Transformers: Age of Extinction
D-
A Review by Frederick Cholowski
Films are escapist
entertainment. They are supposed to take you to places far away that are, most
of the time, simplified versions of real life issues; I get it. My question is
who the heck would want to take up nearly three hours of their lives to escape
to the brain dead world of the latest Transformers film? It’s hard for me to
grasp just how much money this atrocity is going to make around the world and
it’s sad because without exaggeration that’s what the latest Transformers film
is, an atrocity. Nearly nothing redeeming can be taken from Transformers: Age
of Extinction which is an excruciating ride through the worst of American
blockbuster filmmaking.
The plot of Age of
Extinction is so convoluted and idiotic it might just not be worth describing.
The story follows a Texas mechanic/inventor Cade Yaeger (Mark Wahlberg) and his
daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) as they become fugitives after finding a beat up
Optimums Prime sitting in an abandoned movie theatre. They’re on the run from a
special CIA squad funded by Billionaire tech mogul Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) who are tasked with ridding all the
Transformers from the world five years after the events of Chicago depicted in
the last film. While on the run they have to find the rest of the hiding
Autobots and try to stop many different evil parties from gaining “The Seed” a
device that can create a mass amount of material that the transformers are made
from (named Transformium by the humans in this film) and has the potential to
wipe out a lot of people if put in the wrong hands.
There is so much
that attempts to go on throughout Age of Extinction and a grand total of zero
of those things are done well. The plot feels as if it was taken from two
separate films and none of it works at all. The family portion of the film is
groan worthy because all of the human characters (especially the brutally
annoying Tessa) feel like they come from a cookie cutter. The action in this
film feels like an animated film there is so much CGI. I nearly fell asleep
during the last hour of this film because it feels like at this point I’ve seen
at least twenty cities blow up in the exact same way (heck even just a
Transformers film ago). There is nothing
in this film that grabs the interest which make is hard to care about virtually
everything that ends up blowing up near the end.
The other massive
problem with Age of Extinction is that it is two hours and forty six freaking
minutes long. Not only that but because it’s so dumb and dull it feels like it
takes an eternity to get over and done with. At an hour and a half this film
would have already excruciating and this film almost goes twice as long. By the
end of the film the only thing that was on my mind was thank goodness I can
escape this theater. Whenever that is the first thing on one’s mind at the end
of a film it’s hard to call it a success on any level.
The acting (well if
you can call it that) in this film is nearly non apparent. The Michael Bay
formula is such that most of the actors job is to deliver a few lines of
unfunny stinted dialogue and then stare at things whether through amazement,
frustration etc. The one exception and the one dim light at the end of this
terrible terrible tunnel is Stanley Tucci who gets to chew on some scenery and
also gets the one good one liner of the film (that gets the token f-bomb of the
film). The most excruciating piece of acting (although I am sure the script had
more to do with it than the performance) is Nicola Peltz who plays the single
most annoying female character in the history of film (ok maybe not but close)
as she is as bad if not worse depicted than any horror film femme fetal.
The film doesn’t
look particularly good either. There is an obnoxious amount of slow motion in
this film to the point that it is aggravating. It seems like every second scene
of this film uses the device and by the end of the film it is used so often
that it has no effect whatsoever. As mentioned earlier the action sequences
aren’t particularly great either as they all have way to much CGI and no one to
latch on and thus I don’t care at all. Seeing this in IMAX was also distracting
as well as some of it was shot in Digital IMAX and thus aspect ratio changes
were a plenty. This doesn’t usually bug me in fact it often enhances a film but
in Age of Extinction the aspect ratio seems to change every second scene. It
seems that there was no plan to what exactly what was shot in IMAX or how the film
would look when it would ultimately come together and that’s just lazy.
Ultimately it seems that IMAX actually takes away from the film, something I
don’t say too often.
Simply Transformers:
Age of Extinction is just atrocious. There are so many reasons why that it
begins to be a headache trying to list all of them let alone sit through the
film. The most frustrating thing of all is that this terrible film is going to
potentially 100 million dollars on its opening weekend. Why people are going to
see this terrible terrible film is mindboggling and if you are even thinking
about the possibility of doing so I have two words for you, do not!
Good review Fred. Could have been mindless, harmless summer fun, but because it's so long, it's something hard to watch.
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