Skip to main content

Transformers: Make It Stop!

I've seen bad movies.

I've seen dull movies.

I've seen incoherent movies.

I've seen movies that felt like pure torture to sit through because they're so damn boring to sit through.

I haven't encountered anything like Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Confession: once I read the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, I knew what I was in for, so really, I have only myself to blame for putting myself through sheer hell. When they said that Michael Bay, maestro of destruction, had managed to top Revenge of the Fallen as the worst installment of the series, I didn't believe it. How could he top that clunky, incoherent mess of a movie? 

In just 2 hours and 45 minutes (yes, it's that bloody long), I found my answer. In ways I never could have imagined.

It's been five years since the events of the last movie, where Optimus Prime (voiced one again by Peter Cullen) and his band of Autobots stopped the Decipticons from terraforming our world into another Cybertron, but laid waste to Chicago in the process. Ever since, the U.S. government has de-activated NEST, ended all alliances with the Autobots, have begun hunting them down like dogs, and have thrown Sam Witwicky and his girlfriend/accomplice, Carly in jail, along with Agent Simmons. I'm kidding about that last part, but Shia LeBrouf, Rosie Huntington-Whitley and John Tuturro respectively are not even mentioned in this film. Perhaps they had better things to do than come back to this bloated franchise, but I digress

In this new installment, we have a new cast of characters, starting with Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeager, a failed Texas inventor trying to make a breakthrough that will put his daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz), through college. Allow me to stop and talk about the latter character for a moment. Bay is notorious for objectifying female characters in most of his movies: from Ben Affleck sticking an animal cracker down Liv Tyler's pants in Armageddon, to Megan Fox arching her butt over the back of a motorcycle in Revenge of the Fallen, Bay hasn't met a female character he didn't want his camera to carnally lust over, and Peltz's Tessa is no exception. His camera zooms in on her daisy duke shorts and her long legs several times, including where her and her girlfriends drop her off at home. Yes, they're all wearing daisy dukes, and yes, Bay doesn't want us to miss more drooling over young, hot, tasty teenage girls! Oh, I forgot to mention Peltz is 19, and here, she's playing a 17 year-old girl. That's right - Michael Bay is sexualizing an under-aged girl (albeit fictional). Do I even have to point out how uncomfortable and creepy that is?! Even Frank Miller wouldn't dare try and sexualize teen girls, and he's the perv that turned Wonder Woman and Vicky Vale into fap material in the All-Star Batman & Robin comic book series!

Where was I? Oh, right: Cade is struggling to make ends meet, until he comes across a battered truck, filled with shells. It turns out to be Optimus Prime (once again voiced by Peter Cullen), the one Autobot a CIA strike force team led by Harold Attinger (Dr. Frasier Crane himself, Kelsey Grammer) is looking for to kill off and send his parts to Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), a Steve Jobs-type tycoon who's building his own Transformer army for the U.S. Military using the decapitated head of Megatron and other dead Decipticons, along with an element called "transformium" (step aside James Cameron, because we have found a name for an element that's even dumber than unobtanium!), which can transform into anything, including a Beats Pill sound system (now just $299 at Best Buy!) and Hello Kitty merchandise (there's a great bargain for Hello Kitty toys and posters right now at Amazon.com!). Sadly, it can't transform Ethan Krugler's script into something forming coherence. There's backroom deals that feel tacked on, like Frasier making a deal with the remaining Decipticons to kill off the Autobots, in exchange for something called "the seed" (Don't ask), a weapon that can create more "transformium" (Seriously, I feel dumber for saying that)  for him and Joyce to create more of their very own Transformer army. What they don't know is that the newly-created Galvatorn is using Joyce to help-rebuild his army, and by launching "the seed" he alone can use the element to create more Decipticons and enslave the world. Do you see just how convoluted and inconsistent this "plot" is now?


