@Jarkes
Age of Extinction has its own fair shares of pros and cons in my opinion:
Pros:
-Like the previous films in the series, I think this movie has some good voice acting, effects, and music in it.
-The movie felt like it was mocking some of the faults of the previous Bay films. For example, it kills off one of the new annoying sidekicks off pretty early (a human by the name of Lucas) and it made cameos of other previous annoying sidekicks (namely Brains)
very short.
There was also a joke regarding the female character wearing low cut clothing as if it was more or less making fun of the previous films’ fanservice. It felt kind of meta in a sense like the people making the movie were more or less saying, “Yeah, we’re aware people don’t like these things. Our bad. Sorry.”
-Speaking of, there was much less fanservice in this film.
-Less vulgar humor compared to the previous films as well.
-The movie mocks people who think the moon landing is fake. That tickled me.
-Like the first film, Micheal Bay makes a cameo where he gets physically hurt by a bot (in the first film Megatron flicks him aside while in this one his truck gets crashed into). This also amuses me. Love him or hate him, at least he’s able to poke fun at himself.
-The film focuses on the Cybertronians a bit more compared to the other films. (I feel the first movie could get away with being a bit more human focused since it was more or less introducing both the characters and the audience to the Transformers. Also, metawise, animating those robots ain’t cheap and this was relatively new to them so I understand why they had more focus on the humans.)
-The movie does actually stop once in a while to have the characters just talk and bond with each other. Something that I feel was gravely missing from a lot of the previous films and it’s something that I’m glad the Bumblebee film has (despite Bumblebee being mute, the animators made him expressive enough for it to work).
-I feel Cade is a better human protagonist than Sam (and this is coming from someone who actually liked Sam, at least in the first movie). Mark Wahlberg did his best with the script he was given and I think he did a good job with the character.
-To add on the above, I like the relationship Cade and Optimus have in the movie. The two spend a lot of their time together bonding on screen.
The two have some things in common, namely being father-figures to sassy teenagers (Cade to his daughter and Optimus to Bumblebee) and the two act as the leaders of their tight-knit group of people (Cade with the rest of the good humans in the cast and Optimus with the other Autobots). The two also talk about and discuss their own cultures. There was a scene that vaguely reminded me of the Iron Giant where Optimus and Cade talk about being heroes and having souls (the Iron Giant did it better obviously but I digress).
-To add onto this, I like the main human and Cybertronian duo as well: Lockdown and Harold Attinger. Like Wahlberg, Kelsey Grammar does his best with the script given to him (I think people who have watched him in other roles can agree with me that he’s a talented actor and does his best, even if he’s in a bad film).
Like his Animated counterpart, Lockdown isn’t aligned with either the Autobots or Decepticons and kills others to make collections and he thinks he’s above both factions in the war. He’s just a hitman who wants to take his trophies and go home once he’s done hunting and collecting them all.
Unlike Cade and Optimus, Attinger and Lockdown aren’t friends. In fact, both Lockdown and Attinger are fairly xenophobic to the other one’s background to the point that they almost come across as hypocrites. Lockdown hates humans while Attinger hates the Cybertronians.
They both have different motives (Lockdown wants his bounty while Attinger is afraid of the damages the Cybertronians can do and wants them off his planet). But despite having different goals, they both ultimately have the same goal and want Optimus out of the picture, so they begrudgingly do have to work together to get to that goal.
They both claim to be above what they’re fighting against but deep down, they’re not. Lockdown claims to be above both factions but he talks and acts a lot like some of the Decepticons. Attinger does make good points about protecting the earth but ultimately, he wants to kill off an entire sapient species in order to get that done instead of just simply negotiating with them which also makes him no better than the Decepticons.
-The robot designs in this film are honestly pretty good. (And yet again, this is coming from someone who didn’t have a problem with most of the previous film designs for the robots.) All of the previous characters got redesigns in fact.
This movie moves away from the monstrous alien aesthetic and makes the bots appear to be more human. The movie’s designs also took some cues from Transformers Prime and brought in more vibrant colors and sleeker designs while still keeping some of the previous films style intact (yet again, this is something I feel that Bumblebee would later perfect).
The designs are also less complicated and the bot forms even have less kibble. The ones that do have kibble even manage to do some rather creative things with them (for example, Crosshair’s kibble looks like a coat and I think that’s a rather neat design choice).
