Transformers: Age Of Extinction, the next installment in Michael Bay's franchise which made a hell of a lot of money, for him and the studios. I watched this film on Sunday and I have very mixed opinions on it. On the whole, I enjoyed it, I think that's due to the fact that I always enjoy, like alot of people, seeing massive robots smash each other up. I was hoping for a bit more creativity in parts for some of the fighting because I'm a sucker for fancy moves but on the whole it was okay.
However, I have to admit, the first portion of the film centered around Mark Wahlberg's family was frustrating and not very interesting and this continues throughout the film. Probably contributing to the ridiculous run time of 2 hr 45 mins. It wasn't that I didn't like Mark Wahlberg's character of Cade but it was Nicola Peltz and Jack Reynor's characters that annoyed me. It seemed like a lame excuse to put another common father/daughter cliche of acceptance into the plot. Oh yeah, what just sprung to mind that really annoyed me is when she gets captured inside the car and taken onto Lockdown's ship. All she had to do ages before this, was run into the fields on the side or simply run away. When she said she was trying to smash the glass, she wasn't. Clearly they just wanted to make the rescue mission more exciting. In a way, I missed Shia LaBeouf and his family issues even though they were slightly annoying, but I got used to them by the third film. To be honest, the only reason Nicola Peltz is there is because she's eye-candy for the audience, not that I'm complaining.
As far as the plot and story goes I feel it left a lot of gaps. it continued on the same idea of the other three with linking it to past events and somehow creating a mystery that needs to be solved out of it. However the teams got a bit screwy after a while and people shifted there attention, I'm talking about Stanley Tucci's character. In the end, I felt the mystery hadn't fully revealed itself but maybe that's just me. Mainly, I would have liked to see a lot of the fat trimmed down and be focused on the important bits. I would have preferred to see this storyline in the first film and executed alot better, I like Shia so lets keep him. But I think we can see a sequel with the last words of Galvatron even though he literally played no part in the final scenes, lazy git. The Megatron I know would get stuck in.
As far as the transformers themselves, they did impress me but they seemed to be shown in a more muscly and perfect form. I preferred the rugged look of Optimus and Bumblebee before. Optimus in this film was alot more in favor of his own kind in this film and was tired of helping humans for there mistakes which is awesome. He was way more badass, especially when he rode into the city on his prehistoric robot dog, it's cooler than it sounds I promise. But the transformers in this film had a very human element to them in the way they talked and looked. John Goodman's Hound and Ken Watanabe's Drift seemed like they were modeled around there voice and pre-existing look, which is okay but they're such iconic actors that I got a bit distracted.
The humor in the film is very much in the Michael Bay style with bizarre character types and the dialogue to match. The guy next to me in the cinema laughed at every joke there was so he has one fan I can name. In this movie and the others I do enjoy the humor but I'm not a die hard fan of it. I think Stanley Tucci executed his character really well and T.J Miller had some funny lines, despite his death, SPOILER, well it doesn't really affect the story. They forget about him in 5 mins.
Overall, I enjoyed watching it despite all my nitpicking, it had a lot of good action and I wasn't exactly bored during the film. I will have to watch it on DVD a couple more times to formulate a proper opinion but this is it from a first glance. I think the film had a lot of potential to be better and hopefully in the sequel they trim the fat and focus more on the stuff people went to see.
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