Transformers: Age of Extinction review

You ever think Transformers: Age of Extinction should have been called TransFOURmers? this was my main thought during the 6th or 7th giant robot fight scene in the movie. Optimus Prime was riding into battle on a giant fire breathing robot t-rex and I was thinking about missed wordplay opportunities. Because even at its highest, most action packed heights, the film is quite boring.

Fight scene fatigue factor isn’t helped by the films length, the first hour and 45 mins are set in the US, there’s some small town Texas stuff, a lot of big government bad stuff and about as much product placement as you can imagine. After this the movie is sorta over, but the cast and associated robots are transported over to Hong Kong for The Propaganda Hour Hosted by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s so incredibly overt, there’s a moment where some Hong Kong officials say ‘we need to call the central government for help now,’ which feels like the exact opposite of what would happen. Their existence in the film lasts this entire line, these characters appearing solely propaganda purposes and disappearing immediately after. Transformers movies make a huge amount of money in China and there’s a certain irony to that, the original cartoons never aired in China, the toys never sold. They’re watching this massive franchise intended to be built off nostalgia, without the nostalgia. It makes you wonder how necessary the constant churn of reboots and reimaginings of old IP is, people are watching this franchise like it was new to them all over the globe.

Michael Bay is always called an American military propagandist and while I think that is mostly probably true, after watching this, I’m more inclined to think he will do anything for a tax break or a free helicopter. I also don’t know if you can accuse someone of ethics violations when their movie features an Oreo branded Transformer. I think he’ll just take any product placement, it doesn’t matter if it’s the US Marines or a Chinese water brand, Bay’s films are for sale. They’re quite open about it too, every product on screen has perfect advertisement lighting and the label pointed towards camera. I think that’s why the more insidious stuff is left to slide, the big dumb action movie surely can’t be a political vehicle, it has adverts and jokes?! (The jokes aren’t funny.)

I wish one country had some kinda advertising disclosure law on the books, I would love to know how much it costs to put your brand in Transformers. How many Chevrolet vehicles were given over to the production to be turned into slowmo shots and twisted metal. The film made a billion dollars, the advertisers have to look on that favourably, people went and saw their stupid products turn into robots. It has fairly low reviews on all platforms, but people went and saw it.

You might have seen a horrifyingly uncomfortable moment on YouTube, where the film pauses to explain age of consent laws in Texas. You’d think this was to show that the guy doing it was like, a massive piece of shit, but unfortunately it’s peak libertarian ‘well actually’ bullshit. It really didn’t need to happen and leaves some open questions around the movies writer Ehren Kruger. I do not want to know why he knew this, researched it, or put it into the movie. Jack Reynor would reprise the role of ‘sketchy piece of shit boyfriend’ in Midsommar a few years later, somewhat implying that someone, somewhere in Hollywood understood this character for what he is, rather than what Transformers professes him to be.

They replaced nearly the entire cast for this entry in the Transformers-verse. Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, T.J. Miller and all these people who sorta vaguely feel like they’ve always been in these movies are actually new. No one was desperate for Shia LaBeouf in this film, least of all perhaps Shia LaBeouf, but it still feels weird. It’s cost cutting on a 200 million budget. I think it is just too late in the franchise to pull the The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift move, it’s not the done thing when you’ve got a good thing going. But it proves people are here for the robots, not the human hangers on. From here on in the franchise has less and less recurring humans, the proven formula is to find someone new. That said, had someone told me that most of these people were in Transformers one, two and/or three I would have believed them. Maybe Bay is relying on all blockbusters looking the same and having the same extended cast. His orange white people and perfect bright blue sky grading doing the rest, blurring the lines, unifying the similar but not quite cast with the pervious films.

The best part of the recasting is that Dr. Fraser Crane himself, Kelsey Grammer, makes an appearance. He’s an evil CIA guy who’s going around killing all the transformers, autobot or otherwise. The politics get a bit muddy here, because while he is explicitly wielding the power of the US government and has an unlimited black budget with no oversight. But he is evil because he is choosing to go after the good transformers. All the black budget stuff and CIA stuff, the lack of oversight? Don’t worry about that, that is normally good. Grammer is putting in way too good a performance for this film, I firmly believe if he was given character development this would have been a good role.

I think my favourite bit was when the ever wisecracking T.J. Miller was turned into a metal skeleton by a transformer, who then transforms into a Lamborghini behind his frozen in place corpse. Later on Optimus Prime is apologising to Mark Wahlberg for the death of his loved one, and while this must be normal in his world, the transformation into a Lamborghini as a mocking celebration must have hit Marky Mark pretty hard. I don’t really know how you get over something like that. Maybe it comes up in therapy more in the transformers universe, but my guy is going to be retraumatised every time a sports car drives past.

Overall? Don’t watch it, it’s bad and some of the propaganda and product placement is going to make it though your filters. I think the new Transformers movie, (age of the return of beast wars or something) is going to be a little less obvious and a lot more insidious with its politics and product placement, so look out for yourself. That said, it is hard to be less obvious than Michael Bay.