Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Movie Review: Transformers-Age of Extinction

It's been a while here... intense work coupled with good weather is keeping me away from blogging.
So I thought I will post a quick review on the something... something that was supposed to be a movie I saw a few days back... Transformers: Age of Extinction.
If you don't care to read my elaborate and detailed review of the movie, I'll offer you something that perfectly summarizes the whole movie in a single line and you can then decide what you want to do next...
 Watching Age of Extinction is like watching two drunk junkyards having wild-wild sex in the fit of love in your backyard.

Plot wise, if you can say one exists (which doesn't!), it is strikingly identical to all the other 3 movies in the series that preceded it:
  • Everyone searching for that one that thing, spark, seed, fruit, flower... that will tip the scale in Autobot wars, Check
  • An underdog (Mark Wahlberg), Check
  • Barely-Legal hot chick (Nicola Peltz) who, no matter what, always has a perfect makeup with pink luscious lipstick on, ALL the bejesus time, Check
  • Secret Government Organization, Check
  • A villain hiding in plain sight (Megatron aka Galvatron), Check
  • A hero hiding in plain sight (Optimus Prime), Check
  • Plain sight hiding in plain sight... WAIT! What?? That doesn't make sense! Check!
  • Lots of shaky shots, fire, destruction, mayhem, explosions... Check, check and Check!
  • Incoherent story line, Check
  • Predictable, Check
  • And it is unbearably long, Check
(For the record, the first original Transformers was enjoyable, with just the right amount of special effects and not unbearably long).
First off, it looks like the movie was made by someone (and FOR someone) who loves to masturbate to violent explosions and destruction of things.  And every iteration of the "act" then demands for a bigger and larger explosion to get the fix.
There are so many explosions in the movie that it makes all of the 4th of July fireworks combined (to date!) look like a mere spark from striking a matchstick.  If Michael Bay were ever looking for an alternate profession, I think he can really give even the most contemporary Pyrotechnians a run for their monies.
Age of Extinction basically is the exact same movie as the first one, just with more cheap and racist shots at humor, more noise (or the explosion), more robots (or car thingies, because you can't tell what's what anymore).  Once the autobots start fighting (or start making violent love, because no one can really discern what's happening!) you can't figure which are the good guys and which are the bad ones, which makes it orders of magnitude more annoying, because you want to root for the good guys, right?
To top it all off, the movie is incredibly long, 160 minutes, which is well over 2 and freakin' half hours!  2 freaking half hours of mind-numbing noise, mind-bending explosions, mind-@#$ing action and all this to no end, or the same "we must save humans(~~~imagine Prime's voice~~~)" sh!t.  That's torture, not entertainment.  If you want to exact a revenge on someone without him/her realizing it... take them to this movie, IN 3-freaking-D!
And most certainly NO, I haven't missed the juiciest part, Michael Bay's penchant for staring barely-legal female characters is only a notch higher in this version compared to previous movies.  While looking at the hot 20-something year old Nicola Peltz may make you overlook a few flaws in the movie, more than average flaws might I even add   ~~~wink wink~~~, even 100s of her in this movie cannot make you overlook the lameness of everything this film has thrown on the screen.
I believe I have now been permanently marred by this experience and I've decided to ban all future Michael Bay films from my life for good.  I wouldn't have watched this one either, had it not been for my buddy insisting on watching it.  At least he agreed to my one condition when I retaliated; I'm not going to watch it in 3D, even if you pay me a thousand dollars! (A lesson I learned the hard way from the experience of watching the last Transformer movie in 3D, Rise or Fall or Revenge of something).

But, in all fairness, the ideal audience for this movie is not the demographic of USA, but it is other parts of the world, parts where the movie industry just doesn't have the technical know-how of creating such mayhem of special effects.  Let alone being able to afford monetary expenses of creating one.
So, I said it in the beginning and I'll say it again...
 Watching Age of Extinction is like watching two drunk junkyards having wild-wild sex in the fit of love in your backyard.
Other notable disappointments have been Man of Steel and the latest Spiderman (the name of which I refuse to Google), 300-Rise of an Empire (my review here).  And I'm sure I'm missing a movie or two.
~~~sigh~~~  Good movies are so hard to come by these days.  Until last week, I was pinning my hopes on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  As a kid I adored that cartoon series, but I heard even TMNT-2014 is rated as drearily dull, even at its best.  But I might still watch it, just for the sake of it.

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