Transformers 4: Age of Extinction

RATING: D+

The Transformers movies were in an interesting spot after the third one. For starters, they'd killed a *lot* of the robot characters off. About half the Autobots were dead and the Decepticons were basically decimated. So they were going to have to dig further into the Transformers universe for robots. But also, Shia LeBeouf left the franchise. So ultimately, we ended up getting an almost-reboot where none of the human characters from the last three movies were around, and though the events of the last three movies were acknowledged, it's never explained why Optimus Prime and Bumblebee don't seem to care what happened to Sam Witwicky. 

So now, we're stuck with Mark Wahlberg as the lead. And ultimately, I preferred Witwicky's dumber moments. Cade Yeager is a stupid lead character, but then again, virtually all the new human characters are stupid. There's nothing really appealing about any of them. Not that the horrible script helped them or their actors out much. 

We are introduced to a whole new host of Transformers in this movie--most of the Autobots are dead, so they threw in Hound, Crosshairs and Drift out of desperation. Hound is the only one who fares that well, mostly due to being voiced by John Goodman. As for one of the new villains, they bring in Lockdown (neither Autobot nor Decepticon) who is actually pretty awesome and introduces a pretty interesting new plot device involving the Transformers and their "creators"--which is what I guess the fifth movie is going to be about. 

As for the Decepticons? Well, they pretty much exhausted the roster there apparently. So now they've resorted to a stupid plot where *humans* are building Transformers. *Humans.* They create Galvatron out of that, who sadly is hardly even in the movie, especially considering how important to this and future movies he turns out to be. And instead of the usual Transforming effects, these new human-made bots have some awful transforming effects where they turn into a swarm made up of block cubes. Normal Transforming is pretty awesome, so I don't understand why they felt the need to screw it up. 

So yeah, there's a lot of new in this movie--but in some ways, things are still the same as ever. Cool action sequences. Horrible attempts at comedy involving humans. And the plot? The plot is almost nonexistent. Much of it revolves around the idea that somehow all Transformers including Autobots are at fault for the Decepticons destroying Chicago in the last movie. At least in the last two movies, it felt like they were kind of trying--albeit still ultimately failing. It's also beginning to feel like they keep reimagining the Transformers universe and its past just so they can make those movies. 

There are likable moments here. There are still some isolated awesome action moments. The Dinobots, though they aren't in the movie nearly enough, are pretty cool. There's an hilarious sequence where Bumblebee reacts to the human-made Transformers and how one specifically was modeled after him, but "better in every way," leading him to freak out. 

But on the whole, this is definitely the worst of the Transformers movies. With no decent human characters, very little plot and being too long even for a Transformers movie (165 minutes), it's pretty difficult to ultimately redeem this movie even if there are some isolated enjoyable moments. I still didn't quite cover everything wrong this movie, but when a movie is this long, it's pretty difficult to hit all the points, good and bad alike.

The set-up for the next one actually looks kind of interesting, with the concept of the "creators" of the Transformers and such. But it's difficult to see it turning out any better than the others as long as Michael Bay is at the helm. Yes, he creates some good action and visuals, but he can't create a good enough story, and he can't resist putting other stuff in like human drama that no one who's interested in the Transformers cares about. If we got a new director (a proper one, mind you), we might sacrifice some of the visuals, but it might be worth it so we can finally get at least a B-grade movie out of these  movies. And they better hurry before they run out of material to do that with in this series.