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Star cast: Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Stanley Tucci
Director: Michael Bay
What’s Good: The hair raising first half when I couldn’t stop chewing my nails out of excitement and the mere glee that comes automatically for an Optimus Prime fan!
What’s Bad: A loose second hour, where it seemed like Bay didn’t know what to do with the film. The drooping energies and the dissipating tempo in the last 40 minutes which is primarily superfluous.
Loo break: Not too many.
Watch or Not?: I am a fan girl when it comes to the Transformers series and no matter how bad the film turns out to be, it is a mandatory watch. I am sure many of my readers can resonate with this feeling of sparkling ebullience. Transformers: Age Of Extinction is pretty much a must watch. Wooting for the rip roaring autobots is guiltless fun and the child inside me couldn’t help but be overwhelmed. Despite the ironies, the gags and the needless humor working as constant distraction and the story making no significantly memorable headway, the editors along with Bay have created a technical paragon with this! Peeps, the level just got a notch higher and you would regret missing this!
User Rating:
It has been four years since Transformers: Dark Of The Moon and its events. A mechanic in Texas is pretty much making no money. Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) finds a broken down truck, which he was supposed to dismantle and pay for the college fees of his daughter Tessa (Nicole Peltz). The truck turns out to be Optimus Prime.
Meanwhile, the U.S Government is hunting down the autobots, because the humans desire to be self sufficient and fight their wars on their own. Alongside the same, a brilliant scientist Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) has procured for himself the matter to make his own army of transformers.
Can Optimus Prime combat the human invasion on his likes and find a peaceful way out or will he put aside his promise of protecting human race?
Transformers: Age of Extinction Review: Script Analysis
Now writing this is the heartbreaking part. Despite making a marvel of a film which is visually such a spectacular mammoth, the film’s story is nearly paper thin and spills out straight from the good versus evil bottle. Sadly, I was expecting more on the story front. Echoing the sentiment that the world has had enough of Autobots, the film kicks off with the autobots being hunted down. A broke Texan engineer, Cade Yeager is the one who lands up in trouble after he buys a broken truck which he intends to dismantle and sell off to fund his daughter Tessa’s college education.
Breaking down the essentials from the start, a joke about crap sequels evoked a laugh because it rings a bell with all. Probably Bay in terms of his story is bordering of exhaustion. Trying to rejuvenate the series with a whiff of freshness rests on a very flimsy plotline, that is highly melodramatic in parts! The emotional connect for me in the film was more for the non humans than for the humans and it is only because of my affinity with the autobots, the story isn’t simply strong enough to gather for itself the audiences’ sympathy!
In one of the brilliantly plotted initial scenes, where an autobot is being hunted down, the momentum gears up in that one choking scene. However, Bay’s writers fail to keep that nail biting tense feeling consistent throughout the film. At too many places in the second half, the film’s tempo drops and with the multiple sub tracks entangling into a convoluted mess, one realizes the value of a crisp story in a film. Joshua Joyce’s track with the demeanor change from a Steve Jobs impersonator to a comic character by the end is plain poor show.
My only problem with this film is its story which affects the action bits too! The drill was that the humans kept getting caught and kept getting out of it. The too-much-excitement becomes a staple after a point, when you tend to become unfeeling about it. The Hong Kong based climax probably appeases the fans of the franchise in the region, but is in my opinion a slack ending of sorts. When Peter Cullen’s voice wraps up the edition, the feeling that you haven’t had enough of Optimus Prime this time echoes. There is no one else to blame but the writers!
Transformers: Age of Extinction Review: Star Performances
Mark Wahlberg is persistent and intent in the film but when I almost involuntarily pitted him against Sam Witwicky, the feeling wasn’t quite right. Wahlberg’s job as Cade is brilliant but probably the writers did not give a role gratuitous enough.
Jack Reynor and Nicola Peltz were were both merely average. While Jack might walk off with better praises between the two for a few crackling bits like, ‘I am not going for your daughter, I am going for my girlfriend.’et al.
Titus Welliver attempts the menacing with style and quite succeeds in bringing out the sly side of his character with style.
Stanley Tucci is better in his comic bits and I tried by best to ignore his out of the blue attraction towards Li Bingbing, but the hammy bits were just about alright!
Transformers: Age of Extinction Review: Direction, Editing and Screenplay
Personally, the first edition and Dark Of The Moon are my favorite editions. And if I have to be true to my heart here, Age of Extinction doesn’t quite topple the level of the franchise’s third edition. The first one was the best of the lot and leagues ahead of all the other ones. Though the attempt to infuse in a greater deal of emotion is commendable, the good intention doesn’t translate into a good attempt on celluloid. At 2 hours and 40 minutes, the film might seem stretched in its second hour tad bit too much. I won’t really call it exhausting but the overdose metal carnage wasn’t as much fun as I had expected it to be. Something didn’t quite fit right for me in the second half and that did dampen my spirits completely. Micheal Bay might know the best way to create a spell binding, spectacular visual show but his stories need solid reworking.
Transformers: Age of Extinction Review: The Last Word
Transformers: Age Of Extinction engrosses its audiences with its visual gimmicks and high octave action sequences. With a bunch of brilliant moments, the movie is all about action overdose and feeble storyline. It’s like junk food that satiates the greed but has no nutritional value. I am going with a 3/5. Awake the fanboy in you and go have a good time!
Transformers: Age of Extinction Trailer
Transformers: Age of Extinction releases on 27th June, 2014.
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