Transformers: Age of Extinction

Relative brain loss / the fun is worse than part two and three. Something keeps getting moved from place to place under a flimsy pretext, takes a position, destroys everything within reach and travels further for another flimsy reason. The 165 minutes and the lobotomized story sometimes made it difficult for me to understand why, because it all seems so sparse, a bit like an advertisement for (mostly American) cars accompanied by pyrotechnic effects. At the end, the film plays to the Chinese audience, everyone hugs and the story returns roughly to where it was at the beginning of part one, and only the appearance of the actors and their casting changes a little. If you're able to spend two and three-quarters of an hour to see the capabilities of 3D IMAX detail, you're ok, but while Edwards recalled the magic of the perspective in Godzilla, this sounds like a fucking waste of time and money to me. For fans of the series, the good news is that Transformers can continue to run in an endless loop, because "we all have a boss" and even the highest boss has a higher boss. [40%] (25/06/2014)

In a world of thrifty ninety-minute movies, this could have been a blockbuster trying for the title of “best part of the saga", there’s certainly enough material for it. For some mysterious reason this spuriously swelled to the length of two regular feature films and so each great minute/scene/wisecrack is alternated by two to three minutes/scenes/wisecracks that are boring, irrelevant filler (at best) or brought ad absurdum to kitsch infantility in Bay’s inimitable style (at worst and unfortunately most frequently). (21/09/2014)

A dumb story is again plays a front for shifting the frontiers of special effects technology. Bay finds the most wonderful corners of our planet and uses them as the backdrop for impressive battle scenes. I still don’t understand how somebody can expect more from this than a visual feast and three hours of brain death. It’s just a shame that the female supporting role (she reminds me of the girl on YouTube with socks in her bra) is the weakest of the entire series. (20/09/2014)

Undiscerning lovers of robots big and small will be satisfied, I’m sure. But what about the rest of the unfortunate audience? This reboot confirms that the cast of the first trilogy was far from bad. Installment number four lacks the human element of Shia LaBeouf, not to mention the comical element provided by excellent actors such as Frances McDormand and John Turturro. The fourth Transformers contains exactly one funny line of dialogue (“The movies nowadays, that’s the trouble - sequels and remakes, bunch of crap”) and it comes in the very beginning. The following two uninteresting hours leading to the Hong Kong climax contain just two short relatively good sequences (Tessa’s kidnapping and the steel cables in Chicago), the first one being the only moment in the movie capable of evoking some emotion and the other the only original idea we haven’t seen done before. The Chinese metropolis setting is pleasantly refreshing, but I wonder how many viewers are able to follow the plot line through the scuffle in the city streets, after the previous two hours of staring at the screen in bafflement. There’s nothing to talk about regarding the characters and their relationships (like in the first episode), and the climax loses in epicness to the militaristic sequence in Transformers 3. The marines, by the way, are also missing here. They had their place in the Transformers universe. Watching this to the end took a lot of effort on my part. (25/06/2014)

I give the fourth Transformers one more star than the previous ones, because it is the second best installment of the series. The special effects are perfect, of course, but the good thing is that besides the robot fights, I was also interested in the humans this time, and the character of Stanley Tucci was especially good. I liked the ending with the Dinobots very much, I was pleased that Michael Bay finally filmed the action clearly (he had practiced the long shots last time) and that there were not as many Autobots as before and they were more likeable - especially the bearded, cigar-wielding, John Goodman-voiced Hound. (27/06/2014)