Transformers: Age of Extinction is Bloated With Ideas

Transformers: Age of Extinction is sometimes too much of a good thing, other times a shocking abundance of a bad one, but it never lacks for ambition. It’s obvious that Michael Bay wanted to try something new with this movie, and while his hallmarks – namely heavy CGI and randomly-placed female clothing models – are still there, they’re different from before, like they’re finally serving their story rather than simply demanding your attention. This is not the best movie ever made, but it adjusts the usual formulas, and it is a little better than Bay had trained me to believe he could deliver with his previous three Transformers movies. For the first time ever, Bay seems interested in self-evolution.

Earth’s alliance with the Autobots is over. The unbelievably destructive Battle of Chicago was a turning point in the hearts and minds of many American citizens, and now, they want the Autobots gone just as badly as they do the Decepticons. In one scene, a group of special forces soldiers chases Ratchet, an Autobot medic, on an old, abandoned dock that looks like somewhere in the Antebellum South, though it’s still located in Chicago. They’re not alone. They’ve recruited the help of Lockdown, a Cybertronian bounty hunter so cold he’s almost suave, the type to compare the war between the Autobots and Decepticons to two little children fighting with each other. Human corporations have also butted in and begun using the Autobots’ technology for their own selfish purposes, and it’s an interesting twist on the usual black-and-white dynamic of these movies; for maybe the first time, Bay’s world feels like a world.

Populating this world is Cade Yeager, the new protagonist of Transformers, a red-state inventor with an attitude that almost makes up for him not knowing how to invent anything useful, and Mark Wahlberg’s legitimately great performance as this eccentric, overprotective dad takes Age of Extinction further than it would have gone before. Oh yeah, Cade’s got a daughter named Tessa, and she’s going behind his back with her secret boyfriend in a way that only the most overprotected of daughters could. This possessive padre’s writing isn’t the densest of all time, because why would the writing in a Bay movie be, but Mark Wahlberg injects Cade with an unusual and likable attitude that we haven’t seen in the franchise up to this point. For better or worse, I’m sure a lot of men out there will relate to his overprotectiveness of Tessa, whose body Bay is mercifully less obsessed with than, say, Mikaela or Carly. This doesn’t always feel like a Transformers movie, and maybe that’s why I liked it a bit more.

It is also the best-shot movie in its franchise so far. The moments barely lit by the setting sun are the most impressive, and Age of Extinction feels more modest, flowing more naturally and effortlessly than Bay’s earlier efforts. Some of it is set in the middle of nowhere, Texas, and its guitar-laced soundtrack by Steve Jablonsky is surprisingly fitting, alongside Tessa’s theme, a genuinely dreamy track dedicated to Cade’s otherwise stock daughter. It feels more organic than I’m used to for a Transformers movie. Cade and Tessa’s lives are eventually uprooted when it’s revealed that the derelict semi-tractor trailer that Cade is working on in his garage is really a fugitive Optimus Prime, because it’s not every day that you discover the truck you’re working on in your garage is really an alien robot.

Lockdown, who has been tasked with hunting down Optimus, is a different sort of character for his franchise, a good indicator of this movie’s desire to try something new. He’s actually my favorite villain of Bay’s Transformers movies, and Mark Ryan’s magnetic voice acting is a unique spin on the usual heroic soldier or mechanical growl standards of the franchise without sounding hammy. Lockdown is a cold, clinical swashbuckler with his own purposes, an interesting change of pace for a series that has historically just thrown the good guys and the bad guys at each other and called it a day. He has a giant magnet attached to his spaceship, which he uses over a big Asian port city in one nail-biting sequence that is likely the movie’s action highlight.

As great as all of this might sound, the biggest problem with Age of Extinction is that it has too many new ideas, ironically enough. It introduces a whole new cast of characters. It unpacks a whole new set of politics surrounding how humans and Autobots relate to one another. I appreciate its trying to course-correct from Bay’s previous efforts, especially as it relates to performances and a formerly simplistic treatment of women, but it can feel bloated because it just keeps piling on the new elements like some sort of manic pancake stacker. It’s also too long, and not long as in epic, though it wants to be, just long as in that it can start to meander without knowing where it really wants to go, and the longer it runs, the less of an idea it has of what it wants to be, which is a startling change of pace for a movie that seemed to have such a personality out of the gate.

Age of Extinction is also too exposition-heavy, especially when it comes to a new, secret enemy of the Autobots and another Chekhov’s gun that I’ll spare you details about for the sake of spoilers. This movie waits too long to tell you important things about itself that we should have known earlier, a sign that its ambitions are simply too high. It has too many ideas, and with those ideas come new elements that Bay doesn’t always know how to reconcile with his established habits, habits like big explosions that are placed at random throughout the movie in the hopes of distracting us from its still-obvious shortcomings. I think Bay knew he was onto something with this movie, but he doesn’t always know how to get the new dog to do old tricks. Sometimes, it still bites him.

Transformers: Age of Extinction has too many good ideas, and it doesn’t entirely know how to outrun Bay’s old, bad ones in a way that makes room for all the new ones. For the first time in this series, Bay has reached the point of evolution rather than mere escalation, and while I can applaud him for that, he doesn’t always realize that having more ideas doesn’t necessarily mean that he’ll be able to make a better movie with them, though to a limited extent, he sometimes does. Perhaps I would have been a bit harsher on this movie if I didn’t have Bay’s other Transformers movies to compare it to, but there is still more to celebrate here than I had expected. Age of Extinction is bloated with ideas, but that’s better than being bloated with spectacle, bad jokes, or random Victoria’s Secret models bearing no relevance whatsoever to the story. For the first time ever, some of the characters actually feel like people rather than well-acted stock characters at best, and for a franchise that hasn’t always prioritized the people in it, I think that’s worth celebrating.

Transformers: Age of Extinction – 5/10

Isiah 43:19-21