Review of Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) by Terracorex — 26 Jun 2014

Slightly better than the second, which frankly sucked, and not as good as the third, which was mildly entertaining. Even with his best heroic effort, Mark Wahlberg could not save this film. He barely managed to be mildly convincing in his earnestness to save his daughter from all the evil humans and machines. Admittedly, this in itself could be considered quite a feat given the incredulous stupidity of what constituted a plot. Family discovers Autobot. Everyone wants to kill Autobot and family. They fail. Autobots save family. Family saves Autobots. Rinse and repeat.

What the first film had, and the third one at times achieved, were Autobots with whom the audience could at least identify. This movie utterly lacked any semblance of the rapport that Shea LaBeouf had established with Bumblebee in the previous films. Here Bumblebee was little more than a caricature. Optimus was dogmatic and stifled. All the machines, the Autobots most especially, were for the lack of a better word, soulless. The movie would have been improved by removing all human/machine interactions. When a Transformers movie would be better without any Transformers in it, then that in itself is sad statement.