So much has been written about Michael Bay’s aesthetic and everything that is wrong with his films that critics around the world were, this year, struck with a few questions surrounding where to go from here when discussing the Transformers movies. Once you’ve already called them the worst things ever made and Bay the worst director, what more can you say about them? Most of them have chosen the tactful point in the narrative where they begin to analyze their own reviews. Some even point to the audience as the problem. Regardless of how you feel about either the director of Bad Boys’ film making skills or the mental capacity of his audience, there is one thing I’m sure you can’t argue with, and that’s that Transformers Age Of Extinction is one of the most troubling movies you’ll ever see.
I’m not overstating there. During this movie I was often emotionally distressed by what I was seeing on screen, not because of the explosions and the murder and the mayhem, but because I could not actually tell you what the actual fuck I was seeing. At one point I was convinced we’d reached the crescendo in an action sequence where everything was happening at once. I don’t mean everything that could happen in a Transformers movie either. I mean EVERYTHING that could happen in any movie ever. It was fucking nuts.
And the sad thing about it is that it doesn’t start out that way.
Sure, there’s some nonsensical backstory that didn’t need to be there involving bad aliens dropping bombs on cute baby dinosaurs in the waterfall valley from the opening of Prometheus, and some stuff about a geologist and a mysterious alloy trapped in the ground, but once that’s out of the way we’re given something a lot more solid to grasp onto. Pity we have to spend the rest of the movie holding tightly to it in an effort to not actually fall out of our seats or just lose our minds from all the explosions and confusing plot contrivances. The first Transformers movie had a simple enough conceit at its heart: a boy finds a magical car that turns out to be a transforming alien robot. Then the boy and his car team up with Josh Duhamel and Tyrese and blow Las Vegas to hell.
“Why does that robot have balls?”
It had its flaws but, Michael Bay’s treatment of attractive women who act about as well as props aside, it was a fun and entertaining romp involving robots that turned into cars then turned back into robots and punched each other.
Subsequent sequels have had major flaws, including weird racial stereotype cars and us all slowly watching Jon Turturro humiliate himself in increasingly more impressive ways, but their biggest one was removing us from the simplicity and completely understandable first movie’s core plot mechanics. What started out as a movie about a nerdy kid and his talking car becomes one about a twitchy douchebag and the other douchebags he hangs out with while they shout, fall and make things explode. And then some women run in slow motion. Oh and there were prophecies, explosions and tons of duplicity on the part of robots who I’m not even sure had names. Was Megatron wearing a scarf at one point? I think he was.
Holy fuck those movies were bad.
That’s why I figured that Transformers Age of Extinction represented something good for Michael Bay and the Transformers franchise. With a new cast and a cleverly constructed new setting, I figured he could take things back to where he started and when they worked, and build his way back up from there. Plus he was doing it with Mark Wahlberg, who I love and who’d just succeeded at reminding us that Bay could make great movies with Pain & Gain. In Age of Extinction, Marky Mark plays a Texan named Cade Yeager, a down on his luck amateur inventor who lives with his incredibly attractive daughter. Wahlberg’s skill is that he can play the ultimate everyman and, even when we’re meant to buy that he’s an emotive Texas genius who is built like a brick shithouse, he sells it. I mean, I missed the title card so I’m guessing it was Boston, Texas, right?
Yeager discovers Optimus Prime, injured and beatdown, hiding out in an old cinema that Michael Bay implies movies like the Transformers series literally made fall apart. He revives Optimus and repairs him a little but the CIA’s black ops division, headed up by Kelsey Grammer, shows up and tries to kill everyone. Bay is often ridiculed for the way he depicts the US military as morally upstanding super-humans but to his credit, he seems to understand here that the central intelligence agencies who ultimately protect America itself from trouble are shifty assholes who don’t deserve our affection as much as homegrown men and women who buy into defending their country no matter how flimsy the evidence. The CIA and a very menacing Dr. Frasier Crane are working with another Transformer, a galaxy-travelling hitman (or hit robot, I guess) called Lockdown, who is hunting Optimus on behalf of the Transformers’ apparent creators. In his spare time, Lockdown helps the bad humans hunt down any and all robots, even the good ones, to take them out of the field and better protect humans from the horrible conflicts that the Transformers always end up wrapping them up in on Earth.
