Review: ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ (2014)

The fourth installment of the transformers movie is here with new characters and new Autobots, but is this movie worth watching?

Transformers: Age of Extinction begins after the massive war of Chicago. A secret sector learns to take control of the transformer technology and use it to make robots of their own with the help of this new villain named Lockdown, and it’s up to Optimus Prime and his fellow Autobots to save the day…again…Nothing new to the franchise, except a new villain, and even with new characters such as the Yeager family (Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Pelts and her boyfriend played by Jack Reynor) to replace the Witwichy’s and Stanley Tucci to replace John Turturro, this movie doesn’t succeed in delivering the fun and excitement that it should. At first, I thought that changing the whole cast was going to be a great idea, and I’m not going to lie Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci do their best and they aren’t bad, but unfortunately they are surrounded by mediocre performances so they don’t end up making this movie any better. However, let’s talk about the positive and negative things about the film.

Positives:

Optimus Prime and Bumblebee are back and they are the best characters to watch during the action scenes, they deliver the destruction you expect and they don’t disappoint. The new Autobots are ok, they are fun to watch, but you really don’t care much about what they have to say. The new way that the enemy has transformed is original and fun to watch and the last 20 minutes of the movie were very exciting and entertaining.

Negatives:

One of the things that made transformers a rather ok film, was the CGI and in this movie is not that good, when Optimus regain his truck color the transformation was really bad and during some action scenes you can notice the poor CGI effects. The movie runtime is ridiculous (157 minutes!!) and honestly, when you looked at the time and you can’t wait for it to end like I did, it’s not a good sign. The thing that made people excited to see transformers was the “Dinobots”, yes I have to use quotation marks cause no one tells you they are Dinobots and they don’t even say their names, Optimus calls them “Ancient Warriors”, and if you think that’s disappointing we are not done yet… they are only in the movie for 10-15 minutes!!(Sounds familiar). Although the villain was very interesting, you would still end up disappointed in it too, due to you not seeing him much and when you do it doesn’t impress. The secret sector of the CIA had potentials, but it’s the same story that I described for the villain.

Overall Transformers: Age of Extinction lacked a lot to revive the series. The special effects were mediocre, the explosions were too many (I literally got annoyed with all the explosions), the story drags a lot and the acting (not including Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci) was terrible. I really didn’t care about the humans’ side of the story. This is another mistake that directors make when making Robots and Monsters movie, we want to see more of the monsters and robots, rather than humans. Even considering the fact that the humans mean something, the self-titling of certain movies ‘Godzilla’ and Transformers should partly focus on them.

Rating: 3/10