Welcome to the finale of “Transformers Month,” where I will review the latest movie in the series, “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” which came out this past July. If in doubt, smash everything to tiny bits of pieces and be as loud as possible.
Director Michael Bay brought this Hasbro toy line in what Graham Young called “the best sequel so far to Transformers,” but I don’t really think so. I still enjoyed it, but I don’t think any of the Transformers movies are better than the other.
In the first film two Cybertronian races (the good Autobots led by the great Optimus Prime and the evil Decepticons led by Megatron) arrive to pick up where they left off in their ancient struggle on Earth with a high school boy who found an old artifact that held the key to the fight.
Revenge of the Fallen showed Sam Witwicky leaving the Autobots and being attacked by the Decepticons.
The Autobots then learned that there’s a hidden Cybertronian spacecraft in Dark of the Moon.
In Age of Extinction, crooked government agent Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) and tech genius Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) hope a piece called Transformium will make a crowd of controllable Transformers.
Young does rebuttal by saying, “But the recycling business can be dodgy if some old Decepticon material ends up in the mix.”
Meanwhile, Witwicky’s replacement is a new inventor protagonist named Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) who is worried about his teenage daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz).
Finding an old wagon buried in a theater, Cade asks her to look at it as treasure, an understatement seeing that it’s Optimus Prime in disguise.
Targeted by a bounty hunter, voiced by Mark Ryan, Cade and Tessa go running with the Autobots.
I agree with Young when he says, “Age of Extinction is a bewilderingly excessive, non-stop demolition derby that works because of the action’s juxtaposition against some of Earth’s most incredible landscapes.”
Some of these landscapes include the pure-white Arctic, Monument Valley, the red rock playground of John Ford and John Wayne, Beijing, steely home of 21st Century investment money, Hong Kong’s concrete slums, where east meets west in hectic, half-finished (or half-destroyed) structures.
Executively produced by Steven Spielberg, Age of Extinction rules as a new 21st century genre: graphic anarchy.
Young mentioned in his review, “Despite the bloated 165-minute running time, the clunky dialogue, restricted performances and plot dementia, I loved Amir Mokri’s gliding camerawork and his unquenchable thirst to declare an all-out war on video gamers by delivering the biggest and dumbest action movie ever made.”
This movie lacks James Cameron’s edge-of-seat suspense, but it’s got dinosaurs (probably referencing that great “Beast Wars” cartoon that I remember watching in the 90s) and the best machine is…a classic British Mini.
Like the founding technology of the Apollo moon missions, there must be some spin-off lined up using so much energy. The filmmakers probably haven’t thought them up yet.
In the end, I will say that it’s up to you if you want to watch this movie because I highly think people will get bored by this movie very quickly, especially since it runs at 2 hours and 45 minutes. I am not kidding, that’s the length of the movie. I saw it in the theaters in 3D, and even I was wondering how much longer it was going to be. However, I still enjoyed it for the Transformers, the action, and some of the characters I liked.
Obviously I didn’t want to review the Transformers series back in July, especially since I saw two other new movies that month that were “way” better than this one.
Anyway, thank you for joining in on my Transformers reviews. I hope you enjoyed all of them, and if you want to watch them, then you may. Like I mentioned before, I’m not going to defend these movies as great and some of the best, I understand the backlash.
See you all next month, which will be a great month for reviews. Stay tuned to find out.
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