie to root for. No we don't, we have things to root for i.e the Autobots. Optimus and crew are way more interesting as characters then Labeuof's Sam Whitwiky or Wallberg's Cade Yeager (yes, really) ever could be. Even giving the character tangible connections to the events around him in the form of an insanely annoying and stupid daughter doesn't seem to help. Why don't people want an entire movie about just the Transformers? Most of the show was just the Transformers, and so was the 1986 movie.

Perhaps worse of all is that the human element just bogs down the film's best moments: the fight scenes. Yes, there's no denying that everything in AoE looks better then the original trilogy. The Transformers are sleeker, cleaner, and more recognizable then before, and the fight scenes are better paced and, for the most part, better shot then the original. What's really disappointing is the frequency of the Transformer on Transformer fights. There are maybe a half dozen of them scattered throughout the film's marathon runtime of three hours, and with the exception of the last one or two most of the fights are barely shown. Much like this year's version of Godzilla before it, AoE like to show short clips of the fight in the background while Mark Wallberg yells, Nicola Peltz cries, and Jack Raynor stands around like a douche-bag. Make no mistake, the fights are awesome, and much of the films last act is comprised of full scale battle scenes, with the handful of Autobots taking on a literal army of Decepticons, and Yes, there is a scene with Dinosaur robots and it's pretty sweet, but it's all hidden behind so much stupid bullshit that you're lucky to still be awake when it happens. 

Sometimes plot

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From left to right: Respect for the viewers, Hollywood writers, beloved IPs.

The story is that Cade Yeager is an all American good guy with some money problems that accidentally stumbles onto the barely functional corpse of  Optimus Prime. Yeager fixes Prime, but is tracked by the super secret Cemetary Wind, a black-ops group tasked with destroying all the remaining Transformers, regardless of allegiance. Yeager, his daughter, her stupid boyfriend and Optimus escape and have to stop a bounty hunter Transformer from killing the human race, and there's an evil corporation, and the Decepticons-but-not-really and it's all very dumb and hard to follow. It's still a better script then Revenge of the Fallen, though that's a pretty low bar. There's good guys, bad guys, sometimes good and sometimes bad guys, and some weird Asian chick who I don't think actually gets a name, but kicks ass. Oh, and half of it takes place in China, for some reason. 

Least handicapped at the cripple fair

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What I wish would happen to me while watching. 

Transfomers: Age of Extinction is better then the original trilogy, but not by much. The cast is better, the fights are better, and the Transfomers are better, but that doesn't mean that it's a good movie. There's no characters to root for, and the ones you're supposed to are vapid and dumb, so much of the action is waylaid for stupid character drama that you begin begging for an actual fight scene, and there are so many stretches of time without any Transformers that you forget what movie your watching. Add to all that the films incredible run time, and this film becomes a test of patience. The fact that this is setting up for a sequal perplexes me, and there are so many things about how this film ends that I found myself outraged at the fact that there will be more of this shit. 

Transformers: Age of Extinction isn't a good movie, hell, it's a barely passable blockbuster. The real question becomes are we even surprised anymore, and how stupider will the series get. 

Time will tell, Micheal Bay, time will tell...