There's also other characters, like Shane (Jack Reynor) and Su Yueming (popular Chinese actress Li Bingbing) and new Autobots like Hound and Drift (voiced by John Goodman and Ken Wantanabe respectively), but they don't really make much impact or impression. Reynor's just the stereotypical hunk/love interest for Tessa; Goodman's the stereotypical hard ass/comic relief; and Bingbing and Wantanabe are in this solely to attract the Asian market. Even the Dinobots, the one new addition that could give this "film" a new lease on life, they don't appear until near the end of the film. Yes, Prime riding on top of a transforming tyrannosaurus rex robot in some of the film's posters and in the trailer....is just the hook to get us to watch this overlong toy commercial for Hasbro. That comment sums up why Age of Extinction just plain sucks: It's product. Nothing more.

It's a commercial for Hasbro to keep selling their Transformers toy line; it's another way for Bud Light, Beats by Dre, General Motors and Ducati Motorcycles to shamelessly plug their products; and it's one more way for Paramount Pictures to exploit the fanboys and the Asian market by plugging in recognizable faces and characters to come out and see this bloated monstrosity. This film is both so carefully calculated and wildly incoherent that, frankly, only Bay himself could make something this damn awful and bereft of anything that qualifies as a summer blockbuster. It's not entertaining, it's not interesting, and it's not fun to watch in any regard. There's explosions and excellent visuals, but that's a moot point in my view, because all the Transformers movies have explosions and excellent visuals. There is literally nothing else about this movie I can say in a positive way. Last month I bitched at The Fault In Our Stars for being a cynical exercise in exploiting teenage girls' ideals on true love and romance. Transformers 4 is the opposite side of a two-headed coin that major studios love to play to see how much money they can rake in.

Oh, and Bay and Paramount are threatening two more sequels. God help us all.

Zero stars out of ****

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

On Dynasties, Ignorance, and Moving Foreward To the Future.

In the beginning, I wanted Mr. Brown Verses to be a blog about movies, and that's it. Given how there's much more going on, like film analysis and how it relates to issues both here in America and beyond our borders; the annual predictions on the Academy Awards race; the state of the film industry; issues of ethnicity and gender roles in the business; the continued rise of fandom with both sexes; etc - it would be foolish to not  talk about it and just sticking with reviewing movies. Most of this has been hesitance on my end because I personally feel that I'm not as well-versed in the film medium to really speak on trends and whatnot. There are other, more eloquent critics and readers of the Award-season tea leaves that express these concepts so damn well, it's almost amazing they haven't been picked up by publishers like Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone or The New York Times, but I guess the idea that they stand apart makes their work more fearless, more rich

Cowardice

I was looking forward to watching the James Franco/Seth Rogen comedy The Interview  on Christmas Day, even more so than Angelina Jolie's WWII drama Unbroken , or Rob Marshall's Into the Woods . I like what the writing and directing duo of Rogen and his pal Evan Goldberg have done with comedies like Superbad , Pineapple Express and their debut feature, This Is the End . In light of Sony being hacked (which now appears to be North Korea's doing) and threats of attacking theaters that carry the comedy, three things happened today: 1.) Every major theater chain - AMC, Regal, Cinemark, Arclight, etc, had decided to pull out from showing The Interview  on its scheduled release date. 2.)  This prompted Sony Pictures to basically cancel the release date of the film amid threats of blowing up theaters. 3.)  Both Sony and the theater chains basically caved into the demands of cyber terrorism from North Korea. Are you fucking kidding me? We just caved into terrorist d

Mr. Brown Verses Battleship (Or: Michael Bay's Poisonous Influence On Modern Day Action/Blockbuster Movies)

Eventually, I am going to get to reviewing a movie that I actually liked, because I don't just want to be be bitching about terrible movies from the past and from the present In fact, there are two really great movies i'll be reviewing within the next week ( The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Master ) that I think rank among the year's best; add to that the release of Ben Affleck's international thriller Argo , and you'll be seeing a weekend's worth of praise of movies from me, including my picks for the best movies i've seen thusfar. Now, before I tear into the latest review on the sci-fi action picture, Battleship , I need to give this movie some background; not as much on the board game that inspired this bloated and boring piece of crap, mind you, but rather, the director who's trademarks are all over this mess of a film: Michael Bay. See, back in 1998, Bay released a little movie that joined together an unholy union of the Dirty Dozen, the