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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 1 July 2014
This article is a review of TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION.
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“My face is my warrant,” James Savoy (Titus Welliver)
When you have a Transformer whose head turns into a gun, you probably can guess the level of mythology paucity you are about to watch. AGE OF EXTINCTION is just noise: A 165-minute farce, reeking of just being a commercial to sell. Product placement, merchandise-bait and the pandering to governments turn the stomach. For those who thought the last three instalments were inept, wait till you get a load of this.
If reimagining the lunar landings to factor in giant robots wasn’t enough in DARK OF THE MOON, EXTINCTION’s prologue has spaceships 65 million years ago supposedly causing the ice age that killed off the dinosaurs. Barely explained, and devoid of logic, the first few minutes epitomise a completely nonsensical plot. Joining THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2, MAN OF STEEL and PROMETHEUS, are there blockbusters lacking coherence more than these? To go through every narrative hole would be excruciating.
When you have a Transformer whose head turns into a gun, you probably can guess the level of mythology paucity you are about to watch. AGE OF EXTINCTION is just noise: A 165-minute farce, reeking of just being a commercial to sell. Product placement, merchandise-bait and the pandering to governments turn the stomach. For those who thought the last three instalments were inept, wait till you get a load of this.
If reimagining the lunar landings to factor in giant robots wasn’t enough in DARK OF THE MOON, EXTINCTION’s prologue has spaceships 65 million years ago supposedly causing the ice age that killed off the dinosaurs. Barely explained, and devoid of logic, the first few minutes epitomise a completely nonsensical plot. Joining THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2, MAN OF STEEL and PROMETHEUS, are there blockbusters lacking coherence more than these? To go through every narrative hole would be excruciating.
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Present day Texas has widower robot inventor, Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), finding a battered unrecognisable Optimus Prime in an abandoned cinema. Er, he is still a truck, how’d he get in there? The leader of the Autobots is target numero uno. Unknown to the President of the United States, shady bureaucratic bigwig Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) is hunting down all Transformers, killing them and handing them over to private defence contractor, Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), to re-engineer them. Sporadic bleakness is an odd tonal choice among the whizz-bang destruction.
Attinger, rather hypocritically, has teamed up with some sort of interstellar bounty hunter Transformer called Lockdown, who in turn works for mysterious creator types. (These are the purported founding fathers of our mechanised heroes/villains; and not it seems the AllSpark Macguffin thingy from the first two movies. Go figure.)
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Guess which brain is being used to instigate Joyce’s new army? That’s right, Megatron. Akin to liquid metal in TERMINATOR 2, these new automatons don’t actually transform. So they’d be really hard to kill right? Nope, just a normal sword swipe. Where there might have been an allegory to the Manhattan Project, no quarter is given to smarts. Contrast X-MEN’s ideas of having the foreign in our midst, TRANSFORMERS had the potential to go all DISTRICT 9 in its analysis of the world.
Humans, to try empathy with, come in the bizarre form of Cade fighting over his 17-year old daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz), with her 20-year old rally car-driving boyfriend Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor). Amidst dodging death, interactions are boiled down to their dubious squabbling.
Hong Kong gets trashed in the climax, but not to the scale of Chicago. Toning down the mayhem (let’s face it, is there any other reason to sit through?), while not upping any other element that makes movies fun, is another head-scratching decision to join the miasma.
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