Unofficial Synopsis
After the firestorm of Chicago, the landscape between humans and Transformers has changed drastically. Remaining autobots are in hiding, as they’re all being systematically hunted and destroyed by the humans, as well as a hired transformer gun named Lockdown. Lockdown has been tasked with finding and bringing back Optimus Prime to the ‘Creators’ (we don’t know them yet). Optimus, who is also in hiding, is forced out after a poor inventor named Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) discovers him and helps to reactivate him. Once reactivated, Prime does his best to find his remaining troops and to find a way to stop Lockdown before it’s too late.
There is a lot of things happening in this movie, folks.
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Transformers: Age of Extinction starts out pretty simply, as the movie tells the tale of the Transformers last stand on earth. It’s implied that the government is still actively seeking the robots, while depending on the people of earth to spot them and snitch. Yeager opens up the film by finding Prime in an abandoned movie theater and soon discovers, once he is back at his farm, that Prime is still potentially active. Once Prime wakes up, the government is almost instantly after the robot, as well as Yeager and his family.
As you can imagine, the family escapes with Prime and discovers shortly thereafter that the government isn’t working alone to find these robots. Led by Lockdown, a ruthless transformer purist/crusader who is hellbent on getting rid of the autobot/decepticon problem on earth, the capture of Prime is pretty much in the bag.
The beginning of this film is one of the most solid that I’ve seen in the Transformers series. The premise of the government hunting down all transformers in the movie is an intriguing idea. It starts out well with a montage of robots getting hunted and scrapped, and to the point where Prime is bagged and tagged; the opening is pretty cool and wicked dark. I had such faith at this point in the movie. Granted, I was a bit weary of the inclusion of Wahlberg’s Yeager, because his character (as well as his family) felt forced, but I still thought this might really keep going and be dumb/fun entertainment.
Then the movie shifted.
The film introduces us to Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) and Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer). Joyce is a rich entrepreneur, who is always on the cutting edge of technology. Picture a cooler looking Steve Jobs with a bit of ruthlessness and you get the idea. Attinger is ex-military man in the CIA, who has his sticky fingers in Joyce’s Transformer building business. Both men are interesting, but complicate the storyline that is already firmly established.
As much as I like Tucci, the movie could do without his character. He is a comic side show and a well-known face, but nothing more than a catalyst to introduce more robots (Galvatron) that don’t stay long enough for us to care about. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Tucci’s charm and wittiness on the screen, but in the scheme of things he is a forced character in a script that didn’t need it. Plus, the inception of a new antagonist, when we’re still trying to get to know Lockdown, is completely unnecessary. There are too many hens in the hen house at this point.
Attainder is pretty much the opposite of Joyce in the scheme of the story. He is important for it and a true secondary bad guy, though you wouldn’t know it. Grammer can play a wonderful mean guy in movies and he does a superb job with that in Transformers: Age of Extinction. He does a great job with his role in the film, and that role makes sense in the scheme of the premise, but the way he is written comes off just a bit flat. Grammer’s Attinger is leading the charge against all the transformers. His presence should be at the forefront of the film, but it isn’t. He isn’t given the go ahead to berate people or go CIA on them and pull shady shit to make his character incredibly dislikable. He is held back a bit in the film and that’s disappointing. I wanted more of him and from him. He never truly gets to that point, and it just seems like a waste. This isn’t Grammer’s fault, rather the script failed him.
Anyway, both characters are brought in to show the uncovering of what’s going down in this story. We veer off to see Joyce prepping new transformers that are going to be made for the military, while we see Attinger striking deals with Joyce to see that this happens. Is this relevant to the big picture? Not really. It’s a side quest that strays you away from the main story and doesn’t bring you back fast enough to feel right. It simply doesn’t fit into the scheme of things in regards to the already established premise. While the movie’s story should be fixated on Prime and the other transformers, it is hellbent on getting this side story involved, which makes for great action at times, but really bad story flow.
The movie shifts gears from that point on. It starts to split its attention between Lockdown and his plight, while fitting the ‘new transformers’ from Joyce/Attinger into the mix. I don’t want to give too much away, but when the shit hits the fan at the end and we get the classic Michael Bay action extravaganza, the film feels very disjointed and in unstable pieces.
I will say this, though, the movie ends on a high note. It ends on the promise that we’re going to see a shitload of transformers in the next film and that the film is going to possibly concentrate on solely the transformers. That potentiality excites me, as I know that fans of the series from the 80s/90s, myself included, have been dying to see an all out robot battle without humans in the mix. Had we seen that in Transformers: Age of Extinction, a humanless premise, then things might have turned out much better than they did in the film.
In short, loved the action, didn’t care for the unnecessary human involvement, loved the first premise of the movie, but didn’t care for how it was treated. This movie could have been so much better than it was, but at least we have hope for the next one.
(3D reviewed in passive)
Quite possibly the most impressive portion of the movie is on the 3D side of the film. There are plenty of beautiful opportunities, especially during close-up and wide shots, where the 3D is simply superb. The final fight in the film with Optimus is fun to watch, as the draw distance between the fight, background and foreground is nicely done. It truly looks like a deep 3D effect that works well with what Michael Bay has given you visually. If you are deciding between the 3D or 2D version, because you’re going to add this film to the other three on the Blu-ray shelf, then take a hard heavy look at the 3D version. It’s one of the strongest reasons to enjoy the movie. I especially like how the 3D looks during the final scene where cars, ships and everything metal are falling from the sky. There’s just a tremendous amount of depth and artifacts everywhere. It’s hard not to appreciate the 3D version because of that scene.
As for the Blu-ray portion of this release, the visuals are gorgeous. While there is a noticeable frame rate drop in some of the special effects (especially with Galvatron and his minions), the picture overall is pretty sharp. Transformers: Age of Extinction provides plenty of opportunities for the wide array of colors to shine through (blues, reds, greens, blacks and whites) with little issues on the compression side of things. There are no signs of graininess or color banding in the darker scenes. It’s a pretty solid HD transfer and one that follows the footsteps of the previous films on Blu-ray.
The audio is just flat out beautiful. While I wish they had gone 7.1 on the mix, and this type of movie really deserved that treatment, the 5.1 shines through splendidly. Transformers: Age of Extinction is still a treat for the ears.
On the special features side of the track, here’s what you’re getting:
– Bay On Action
– Evolution Within Extinction:
*Generation 2
*Drive Like Hell
*Small Town, Big Movie
*Shadow Protocol Activated
*The Last Stand
*The People’s Republic
*Rise of the DINOBOTS
*The Finishing Touch
– Just Another Giant Effin’ Movie
– A Spark of Design
– T.J. Miller: Farm Hippie
Everything is here that you wanted to know about this production. This is an impressive amount of features that give you a glimpse of how Bay and company put together Transformers: Age of Extinction. You get to see everything from Bay’s point of view during the action sequences to how things were decided and done in the movie. There are a ton of good interviews with actors and crew included. Again, it’s impressive to see this many special features in one release.
In some respect, the features are actually more entertaining than the film, well at least a bit more organized and thought out.