To add onto this, each Autobot’s design is based on human combatants. To quote Tfwiki:
Optimus is obviously a medieval knight, Hound heavily resembles a World War II-era commando, Crosshairs looks like a mercenary or assassin, Bumblebee’s new form is highly Ninja-like, and Drift is unsurprisingly a samurai.
Cons:
-It’s still a Bayformers film so even though I could argue that it’s written better than some of the previous Bay films, it’s not written well enough to even warrant giving this movie a B rating. It still has its fair share of continuity errors, plot holes, character fumbles, and even some scientific inaccuracies (mostly regarding the dinosaurs in the flashback scene).
-It’s still a Bayformers film so it’s cinematography still falls down the same pitfalls as the others do (e.g. overuse of shaky cam and fights being shot poorly to the point it’s hard to point out what’s going on).
-The middle of the film drags out a bit and gets rather boring in some parts. The film is honestly way too long for its own good (it’s nearly 3 hours) and some scenes should have been cut out of it since there’s more than enough scenes that don’t really advance the stories or the characters along.
-Speaking of the movie’s long run time, it also suffers from ending fatigue. There’s a fight in Bejing that could have made for a good climax. But no, they got to drag the movie out some more and then have another fight in Hong Kong too.
-The movie had this joke about Cade’s daughter dating an older boy that she knew from her school. On paper, this seems totally fine. But the movie made it weird…really creepy and weird. And then the movie more or less proceeds to make this a big plot point since the boyfriend and Cade do not get along during a majority of the film.
Let me explain. In the movie, Tessa is 17 years old and her boyfriend Shane has since graduated. Cade is overprotective about his daughter seeing someone older than her (with good reason).
A normal way to diffuse the tension between both parties would be to have the couple simply explain to Cade that both dated when they were at school and he already graduated since he was a bit older than her. Nah, this movie not only does that but has Shane pulls out a badge(?) from his pocket and he then talks about the Texas Romeo and Juliet law and goes onto explain that the law supports them. It comes off as this weird creepy “jailbait wait” sort of thing when it easily could have just played out differently. Also, his discussion about said law is completely incorrect. I’ll let TV Tropes explain for me:
Artistic License – Law: Not only does Shane misstate the Texas Romeo and Juliet laws by saying that they’re safe because of the preexisting relationship (in actuality the provisions are that the age difference is no more that three years, that neither party be younger than fourteen, that the two parties are of opposite sex, and that the adult is not a registered sex offender), but the point is moot since Tessa is actuality an adult in this respect (the age of consent in Texas is 17, and Tessa is 17). The law still applies to their relationship (they started dating before Shane came of age, and it’s implied they never stopped), just not in the film’s here and now.
-Remember my praise for Cade and Attinger? I don’t have the same praise for a majority of the other human members of the cast. A lot of the others are either kind of annoying or just there and left me feeling really indifferent towards them.
Some of them constantly get themselves into trouble due to their own stupidity and recklessness. While some characters can do that while being charming due to their personalities or if their actors playing them has enough charisma, I feel these characters have neither of those. So whenever they get into mortal danger I’m just mostly annoyed with them because if they just used common sense they wouldn’t have gotten into that trouble in the first place.
Also, the actress that plays Tessa also played Katara in The Last Airbender so from the get-go, she wasn’t making good impressions with me. And she didn’t change my mind of her as an actress at all once I finally did see the movie.
To quote TV tropes again (because they hit the nail on the head for me):
Tessa gets a lot of flak for constantly blaming her father and the Autobots for nearly every bad thing that happens to her even when they are attempting to keep her safe from Lockdown. Being played by Nicola Peltz does not help.
Shane is hated for reminding Cade of his relationship with Tessa even when they are under attack. The fact that he carries a card with a description of a law that authorizes his relationship with a seventeen-year-old girl in his wallet like a condom certainly rubbed viewers the wrong way. Saying lines like “I’m not here to save your daughter, you’re here to save my girlfriend” make people side with Cade on wanting him away from Tessa.
-Like nearly every Transformers movie (including the G1 animated film), previously existing characters are unceremoniously killed off like it’s nothing. I’m not against killing off characters. Quite the opposite. But don’t do it like this. Give their deaths meaning and make it so both the other characters and the audience actually cares for their deaths. To help with this, also flesh out the characters before they die (which is yet again, a complaint I have for all the movies, the G1 animated film included).
Both a Pro and a Con at the same time:
-Recall my praise earlier about the film being meta about the fanservice and annoying sidekicks? It’s nice that the movie was meta enough to joke about both but at the same time, it still engages with those tropes and some people probably took both cases non-ironically and I wouldn’t necessarily blame them for doing that.
