Good god, was this thing awful.
I mean, for what it’s worth, we both agreed that it was going to be terrible before we even pushed play, so I guess in that way it met expectations.
Still, if the universe needed a sign that it’s time to stop making Transformers movies, it should be pretty safe to say that Age of Extinction can go ahead and be that sign…
I mean, seriously – by mid-movie I was actually kind of rooting for the end of the Transformers as a race, until they revealed their actual “plot” and it just became one long groan that lasted the entire rest of the movie.
When it comes down to it, I think that by far the biggest problem with this franchise is that the writing is incredibly lazy. It bugged me way back to the second one where the title was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and they actually had a character named The Fallen. Seriously?! Because up until that reveal, it was actually kind of a bad ass title, and then you had to go cheapen it all up … was the Transformer naming guy sick that week and an intern was just pressured into coming up with something on the spot???
It’s that same laziness that in Transformers 4 brought us Transformium … because the writers of a billion dollar franchise couldn’t be tasked with making up a name for the crap that makes up these things in the first place. I guess they figured it didn’t really matter because all of the new, human-made Transformers all looked like shit while they were “transforming” because they were just blobs of metal instead of actual parts moving around, anyways.
That said, the casting is equally awful in this movie, starting with “the new star” … and don’t get me wrong because I like Mark Wahlberg in a lot of his movies, but he just seems so out of place in this movie, I could’ve sworn that there were times that Sara could probably hear my eyes rolling during the movie. The action shots, the stupid lines, “I think we found a Transformer!”, the fact that never before have we really seen humans standing a chance against these things, and yet now Mark Wahlberg just picks up a Transformer gun and starts blasting them like he’s the Last Action Hero!
At least the other movies all showcased big scenes of robot boxing that could distract us from the ridiculousness of the actual plots, but this movie was hanging on by a thread and honestly the action scenes that we got really weren’t all that great.
Plus, how come nobody ever learns in this franchise?! Seriously, the only reference to the previous movies is how Chicago got all fucked up and we must never forget and these robot aliens are our enemies, yet the real plot has the government siding with evil robots to kill the good robots after the good robots defeated the evil robots in the last siege, and by the way, now we’re also going to try to make some new – probably evil – robots of our own?!
I know that this is fiction, but good fiction is good because the story is actually plausible. The plot for Transformers 4 was just stupid.
And yes, for what it’s worth, I do think that it hurts the franchise that Shia LaBeouf wasn’t in this movie. It was weird watching a Transformers movie without him and Megan Fox, and not just because Marky Mark was horrible as a replacement. The story seemed so forced to not even acknowledge anything from its own past – like there wasn’t some point where the Transformers would be sitting around and someone would go, “Hey, I wonder how Sam is doing … you know, the guy who helped us and who we swore to protect for the last how many years? The human who was kind of Optimus’ BFF? Whatever happened to that guy???”
They said that this wasn’t supposed to be a reboot, but save for a forgetful Optimus and Bumblebee, it pretty much was. New human actors – all of them, new Transformers that were terrible – sorry, but John Goodman was a lousy giant robot, a plot that forgets just enough of the past movies to make the same stupid mistakes all over again … and giant robots fighting.
I mean, I probably rolled my eyes at that scene more than any other, but Optimus Prime riding a Dinobot was probably the most worthwhile image in the entire movie. And they had already given it to us in the trailer.
I laughed afterwards when the TV jumped back to the menu after it finally ended and I saw that Transformers 4 had an 18% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It kind of makes me glad that I wasn’t more of a Transformers fan growing up or my nostalgia would be hurting pretty bad right now…