Age of Extinction
is hands-down the best film in the modern Transformers
franchise. This isn’t to say that it’s a
good film by any stretch of the imagination, but at the very least I didn’t
find this one painful to sit through.
Michael Bay seems to be sick and tired of making these damn things, and
paradoxically, his laziness is taking over his baser instincts and he’s
directed a better film than when he’s actually tried in the past. The film is still over-long and unnecessarily
padded, but the action is at least somewhat fun and if explosions are your
thing, they’re still here in abundance.
The plot starts off focusing on new characters, headed by
Mark Wahlberg as a down-on-his-luck inventor and his teenage daughter. These characters are just as one-dimensional
as any of Bay’s past Transformers
characters, but the major benefit here is that since Wahlberg is supposed to be
the relatable character, we’re saved the adolescent objectification of our
female lead, since creeping on the protagonist’s teenage daughter apparently
crosses a line. Anyway, Wahlberg
accidentally comes across Optimus Prime in hiding from the U.S. government, who
is now in league with a robot bounty hunter that is after Optimus’s head for
some reason or another. Wahlberg,
Optimus and company must now flee the government and also prevent it from
creating a knock-off Transformer army of its own. Whereas the previous films had one very
simple plot that took convoluted and circuitous routes, this film has too many
plots overlapping and competing for screentime.
As a consequence, the film feels bloated with too many new story
elements that function primarily as teasers for sequels.
On the flipside, however, the film has done away with the
franchise’s fascination with nameless dudes in military regalia, and so now the
brunt of the film’s storytelling and action falls on the metallic shoulders of
the Transformers themselves. With a cast
of five main Autobots that have colorful designs and distinctive voice actors
(if not unique personalities), this is the best that the robots have ever
looked in their own movies, and while I recognize that this isn’t much of an
endorsement, the difference is noticeable.
They actually engage in dialogue with each other and aren’t relegated to
simply being military lapdogs; there’s actually an attempt to acknowledge their
alien background and their relationship with humanity as a whole. The characters aren’t quite fleshed out
enough to make it work, but it’s a step in the right direction, and one that I
hope future directors in the post-Bay Transformers films will deign to capitalize
on.
Despite the bulk of this review focusing on the improvements
this film has brought to the franchise, I still want to emphasize that Age of Extinction is not a good film by
any means. The plots are simultaneously
dumb and overcomplicated, the characters are cardboard cut-out archetypes that
offer nothing interesting to the narrative, the editing still jumps around so
much that you have to piece the shots together with your imagination rather
than comprehend what’s actually happening, and the whole experience feels
phoned-in and lazy. But if that’s all
the negativity I can force myself to muster at a Transformers movie, the franchise’s status has been elevated from
abysmally awful to simply below-average.
It certainly wasn’t the worst film I’ve seen this year, and its
stupidity is, at worst, inoffensive. I
don’t recommend seeing it, but perhaps the groundwork has been laid for better
installments to come.
Don’t believe me?
Disagree vehemently? Leave your
thoughts in the comments below.
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