This all seems to hold together quite well until the scene where the CIA actually attack the Yeager farm. This scene literally takes place at about four different times of the day, all happening at once, and it introduces the ugly creep of the style-over-substance, just-look-at-this-explosion style of filmmaking that made the last two Transformers movies such a chore to sit through. Or stand through.
Hell, even passing through a room while they are on in the background is a joyless experience.
The CIA receive word of Marky Mark’s possessing Optimus while it’s afternoon in Texas, so they scramble their attack squad who leave as night arrives, and they drive into Texas by sunset. Except as they pull into the Yaeger farm at sunset, it is the middle of the same afternoon it has always been for Marky Mark and his funky bunch of unlovable characters. From then on it only gets worse. The script for this movie seems to be written under a doomsday clock, with the screenwriter just getting notes yelled at him to “add the robots now!” and then doing it whether it makes sense or not. The Autobots have formed a little resistance pocket and continue to sneak around America incognito in the form of the most ostentatious collection of vehicles ever seen. Optimus is hiding out using the exact same decals he had in the first three movies. In my opinion, it’s when he makes the decision to do that that they should’ve just killed him off wholesale because he fucking deserves it.
John Goodman’s character, a bearded old robot soldier, refers to Optimus joining the resistance as “getting the gang back together” but most of these robots were not in the previous movies. Or if they were, I didn’t notice them. But I’m pretty sure I would have been able to remember the horrible Ken Watanabe-voiced samurai robot who speaks about honour and haikus and fights with two swords because even Watanabe himself is clearly willing to sell his culture out for a pay cheque.
There is also a robot who is wearing a fucking coat here so all you Gambit fans can be thrilled by not having to think about whether this guy is cool or not. He’s cool. You love him. You’d buy his trading card.
With the stage clearly set for a battle between the CIA robot-killers and the Autobots resistance, the movie chooses instead to introduce another plot involving Stanley Tucci playing a hilarious Steve Jobs parody who is trying to help the bad humans hunt the robots down so he can strip them for the element they are made of… Transformium. He plans to use this… Transformium to make new Transformers that will work alongside the US military and protect the US… wait, wasn’t that what the Autobots were already doing before they started hunting them down? Why not just… ask them to help? I’m pretty sure they’d be up to help anyone trying to build more Transformers to help fight the bad guys. But whatever, this is what they’re doing.
Also, one of this company’s new robots is a rebuild of Megatron called Galvatron, and that means that, yes, Megatron is also a bad guy in this movie.
Well, at least he is for the half hour of the movie during which Lockdown has left Earth. Lockdown then comes back and Megatron is mostly forgotten about while we deal with a series of explosions that John Goodman seems to have been paid to narrate with a sixpack of Budweiser Light (TM). You’ve seen the other Transformers movies so you know that the action sequences never make any sense so rather than me rip them off more here let me just leave you with this one simmering thought that was burned into my brain during each and every one of them: why?
Why can the guy who directed incredible car chases and action sequences in Bad Boys, Bad Boys II and The Rock not get it to work as well here? He is basically dealing with large robotic action heroes who have to fight other larger robotic villains. He should be able to pull it off but it’s like he just doesn’t feel like it. I guess that’s ok. This movie has no doubt made many billions of dollars and I think he doesn’t take this as seriously as he does some of his other work, so I’ll go ahead and give him that. But man alive. These are the moments that left me emotionally distressed, confused and fearing for my life.
The whole thing ends with Optimus Prime flying into space, which is something I guess he could have done at any point in the movie but chose not to because… I don’t know why. All I do know is that the Transformers franchise is going back on my “I’m not paying to see this” list and that’s just where it’ll have to stay till a new, better director is hired to handle these things.
It shouldn’t be this hard to make robots turn into cars then back into robots and punch each other. It just shouldn’t.
Nas Hoosen