"Transformers 4: Age of Extinction"
The third sequel to Michael Bay's take on the iconic classic Transformers series reboots the humans.
As for canon the film makes it seem kind of like Transformers Animated, where Megatron'd head leads human inventor to build him a new body, and Transformers Prime Beast Hunters, where like in the classic series, Megatron is reborn again somehow, as though both meet. The never movies have always been about the post Armada stories, with a little of the classic peppered throughout, but never enough.
The comparisons with the series are superficial though, as the writing team were given only an outline and Bay ran off and filmed several explosive set pieces, then someone strung them into a semi cohesive plot.
Although there are more personalities with the robots, finally, they're still textbook Bay, not Transformers. This time though Optimus Prime comes off as kind of a jerk who wants to destory the humans for killing both Autobot and Decepticon kind alike. He goes in disguise and is adopted by a human, Cade Yeager, in Texas, who then discovers he's a Transformer. Then a top secret group making a lot of noise trashes his ranch while trying to find him, leading the hero, and his hot blonde teenage daughter, and her boyfriend, to a road trip to find other Transformers while on the run.
The two villains are a CIA guy named Harold Attinger and his lackey, Joshua Joyce, whereas Attinger is evil apparently and is pulling this corporate scientist to rebuild Megatron into Galvatron to destroy the Autobots, like there will be nothing wrong with that.
Cade, Tessa and Shane are on the run and eventually make it to the desert where they run into the Autobots, new ones that sound bizarre, but not too offensive, except for maybe the homage to samurai. Then they high tail it to Chiocago, which looks pretty gfood for a city that was decimated 5 years before. They then break into Joyce's secret lab and try to convince him he's doing evil.
Somehow later on they encounter a Decepticon ship that formerly was commanded by the Klights, whoever they were, and is now under Lockdown, a Decepticon bounty hunter with a gun face. You'd think the recoil would blow his head off. Oh well.
Lockdown wants to get the all spark so he can blow it up in Hong Kong, but they call it the Seed this time, and it looks like a metal robot poo.
They group somehow gets onto the alien ship, captured, and must escaping, leading eventually to Hong Kong where there is an epic series of battles and spy versus spy, and where finally the Autobots enlist the Dinobots to help them fight the Deceptions and get that spark thing slash bomb, slash cyber forming metal maker back.
So the seed acts like the key for Vector Sigma and if you blow it up it's bad. Got it.
Well it's not a horrible waste of time, with its similarities to other stories, and even online fan films like mine, from years back, but it is at times a little long and nauseating.
At least they got rid of the endless stream of dumb jokes and only went for some of the mawkish humor.
I saw the 3D version which was also kind of painful. Later I will have to see the other version.
Review by Adam Browne
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