Transformers 4: Age of Extinction Review

Transformers 4: Age of Extinction

Transformers: Age of Extinction is the latest entry in the Transformers “saga” from director of awesomeness: Michael Bay. The movie also stars Mark Wahlberg, but his performance is less than noteworthy. I said previously that I wasn’t going to review this movie, but I decided that it could only be fun, so here we go. Get ready for sarcasm.

Story

After the events of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, all the Autobots are being hunted down by the government with the assistance of some freelance evil transformers. These evil-but-not-Decepticons-for-some-reason want to capture Optimus Prime in order to add him to “the collection.” The government, in their typical selfish way, are hunting down the Autobots and Decepticons collectively and melting them down into…. Wait for it….. TRANSFORMIUM. Ignoring the absolute awfulness of that name for a moment, Transformium is a sort of bio-metal that all Transformers are made of. Funny that it hasn't been mentioned in any of the previous films. Hmmmm. Anyway, some government corporation has re-purposed the transformium and is using it in order to manufacture their own Transformers. The idea is that the government will then use these robotic soldiers to rule the world or whatever.  

This fictional corporation, which also has a dumb name that I can’t remember, makes a prototype named Galvatron. Galvatron is based on Megatron’s genetic code and, unsurprisingly, he becomes self-aware and develops the urge to rule the world. Thus ends the Transformer portion of the story.

Now for the human portion. Mark Wahlberg is a Texan mechanic with a daughter who I think is supposed to be the “love-interest” because she basically fills in for Megan Fox from the first two films. Marky Mark discovers Optimus Prime in a basement somewhere and repairs him. Optimus then saves Marky’s family from the evil government agents and Mark Wahlberg decides that he owes Optimus and spends the rest of the movies repaying his debt.

Obviously, the Transformer storyline is way more interesting, albeit a little ridiculous. My biggest problem with this movie is that they repeatedly enforce the idea that Transformers are not just machines, but living things. But the movie never develops the Transformers’ characters. Instead, it focuses on the boring humans leaving the A

utobots for which the movie is named are left looking like side characters.

Besides, the plot doesn't really evolve throughout the movie and at the end, almost nothing is resolved. But hey, no one watches Michael Bay movies for the plot anyway. He’s the master of explosions! So if you just want to see lots of action and good fight scenes, then this movie is up to par. At best.

Acting/Dialogue

Mark Wahlberg is arguably the biggest star in this movie, but his performance seemed forced. I don’t think any of the actors in the movie actually wanted to be in the movie. Regardless, I will give out the award for best human actor and best voice actor.

Best Transformer: John Goodman for his performance as Hound. He is by far the most funny and interesting Autobot in the movie.

Best Human: Stanley Tucci for his performance as the CEO of the evil corporation.

Dialogue is poor. Piss poor. Composed of bad one-liners the script is uninteresting and unoriginal.

SFX/Action

Here it comes. The category that everyone wants to see, especially for this movie. Does Michael Bay live up to his reputation as king of the extreme?

No.

Alright fine, I’ll elaborate. Nothing looks real in this movie. Fight scenes don’t usually play out like you’d expect them to. Granted, transformations look really cool and fight scenes have a lot more detail than in previous movies.

The explosions are what got to me. Arguably the most appealing feature of a Michael Bay film are his epic non-cg explosions. In Transformers AOE, every explosion is way too over the top. With fireworks literally exploding out of nowhere, everything just seems unrealistic and cartoony.

Note: 3-D did not add or subtract much from the movie at all.

Conclusion

When editing this review I realized I went a little too easy on this movie, as I tend to do. Just to clarify, I did not like it at all. I give Transformers 4 a 4.5/10. If you still want to see it, I recommend doing now while it is in theaters. The special effects, despite their cheesiness, won’t look as good unless they are on the big screen.