Transformers: Age of Extinction

Transformers: Age of Extinction

Okay, try to not be scared by this post. Just breathe... Are you breathing? Okay, let's do this like ripping off a bandage and just get it over with. I've been home with a broken down car for a couple of weeks and it's given me a lot of extra free time to watch some things that wouldn't normally blip on my radar. Recently, I decided to give T:AoE another watching to see if my ambivalence could be pushed one way or the other on the scale of like/dislike. I paid attention to decisions that were made with plot and shot composition, and tried to take it in as only I know how, which is, of course, dispassionately. This viewing left me a little shocked as I picked up on a couple of things that I found genuinely cool and entertaining so naturally, I decided I should share these thoughts with all of you. As a disclaimer, this film is still a huge mess so don't get the impression that I thought anything to the contrary overall, I just happened to stumble across a few redeeming qualities that it's easy to overlook.

The first thing I noticed was shot composition.Say what you will about the film as a whole, but there are some legitimately good shots peppered in there, especially some of the wide angle establishing shots. You could tell that Bay was looking for slick and sexy, and that shows in a lot of the shots that he chose to use in establishing setting. At times, although not necessarily throughout, there was good use of contrast, lighting and texture to really make me feel like I was in the action right with the characters on screen. This may have had a lot to do with the fact that this movie got a 3-D release so maybe Mikey was trying to bank on that aspect with greater depth in his shots, but it paid off. The visuals for the most part are rich and engaging.

Let's talk about characters for a moment. This is one of those areas where Bay tends to take a lot of flak being that his characters always tend to feel more like caricatures. I'm not going to say that that didn't happen in this movie as well, but it seems like MB at least tried to turn that flaw into an advantage with SOME characters. Yes, they're all cliche, and, yes, there are some that should offend people of that particular ethnicity, but on the whole, they're at least used as effectively as Bay can muster. In particular, look at Joyce's assistant Su Yueming. She comes across at first as your stereotypical Asian, but by the end of the film, she's kicking butt and taking names. She isn't a damsel in distress, she isn't acting out of anything more than self-preservation, she's just a strong woman who's strong simply for the sake of it. Bay does ruin that at the end with one of those, "I realized that I now have feelings for you moments." But, for a time at least, she's pretty bad-A. Along slightly more relatable lines. I actually found myself understanding the Cade Yeager character to a point. He's a guy just trying to give his daughter a good life and trying to balance that with his passion for engineering and invention. He's reached a crossroads in his life where the fundamentals are about to change irreversibly and he's understandably scared. He puts a lot of pressure on himself to live up to an ideal that he feels is mandated by a promise he made to his wife before she died, but that he himself actually created. I understand what this guy is feeling. He's got an attractive daughter who is maturing into an adult and wanting to move into that period of her life and he wants to hang on to the last vestiges of her childhood when he was her hero and her world revolved around their relationship and everything seemed simple. I get that. It's actually a pretty deep character for a Michael Bay film, at least it would be if he hadn't already used the archetype once before. 

This discussion of characters brings me  to my last point for this post. Kelsey Grammer's Attinger character is really what got my mind racing about this movie. He plays your typical 'evil government guy'. You know, the one that everyone is naturally supposed to loathe throughout the film. He plays it brilliantly, but as I was watching, I was looking at what lurked below the surface and it was actually pretty amazing. Whether done intentionally, or stumbled upon by accident, there is some poignant and well crafted commentary happening as pertains to the government and those things that they do under our noses. Perhaps it's because of the huge Apple hacking scandal that happened recently, but this aspect of the movie got me thinking about just how much goes on in the shadows that we think is for our protection, but that really just serves to further an agenda. We live in a world of terrorists, where our own government will give weapons to one group in order to snuff out another. But they won't have any idea what to do with the first group after the snuffing has been completed. These are often operations that happen unbeknownst to our Commander in Chief and certainly without the knowledge of the general public. It leaves the common man to ask, "How much of this is actually our fault?" It's a talking point that only now are we becoming comfortable expressing, but this movie touches on in a pretty engaging way. It maybe exaggerates things a little, a lot, but it tries to show just how out of control people can get when they think that their power is endless and their actions sanctioned. Well played Mikey!

This has been a short post. Call it my way of making up for last week's diatribe. But should you find yourself watching this mediocre piece in the future, try to look at some of these points and perhaps you'll see, like I did, that there were the makings of a decent film hidden behind all the needless spectacle that the movie became. Now brace yourselves! Being as I'm still suffering from a wee bit of post holiday slump, we're going to kick off a month of underrated comedies starting next week! I've got some gems picked and we're going to look at what worked a what didn't so stay tuned!