Transformers: Age of Extinction
Director: Michael Bay
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, Nicola Peltz
Review.
Transformers 4 is the 4th film in the Transformers franchise, and also the most intelligent. Gone are the corny jokes about little robots having the hots for Megan Fox and Witwicky's mom wearing dumb pants. The movie follows up on the consequences of the third movie, in which the city of Chicago was devastated by a fight involving Sentinel, Optimus, Megatron, and their associates. Following this, on offscreen-ville, some of the humans turned on all the transformers, attacked several of them, and the surviving autobots went into hiding (though the general public doesn't know that the beloved autobots were betrayed). A company is mining Transformers technology to make new Transformers.
All of this is positive: some logic. Of course human leadership would turn on Transformers after Transformers 3, of course they'd seek to reverse engineer the technology, of course there'd be some manoeuvring within the American government for leadership. Gone is the dumb patriotic jingoism of Transformers 3, where the movie's plot starts with the autobots destroying a middle east (i.e. Iranian) research base on behalf of "neutrality". Instead we see the USA seeking to take control of leftover alien technology, competition with Russia for that technology, et cetera. We're also dealing, interestingly, with a cynical Optimus Prime, which is interesting. He's not the eternal optimist beacon of hope we're used to, which is cool to see.
All of that is a positive, moreover, surprisingly, each of Optimus Prime and 4 of the 5 principle human character arc has a meaningful character arc, which I wasn't expecting? The characters are normally constants in these movies, a lot of them were here, but not here, it's not something I'd expect of a Transformers movie.
The main human interaction is a repetition of Michael Bay's favourite, father-daughter-boyfriend love triangle, as per Armageddon where Bruce Willis didn't trust Ben Affleck for the first 80% of the movie.
Minus: Opimus Prime is heavily damaged at the start of the movie, I'm not exactly sure how he fixed himself or if he completely fixed himself.
Aside from that, the movie toned down the Bayhem which may have been a studio reaction to Man of Steel, we see a lot of occasions where a huge number of humans almost die, and then don't because of last-second adjustments. There is destruction in this movie, but not as much before. Another change, the lead actress Nicola Peltz, though demonstrably gorgeous, does not titillate the screen with T&A shots like Rosie Huntingdon-Whitely and Megan Fox did, the male gaze is toned down a couple notches, we see that she has great legs, a thin midsection and a beautiful face, with the viewing angles not being as blatant. Also gone is the old look of miscellaneous transformers, wherein they all looked alike and it was difficult to tell who was who. These battles were easier to follow.
Another plus is Lockdown. He gives a few great speeches, he has a great theme music that is currently frustrating me because I can't find it on youtube, and his fight scenes are cool. A lot of nerds will complain that the movie doesn't give all the answers, but that's the point of Lockdown here, he is mysterious. He is a bounty hunter working on behalf of some external force. He's apparently been bounty hunting for a very long time. I'm not sure how Optimus either recognised him or recognised the interior of his ship. That's left for sequels to explain I guess.
There's also some confusion with Grimlock. We see a frozen dinosaur at the start of the movie, I thought that would be Grimlock once he unthawed, but it turned out that Grimlock was something else, and thus that frozen dinosaur is still in the arctic.
With that said, I had a huge grin on my face when I saw the dinobauts first start stampeding into Hong Kong and kick ass, that was awesome to see.
The minus for me is mostly in the last 45 minutes of the plot where a lot of nonsense happens.
- We're told that the new transformers are upgrades, but 5 autobots dispatch 50 of the new transformers with relative ease. 2 of the human characters
- Kelsey Grammer and his associate, go crazy and become boring, though it leads to an entertaining payoff in how Grammer's character dies. However, that payoff was so surprising that the emotion of shock overtook the emotion of joy at least for me, I'll be curious to know how others react.
- The conclusion of the human character arcs is reached at very saccharine destination points and quite cringeworthy, it's not as bad as Darcy in Thor 2, but it's getting there;
- The way the Transformers can easily damage Lockdown's ship is distracting because I'd expect that ship to be more advanced;
- The end fight was so long it was starting to get boring;
- Galvatron isn't as cool as he was in the 1986 movie;
- The worst one: WTF is Galvatron doing during the final fight?
All in all, it was ... surprising to see Michael Bay make a movie so different from the previous three. It still has problems, the plot is kind of bloated with multiple prologues leading to multiple plot points some of which don't converge well, but it's better than Transformers 2 and 3 since it's removed some of the general problems there. However, I'm not sure if it's as fun as Transformers 1.
Grade: B
Ongoing ranking of 2014 movies
Tier 1, A grade: Noah, Grand Budapest Hotel, The Lego Movie, Edge of Tomorrow, The Fault in our Stars
Tier 2, B grade: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Robocop, Divergent, Transformers: Age of Extinction, X-Men: Days of Future Past, 300: Rise of an Empire,
Tier 3, C grade: Godzilla, Amazing Spider Man 2
