Transformers, my childhood nostalgia, the many hours spent with the action figures. When the first movie came out, I was blown away. It was everything that I wanted the Transformers to be on the big screen.
Then the sequel came with shaky action sequences and incoherent battle scenes that completely ruined the movie. The third sequel came with new cast members, humans and Transformers; bigger action sequences and bigger explosions in true Michael Bay fashion. Though it was slightly better than the second, it was still far from the first because of weak plot points and many plot holes.
Many years have passed, and while movie standards and quality have generally increased, Michael Bay somehow did not.
Age Of Extinction, fourth Transformers movie, still suffered from a lot of the same old mistakes that just took me out of the movie completely.
However, Bay is still able to attract real talent to join his cast. Stanley Tucci is probably one talented character actor that I didn't see joining the fold. And he gave the best performance in the entire movie. He's committed to the character completely and brought a lot of funny and memorable moments.
Kelsey Grammer also turned in a good performance playing the bad guy with a good motivation. T. J. Miller always bring the funny and he didn't disappoint here. The beautiful and talented Nicola Peltz did the best she could with the material. I'm not familiar with Jack Renynor's work but he was forgettable here and probably not his fault too.
As for Mark Wahlberg, he's a legitimate action star. But I would have casted someone else for this role. When he proclaimed to Peltz in the movie, "I'm an inventor," I almost started laughing because I just didn't see it. But that aside, he delivered what needed to be delivered.
What improved quite clearly this time was the CGI. The transforming still awed me. Some action sequences were really cool, though Bumblebee saving the humans in mid-fall wasn't as good as before, unfortunately because it used to be one of the best bits. But sequences like Crosshairs parachuting while shooting up some bad robots was super cool but we've seen that in the trailer already.
The best addition in terms of the Transformers was Lockdown, voiced by Mark Ryan (who also did the voice for Jetfire in Revenge Of The Fallen). Lockdown was tough, menacing, adversarial, and all-around badass. And he transformed into a badass Lamborghini.
Now with the bad. What I really didn't like and what Bay keeps doing is not having a consistency with the Autobots' location and situation. When Optimus Prime was fighting Megatron (that same part we saw in the trailer), the rest of the Autobots were nowhere to be found when minutes ago they were right beside each other.
And in this movie there were only 5 Autobots. Two of them were Optimus and Bumblebee, the two returning characters. So really, there were only 3 new Autobots Bay had to introduce to the audience. And he couldn't even do that well. I couldn't even name all of the 3 after the movie ended. The only two names I caught were Crosshairs and Hound. I didn't know the third was Drift until I check out IMDb.
Another pleasant surprise I found on IMDb was that Ken Watanabe provided the voice for Drift while John Goodman did Hound. Such small roles and yet we get those big names to do the voices when it really wouldn't have mattered who did them.
One blasphemous thing that Bay did here was turn Optimus into the biggest crybaby I have ever seen. He was pouting, sulking, throwing tantrums and kicking things around. This is not the Optimus that I know and love. Bay, this is unforgivable.
Another unforgivable thing was also turning Bumblebee into a spoiled, jealous, little kid; making a mess of things when he was supposed to be in a covert mission. Sure, Bay, you wanted to create some light-hearted and fun entertaining sequence but at the expense of the character of a strong soldier?
And why were the other four Autobots fighting one another for sport? Facing their age of extinction, and they turn on one another when their bond should have been so much stronger. And Optimus didn't even care when all that were happening.
The script once again was horrible. Ehran Kruger who also did the other two Transformers movies that I didn't like, should stop writing for Transformers movies. It's as if he's trying to out-cheese himself with each sequel.
And what about the dumb moments? So Kruger and Bay were telling us that an alien spaceship, that could suck up and destroy an entire city, takes about 10 minutes to warm up its engines to take off into space? Who came up with this dumb idea? So bad writing.
There were also too much focus placed on the humans. And in some instances, not enough. Why was Wahlberg and family chased in the first place? I saw no plausible explanation for that.
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Let me go into the spoiler section.
Galvatron was nowhere to be found when it came to fighting. That was disappointing. Stinger was introduced along side Galvatron and he had no personality. That was disappointing.
The rest of the robots fighting for Galvatron transformed in a "new age and futuristic way" that didn't make them Transformers anymore. I wanted Transformers. Not the predicted future where atoms join together intelligently to form whatever we want them to form.
I did predict that Grimlock may not speak, I didn't want to be right but sadly I was. It would have been nice to hear him say, "Grimlock help Prime." Or something along that line, since Bay already established they didn't speak the modern language. (But of course Prime spoke their ancient language.)
The worst part with getting the Dinobots (a term that wasn't used at all) was Optimus saying, "I'm giving you freedom," and subsequently gave Grimlock (let's call him that for the purpose of the review) a hard bitch-slap. Optimus continued to say, "Fight for my family and I'll set you free," (or something similar) - another great example of a horrible script. Kruger doesn't understand what freedom means?
When all this was happening, Hound and Bumblebee were in the city battling 50 other robots. And what were Crosshairs and Drift doing? Relaxing and watching Optimus and Grimlock throwdown. No sense in urgency in the writing.
And when the battle ended, the Dinobots just... left. To where? That scene was hilarious. And Hound shouted something like, "It's an honour to ride you anytime, Spikes." It would have been nice if Bay threw in the name used in the cartoon as an Easter egg for the fans. But did we even get all 5 Dinobots? I couldn't even tell. Bay doesn't seem to be able to do proper character introductions.
Optimus flying into space in that final scene? I wonder why nobody told him he could fly in the beginning of the movie.
Michael Bay, enough is enough. Stop directing another Transformers movie. Be a producer if you want to. But let's bring a fresh pair of eyes into the next installment. Please.
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