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Friday, June 27, 2014

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Rated PG-13 / 2 hr 45 min / Action - Adventure - SciFi

What is it about?


A down on his luck inventor played by Mark Wahlberg buys a broken down truck to strip it and sell the parts. He begins to fix it to see if he can, and finds out that it's a transformer. Optimus Prime to be exact. The last battle that destroyed Chicago left a lot of fatalities and damage, so the government began hunting down all Transformers. The Autobots went into hiding. Government agents come to collect Optimus Prime who then comes out of hiding to protect the humans that helped repair him. There is another transformer hiding that is working with the humans to hunt and kill the other transformers.

You will like it if...


If you like Michael Bay movies or the previous three of his Transformer movies. The movie starts out much better than expected. The backstory is interesting and the actors are able to mute the terrible dialogue. As the movie progresses Bay tries to mash another three movies into this one. There are plot holes large enough to fit solar systems by the time the end comes. The dialogue throughout is terrible. It's as if they found a George Lucas clone who was raised to have English as their second language just to write the dialogue for this movie. It's especially horrid whenever one of the Transformers that isn't Optimus Prime tries to chime in. It's like they are trying to be charming, but end up being annoying. The timing on the bot's dialogue seems off as well. It never feels like a natural conversation. The second half of the movie they don't even try to make any sense. Bay tries to use explosions and action to mask the mangled storyline. Too often he uses the extreme close up with a shaky camera to make it impossible to tell what is going on. When he doesn't do this, he has the actors reacting to CGI animations that are happening behind them. For example, one character says "Oh my God!" like he sees something coming in front of him. Then you see a large explosion behind him. It's as if the character has eyes in the back of his head. Even with all of the issues this movie has, the acting is quite stellar. The sad thing is that this movie is one of the better Michael Bay directed Transformer movies. None of them come close to touching the original animated Transformers movie.


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