Transformers: Age of Extinction - A Review

At a certain point, one wonders if film critics hate Michael Bay as much as they claim to, bearing in mind that he is a part of the very industry that keeps them in work, as well as a part which enables them to regularly flex their bile muscles as they pour huge streams of invective onto the page regarding the man and his work.  It’s got to the stage now where a film which even has Bay credited as an associate producer has the reviewers sharpening their knives in gleeful anticipation. 

But anyone paying any attention will also note that, regardless of how much critics fall over one another to profess that they are the one who hates Bay the most, the majority of his movies do fairly well.  Transformers: Age of Extinction is a pertinent example.  This was a film that critics almost exploded over. With an 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and such choice review quotes as “the worst and most worthless Transformers movie yet” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone) and ‘an endless barrage of nonsense and noise” (Chris Nasahwaty, Entertainment Weekly), this was the film that united the critics in declaring Bay the very devil himself.

And what effect did that endless barrage of negative response from the critical community do to the global box office for the film? Nothing.  Nada. Zip.  In a year which brought us delights like Guardians of the Galaxy, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and other shining critical gems, there was one movie squatting atop the pile with a global taking of over $1billion US.  Even the climactic instalment of Peter Jackson’s epic Hobbit trilogy couldn’t dislodge it from the top spot.

I myself have avoided seeing the film for a long time, having gotten bored after the execrable Dark of the Moon, which promised a serious, grown-up version of the franchise after everyone including the cast apologised for Part 2 and then delivered on that by basically including more swearing, more blatant sexual objectification of its female cast member and more graphic violence (including human beings vaporised in-camera).  It was a tragic, tone deaf, uneven mess of a film, and having paid money to watch it on DVD (because you used to be able to still rent them back then) I swore I would not be paying another penny for the privilege of watching another.

Then Age of Extinction popped up on Netflix, and with nothing better to do one day, I decided to sit down and see if it really was as bad as all the critics had said.

It wasn’t.  It was worse.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to get out my own critical baseball bat and go all medieval on Mr Bay’s head with it.  I’m bored of the invective, the endless posturing among critics who archly dismiss a movie based on a kids toy franchise because it’s just beneath them and fanboys crying that Bay has violated their childhoods somehow.  Seriously, enough already.  A movie is just a movie and a blockbuster director merely serves up what he knows will sell.

Let’s get the first thing out of the way – yes, the way that Bay treats female characters hasn’t improved at all. Yes, the whole cringe-inducing scene wherein the male love interest for the main female character proves that despite his being 20 and the girl being 17 (and therefore illegal for him to date as a minor) they have found a loophole.  Yes, it’s as awful as you imagine when Wahlberg’s daddy character tells the girl (his daughter) that her ‘shorts are shrinking by the second’ in a scene where tbh nobody was looking at her shorts. But that said, at least in those two scenes, the poor girl actually gets to do some of that ‘acting’ stuff after a fashion, in that she has lines (albeit she’s mainly just a piece of meat for Daddy and Boyf to fight over).  The rest of the time she’s mainly screaming, running away, and being told what to do.  I’m not even joking. The one tiny effort that the movie makes to have her rebel and do something that she wants to do against her Father’s wishes towards the end of the film ends with her basically getting herself in trouble, ‘proving’ that if she would just listen it would all be ok. Other female characters appear – Sophia Myles is wasted in a part which I literally could not tell you what was the point of – at one point she seems to be being set up as the love interest for Stanley Tucci’s weird Steve Jobs knock off, but then she basically vanishes somewhere in the middle of the final act and Tucci seems destined to walk off into the sunset with his Chinese assistant instead (who herself has been established as *yawn* a kickass martial artist with plenty of spunk, because god knows every Chinese person must know kung fu (if you think I am exaggerating, there’s another random man in an elevator who suddenly explodes into kung fu action and beats down a trained CIA Black Ops guy.  Up to the point he does this, he’s merely been standing there holding his groceries.)

So yeah, the women get a crappy deal, but then this is a Transformers movie, and after three preceding it which treated their leading ladies as arm candy to be won by the (thankfully now departed) Shia LeBouef, we should not be surprised by this.

Let us turn then to the male protagonists.  I don’t mind Wahlberg.  I know he gets a lot of stick, and he’s hardly the greatest thesp in the world, but given the right vehicle he can turn in a workmanlike performance.  Here, he’s supposed to be some sort of deadbeat self-employed inventor who just mucks around with junk.  His sudden attachment to the Transformers and involvement in their fight makes little real sense, and he might be a little more believable as an inventor if a) he didn’t keep telling everyone he was one every five minutes and b) he didn’t look quite so permanently bewildered by everything going on around him, but he’s doing his best within his limited range, and he’s far less annoying than LaBoeuf was in the third instalment.

