Hello folks, I am not Matt Cotter, I am a guest reviewer who strongly urged Matt not to see Transformers: Age of Extinction after seeing it myself. The only reason I saw it was because I figured it would be better than waiting at a walmart in the middle of the desert for several hours while I wait for a ride after my car broke down. I have never been more wrong in my life.
In the fourth (and pray to God that it is the last) installment to the Transformers series Mark Whallberg plays Cade Yeager a highly overbearing father struggling to make something that will define his career as a freelance inventor. The movie opens on alien spaceships killing the dinosaurs, the metallic remains are then found by a lady of ambiguous importance. Next, we join Cade and his partner Lucas, a hippie/surfer/the movie’s comic relief, buying a movie theater that serves no importance to the plot other than the fact that it has the dying truck form of Optimus Prime in it. Seriously though, what is the significance of the theater? It only makes movie-goers curious as to how the hell a giant semi truck made it through the doors of the building. Cade brings the semi home with hopes of restoring it. Cade’s daughter is beginning to lose faith as to whether or not he will be able to put her through college and Lucas is worried about whether or not he will get his last paycheck. A fight sequence tells us that all transformers are being hunted because even though they saved the world, they started the conflict. This doesn’t make much sense right off the bat though because the CIA uses a transformer to kill another one. We then learn that the CIA knows of Cades involvement in the harboring of Optimus Prime and they send the transformer equivalent of the Gestapo to seize him. When they find that Cade’s farm is empty we learn that Lucas ratted him out (even though in the previous scene the CIA said they caught it on a traffic cam or something along those lines). The transformer Gestapo threatens to kill Cades daughter when suddenly her secret boyfriend comes and saved the day. A car chase ensues and Lucas ends up going out like the dinosaurs and the group kind of brushes it off like they lost their favorite pair of sunglasses. Optimus takes them into hiding and Cade hacks a mini drone he stole from the CIA raid. Optimus then reunites the last remaining transformers and they plan to raid KSI, a company that the CIA ships all of the dead transformers to. After the raid it is learned that KSI is using all of the metal dinosaur fossils to make a new element they call transformium (real f**king creative guys…). Transformium can be used to fashion any object in the world, so what does KSI make? MORE TRANSFORMERS. The band of misfit robots break in to save Cade after he gets caught and then go right back into hiding. We learn that the director of the CIA’s operation against transformers is working with an evil transformer who has ulterior motives of releasing a bomb to turn people into transformium over the most populated city, Beijing. So everyone goes to Beijing to try and take this bomb called “The Seed” and KSI’s owner (I will call him Steve Jobs because 1. I forget his name and 2.he is definitely based off him) attempts to get the bomb to a safe place for extraction. During extraction the autobot’s spaceship gets shot down which leads to a battle between them and KSI’s evil transformers. When the group is about to lose hope Optimus calls for reinforcements and some badass dinosaur transformers come. They were only on screen for about 5 minutes so I don’t know why they were on the poster. It seemed like kind of a cheap way to get the protagonists out of a jam and probably made a lot of transformer fans angry (assuming the rest of the film hadn’t already). After the battle, Optimus takes the seed and blasts off into space setting up for a sequel that, if we are lucky, will never come.
Although the general idea for the storyline is pretty good, it has been done a million times and is a rather common formula: Guy meets fugitive, guy chooses to not turn fugitive in, fugitive gets guy into trouble, guy helps clear fugitives name and saves the day. Not only is it overdone but it was also poorly executed, the story had a lot of holes and plot devices that didn’t make sense at times. The visual effects were choppy, blurry, and the frame rates sucked. The CGI was horrendous at times, in a scene where two scientists are playing with transformium it changes from a my little pony to a gun and the 3D model floats and bounces in the guys hand making it look like a five year old was playing with MS paint. It seemed as if the movie was only shot at sunrise and sunset making the sun constantly shining in your eyes taking away from the terrible acting. Not only was the acting dry and forced but the characters were highly cliché and predictable. Going deeper into the bad acting the guy who played he boyfriend did the most Australian sounding Irish accent I have ever heard, correct me if you think otherwise. The bad CGI and frame rates combined with poor acting made the movie seem like an ibuprofen commercial, which brings me to my next point. The film implements product placement so blatantly it may seem like this scene from Waynes World: http://youtu.be/KjB6r-HDDI0 . Mark Whallberg even makes a show of cracking open a bud light and taking a swig after the camera pans across the street littered in bud light bottles. Shame on you Michael Bay.
I would NEVER recommend this movie to anyone, in fact I would put it on my list of movies to never watch ever.
Thank you, hope to do some reviews with you guys in the future.
Anthony
(Image: Wikipedia)
The movie opens on alien spaceships killing the dinosaurs, the ... dinosaurtransformer.blogspot.com
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