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Saturday, June 28, 2014

Transformers 4 Age of Extinction Review: How do you screw this up?

Bay.  What's wrong with you?  At first I thought you were just some meat-head man child acting out your own frustrating arrested development.  Now I think you are a man child with some kind of heroin addiction.  The entire movie is frantic!  It's like a junkie with an itchy finger on the morphine drip.  This isn't a movie.  I almost don't want to review it because... hey why bother.  Nobody made any real effort to making a coherent story, so why should I critique it? 

And who the flying f*** was the villain of the story?  There were about 6 or 7 antagonists.  Am I supposed to just take my pick?  What the hell did you do?  Ever see those magnetic poetry things?  You throw them at the fridge, see what sticks, and hilarity ensues because what usually comes out is just word salad.  That's this entire movie.  It's Michael Bay's free floating stream of consciousness.

How can a movie make less sense than the 1986 animated movie?  And they just keep getting worse.  I swear he can't help himself.  They just keep getting worse. 

And you know what?  You rak diseprin you racist c*** snake! 

The story is a mess.  And my first thought is this:  I do this as a hobby.  I watch movies and analyze the story.  I see what was good and what was bad.  I'm also a 33 year old man.  The target audience for this movie is what... 12 to 15 year old boys?  How are they supposed to know what the hell is happening?  I'll try my best to recap.

The Autobots have been labeled terrorists by the evil rogue agent of the CIA who is working with a private business contractor to sell Autobot and Decepticon bodies for scientific research.  They want to create their own robot army so they can have giant robot wars instead of using soldiers?  There's like one throw away line like that about 1 and a half hours in.  Unless you're really paying attention you might miss it.  I mean it's not like you just labeled all giant sentient robots terrorists and now you want to make an entire new race of them to serve as cannon fodder.  Really?  Slavery illusions in a Transformers movie?

But unknown to them, they are using the "soul" of Megatron to do it so the dead Megatron is actually manipulating all of it to create himself as Galvatron. 

Meanwhile in side plot #1 Mark Wahlberg is a Dad and a really crappy inventor.  He doesn't want his 17 year old daughter to date.  So naturally she does.  And we get insufferably overbearing Dad moments sprinkled through the whole movie.  Because nothing captures the earnestness of planet wide extinction quite like Daddy threatening to murder his daughter's statutory rapist boyfriend.  You see:  Marky Mark made a promise to his dead wife that he would get his daughter to graduate from high school without getting knocked up first.  Question: how did she die?  She died of reason never explained.  I like to think she died when she tripped over her own shoelaces and impaled herself on a garden gnome.

And in Side plot #2 we have mysterious alien giant robot who's named "No Name Given".  And he agrees to trade one of the "seeds" for Optimus Prime.  The seed is basically a tactical nuke that transforms all living matter into what this movie so lovingly called it, transformerite or Transformium.  Or something equally offensive.  I stopped listening after the 10th fight scene in the first hour. And naturally every evil human villain in the movie thinks detonating a weapon of mass destruction would just be dandy.

And don't bother looking at the promotional poster.  I know it has Optimus Prime riding Grimlock.  But you might as well just watch the last 20 minutes of the movie for that 3 minute waste of time.  It'll save you a lot of stress if you do.  And I just love how the Dinobots were included.  They are epic warriors of legend that just happened to be on no name dude's ship.  And of course they won't help until Optimus puts him in the camel clutch and makes him humble.

This movie is s**t.  And of course there's going to be another one.  So look forward to this whole thing just getting worse. 

Bah-weep-graaaaagnah wheep nini bong