Then we have Shane, Wahlberg’s daughter’s secret boyfriend.  The internet assures me that Jack Reynor, who plays this loveable rogue, is himself Irish, though from his accent in this film you wouldn’t really know.  Shane is a weird character – introduced as a ‘professional driver’ though we never really learn much more, he starts seeming to be a fearless, chiselled hero archetype, before suddenly becoming a scared, helpless little boy almost like a comedy relief partway through.  Then he traverses a full range from outright coward to cheating liar who takes credit for someone else’s achievement and finally ends up walking off into the sunset with the girl, having been given the blessing of said girl’s father who has alternately hated/pitied him the entire film.  It’s less a character and more a place filler, much like the girl, just there to do whatever the series of unconnected events passing for a plot needs him to at any given moment.

TJ Miller is the most likeable human character and here he is utterly wasted. Enough said. Others turn up and earn their paycheck with ill grace – Kelsey Grammer frankly looks like he is asleep and Tucci seems to think that maybe the big glasses and *ahem* ‘uncanny’ impersonation of the late Steve Jobs will maybe distract us from the fact that it’s him.  Oddly, in one improvement from previous instalments, the voice cast for the robots themselves includes some heavyweights, which lend real character to them.  John Goodman as Hound and Ken Watanabe as Drift are the standouts, each using their unique voices to good effect.  

And as to that plot.  Well, this film claims to be in the same universe as those preceding it (thanks to the ‘Remember Chicago’ posters and billboards and the constant references to the events of the previous film), yet it doesn’t really seem connected.  The overarching meta plot of an alien/transformer bounty hunter tracking down Prime, and the various mythos the movie attempts to inject with the painful Round Table rip off (it isn’t a metaphor, and if Bay thinks it is, then he needs a dictionary) and the idea of Prime being one of the mystic Knights sent forth by the mysterious ‘creators’ seems to sort of completely run counter to the mythos of the Primes established in Revenge of the Fallen.  It might fit better with Dark of the Moon (frankly I have forgotten whatever passed for a plot in that one) but overall one can’t escape a feeling that it’s just being made up as the writers go along.  And that’s just the one plot.  Then we have the secret CIA project to find and kill all transformers while pretending that they are only going after Decepticons, the fact that this plot ties in with another whereby Tucci’s company is making their own transformers from Transformium (the element from which transformers are created apparently, presumably mined on Pandora with the Unobtanium), Wahlberg is trying to make a living and keep his daughter in school and on the straight and narrow, Shane is…well ok I’m not sure what Shane is trying to do in all honesty.  It all just kind of smooshes together with each plot suddenly taking prominence for a moment depending on what sort of slow motion explosion stunt Bay wants to shoot next and then moves to another as he finds the next one.  

That last point is the one worth making. It is often pointed out that Bay has certain hallmarks in his film making – slow motion explosions, low camera angles, military fetishism and so on.  Nowhere has this penchant been more painfully obvious than in Age of Extinction.  There are so many plots and sub plots, most of which are paper thin and many of which go unresolved, and so little done to flesh out any of the characters beyond one dimensional cut outs, that one is left purely with the explosions.  And I don’t even mean action scenes because mostly it is impossible to make out what is going on in the action scenes beyond that stuff is exploding.  Add in the fact that Bay feels the need to constantly have human characters in the middle of the explosions and crashes and heavy things falling down without ever really getting hurt, and it all just becomes weightless and stakeless.  It doesn’t matter that the young girl is in a car which is being crushed and shunted about by giant robots because we know that she is going to be fine.  All tension is lost, because there is nothing to be tense over, even if you could understand what the hell was going on.

I’m not angry.  I’m not going to declare that Bay has sullied my childhood, or that he is wrecking cinema.  I’m not even going to say that it’s a bad movie, because between the product placement, the endless explosions, the lifeless human cast and the lack of any coherent plot or direction, it isn’t a movie at all. It’s the equivalent of a fairground ride.  You get on, your senses are assaulted for nearly three hours of noise and explosions, and then you get off. You haven’t been told a story, you haven’t taken away a lesson or learned anything.  You’ve just sat and had a lot of stuff happen at you, and then you’ve walked away.  Even now I can feel the details of what I have just watched slowly leaking out of my brain, leaving only an impression of endless fireworks.

Ultimately, Bay has honoured the original series perhaps more than even he himself realises.  What we have here is a three hour commercial for toys, underwear, beer, energy drinks, various car manufacturers and the Peoples Republic of China.  All he’s really done is expand the mandate of the original cartoon, to include the adults as well.  In that respect, his attempt to produce a more ‘mature’ entry in the Transformers series is an unqualified success.

1/10