Blechlight #06- Transformers: Age of Extinction

 Howzabout we start off the October review season with our first negative review. That's right, this is the first review to be recognized not as a spotlight, but as a Blechlight.

 Listen, off the bat, I'm not a big fan of Micheal Bay as a director. His movies in the past have been mediocre at best, and they truly emphasize everything we hate about humanity- i.e, sexism, violence, and stupidity. I promised myself I wouldn't ever watch this movie. I held through my friends telling me how good it was, I passed by it in theaters, and lamented when it earned more than a billion dollars worldwide. Unfortunately, fate ran its course, and my family ended up renting it overnight. Eventually, I thought I would give it a chance and see if it was good at least as a mindless blockbuster.

 Biggest.

 Mistake.

 I've made.

 In terms of media.

 At this point, I realized that plot doesn't even matter to Micheal Bay, but even so, I'll try to summarize. Mark Wahlburg takes center stage as a family man struggling to keep a home, a job, and a life for his daughter. He comes across an old semi truck who just so happens to be Optimus Prime, who has been on the run with his fellow Autobots from the government since the destruction of Chicago in the previous film. After some typical shady figures appear at his doorstep asking where he is, he gets caught up in a conspiracy involving humans manufacturing transformers, working with decepticons, something about dinobots, explosions, soft porn, and there we have our movie.

 Really, Micheal Bay's agenda becomes astonishingly clear early into the movie. All the men are there for comic relief as idiots, and the women are only there for short-short-shots. Every single human character is only for plucky comic relief. The transformers themselves are even worse, having either no character at all or being downright offensive stereotypes. They give them all of these carebear colors, but honestly you'll only remember Optimus, Bumblebee, and Grimlock (who, if you think GODZILLA showed up late, doesn't even get mentioned until the last fifteen minutes of the movie). That's right- he doesn't learn from his mistakes. his mission is to very plainly make them the point of the movie, soiling the whole thing.

 If the first trilogy had anything going for them, it's that the action scenes at least did something new, what with the whole transformation sequencing and all. Here, they decided to do absolutely nothing new with the battles. As usual, the explosions were always in the camera and came from the most unnecessary of directions. What's worse- the machines no longer look like metal and have gone back to that late 90's vibe of plastic-esque materials. The animation was obviously rushed, leaving some shots with robots and other shots from the same angle without. In other instances, they'd show a shot of a mech, cut away and play some transformation sounds, then cut back to show a car, and expect us to believe that the two are somehow related. Green screen edges, disappearing shadows, and bad compositing throughout, you'll start wondering how Mike had the audacity to release an unfinished product.

 The story itself, while confusing in and of itself, runs through all of its themes in the wrong way. It doesn't even start to go in a direction until the end of the second act, and even then it's not a good direction. Optimus Prime spends most of the movie in bitterness and doing things that he would never do, such as (brace yourselves) shooting and killing human beings. They even try to work that into a moral advocating doing wrong things and having them work out in the long run by sheer luck. To some credit, they tried to handle some more complex ideas with free will and what it means to be human, but amid the bottomless tide of bad cinematography and scripting, nothing is ever fully realized.

 As the credits rolled, the only thing I could compare this to was a really bad hangover. It was bitterness taking it all in, you didn't remember half of it, you didn't want to remember the other half, and you woke up with a bad headache and nausea afterwards. At my house, I've been labeled too critical and have been more or less banned from voicing my opinion, but this has to be known. I never would have rented it on my own, and I thought that sticking it through to the end might have taught me something about Micheal Bay's style. I was wrong. It was the hardest waste of three hours I have ever spent, and it's all the proof you need to never trust Micheal Bay with your thirty bucks.

All rights owned 2014 by Dreamworks. They should be ashamed. No copyright infringement intended.