You’ve heard of the phrase online, “Ironic shitposting is still shitposting”? That’s essentially what happened here. It’s nice that they were able to joke about those things and all but they were still sort of engaging in it and didn’t go far enough with the jokes.
Either make it obvious that you’re joking/insulting those tropes (like what the Transformers wiki does with its snark) or be like Bumblebee and don’t engage in those tropes at all. Don’t try to have your cake and eat it too.
-Optimus seems to have PTSD in this film. And while him having PTSD does make sense given all that he’s gone through, the execution of it could have been so much better. For example, he wakes up in stasis in a complete defensive rage. That in itself seems fitting (and it’s something they would later do with Bumblebee in his film). But the execution left a lot to be desired.
For one, I think they made Optimus a bit too aggressive (which has been an unfortunate thing they’ve been doing since Revenge of the Fallen) so when he does have his mental breakdowns, he may come off as more of as someone to be feared because he talks about destroying humans (as opposed to someone who deserves empathy due to suffering from the pains from the war on Cybertron as well as being tortured by humans). Yet again, this is something I feel the Bumblebee film pulled off better.
-Bumblebee can talk again now. …They don’t explain why he can talk now. At all. He just can.
-Also in regards to Bumblebee, his personality. It’s kinda a 180 from whatever it was in the previous films. He’s definitely not the cuter protective friend character from the first film.
He’s still kinda a sassy teenager (like they implied in Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon). Unlike those two films though, he does some stupid reckless things that almost make you think he’s actively trying to get the other characters in trouble or hurt.
-You know about Bay’s sunset fetish? Oh, it’s still here. People joke about it all the time (and I can’t necessarily blame them) but…sunsets are pretty.
-You know about Bay’s explosion fetish? Oh it’s still here. People joke about it all the time (and I can’t necessarily blame them) but…explosions are cool.
-You also know about Bay’s ‘Murican fetish? Yeah, there’s too many waving American flags in this movie. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing a flag waved once in a while but there comes a point where there’s so many that it becomes distracting and it becomes distracting in this movie.
-The Dinobots. They’re cool but they don’t have any lines or do much in the movie. (But hey, Optimus rides Grimlock into battle while wielding a sword!)
-The movie is very vague on whether this is a reboot or a sequel to the previous trilogy. But it leans towards it being a sequel.
The movie also vaguely implied that Sam may have passed away since when Bumblebee was first introduced, he was rather silent and his alt form was a black car. It just made me think Bumblebee wearing funeral attire and mourning one of his human friends. (I admit I’m probably digging too deep into this. Him having that alt mode before getting his new one could have just been a reference to Transformers Prime since Bumblebee’s then current alt mode in the show was a black car.)
-Galvatron is in this film. And he’s voiced by Frank Welker. That’s nice to see. He’s also fairly menacing too which is much better than what happened in the previous film where he was more or less a poor beaten up crazy hobo.
But unfortunately, he didn’t really get to shine as much as Lockdown did. Also, having him come back yet again is just rather unfortunate (the previous films kept bring him back over and over again and then not doing much with him). The guy keeps getting upstaged by the other villains really.
-Like the first film, there’s a little reference to My Little Pony. However, unlike the first film, the reference feels completely forced.
The first film had a little girl holding a G3 Plush toy while she looks at one of the Autobots passing through her backyard. This movie has a guy in a lab observe some of this Transformium (basically this compound makes things transform and is found in the Cybertonian’s bodies). So the guy’s playing around with it and he makes it turn into G4 Rainbow Dash. The reference is less organic and comes off as them trying to force a meme.
So instead of it being a cute little nod to another Hasbro property, it just comes off as rather jarring (and kind of embarrassing).
-The bots carry guns and other weapons like swords. Some people in the fanbase made a huge deal about them not carrying their own weapons in the previous films and instead had weapons were part of their bodies.
I personally didn’t give a flying feather that Optimus and the others were able to transform their arms into weapons. In fact, I thought it was cool and I was glad the idea was carried over to Animated and Prime. They’re alien robots that already can transform their entire bodies into vehicles (or animals), why not have them transform their hand into a gun or a mace or give them arm blades? They’re Transformers. Let them transform.
That being said, I don’t mind them carrying weapons either. (Yet again, both of those animated series did that too as well.) I feel both ideas can co-exist just fine.
