It's difficult to believe.
I am a person who not only watches internet reviews of terrible, terrible productions, I seek out some of these movies as well. I have friends who scrounge retail stores in search of VHS tapes that look bad. They watch shitty movies. For fun. I watch shitty movies and people watching shitty movies.
With all of that, without a single doubt in my mind, Transformers 4: Age of Extinction is the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life.
It's 5:03 AM right now. I left the movie theater some 8 hours and 40 minutes ago. Somewhere between the and now I got 6 hours of sleep. This movie still remains in my head, infecting my thoughts about anything else. Questions are still there to be answered. I attempt to answer the questions I propose to myself, though it's mostly just one question repeated ad nauseam.
Why?
Why, oh God, why?
Enough bullshitting around. Let's get to the movie. We arrived at the movie at 6:30 ready for something. I haven't seen any transformers anything ever, nor do I intend to, current or older. Cause I don't care. Transformers never got me as a kid except for that one that was on Toonami or some shit some 12 years ago. I knew these movies were bad. I wasn't prepared for this.
I was reluctant to even join my friends in this experience and probably wouldn't have had it not been for my wanting of the Mass Effect Trilogy. Had it not been for Mass Effect, I would not have gone to the movies. Fuck you, Mass Effect.
Ah, I didn't mean it. But whatever. Movie starts, I'm sitting in the theater next to my fairly intoxicated friend. Scene begins, some sort of disgusting looking dinosaurs doing dinosaur things until space aliens come and drop bombs turning everything nearby into metal matter. It implies that these probably caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, but not only do we see a small dinosaur OUTRUN the blast of the explosion, the entirety of their bombings were enough to cover the square footage of my small, 3 stoplight village. Unless they spent YEEAARS repeating this explosion technique, it's baffling how we're expected to believe they took out everything. EVERYTHING.
Cut to sometime in the future, we're in the arctic where we see a woman clearly not properly dressed to be in such cold conditions looking at a giant metal piece of something. What is it? What is she doing? I dunno, it must be important though because a person threatened to shoot her because I don't know, he's insecure?
Forgive me if I am unable to recall these scenes properly, as they're convoluted in their order, and some are just unnecessary. But whatever. At some point, Wahlberg and another guy, Lucas, enter an old movie theater. At some point we get Wahlberg's name, but it's awkward to spell, awkward to say, as it rhymes with his last name, and it's honestly just easier to call him Wahlberg because you aren't for a second going to see him as anything else. Not his fault. Anyways, in this theater, he finds a semi truck that looks like shit and takes it home with him because he's an inventer and likes fiddling with things or whatever.
Cut to his hot daughter getting out of the car with her hot friends, talks with Wahlly and Lucas- which by the way who the fuck is this guy? I don't ever remember it being stated who he is. He says to Wahl that he has a hot daughter, then says to her that he's like her uncle. He's an asshole and comic relief. Whatever. She complains that he's strict, and doesn't really make that much money, blah blah blah, whatever. A lot of nothing important happens until he hooks up the semi to a battery and jumps him alive. At some point a missile goes off, everyone calls it a missile, but it just flies around and doesn't ever explode. Optimus is jumpstarted and threatens the humans, then sees they're not bad, calms down.
Asshole Lucas called CIA or somebody to try and... why am I trying to recap this movie scene by scene? In text format, that's not necessary. The plot of the movie is stupid, people are trying to harness the metal both in transformers and from that early scene where they find a big metal something. This is where I got confused, the entire time, the villians, the big corporate baddies, one working for that company, KSI, one working for the CIA, they're talking about taking Earth back from the transformers by... creating their own? And I didn't see the previous trilogy, but didn't the transformers just fight on Earth because whatever? Were the autobots defending Earth? That's what I thought, and so the plot is after Man of Steel, everyone hates Superman because he's an alien and he caused widespread chaos because these people are masters at missing the forest for the trees. But then I don't know how much of what they say is just rhetoric, just to sound good, as the first use of their transformer prototype, it goes berserk and kills some people probably. Seeing this, the head of the company justifies it saying that innocent people die all the time. SO THEN WHY ARE YOU SO MAD AT THE TRANSFORME-nevermind.
Even with this, I guess some CIA people made a deal where they provide an alien transformer with Optimus and he gives them a seed. What is this seed? What's its practical value? It's only use is a bomb- yeah, big surprise, the bomb looking thing you got from the big evil looking alien robot is a bomb and he wants to destroy a big city. Why did they want this?
They get it, Optimus is taken, the transformers go and get him. Again, I haven't seen the previous ones, but were the same transformers in this one in that one? Cause they all suck. We were excited for Bumblebee's appearance but it's like being excited to play Brink. It's most likely going to be bad, but with the level we've overblown it, his presence alone was enough for forced enjoyment. But the other 3? There was an irish stereotype that sounded like if somebody autotuned somebody's stomach rumblings, there was an asian stereotype that stupid and offensive, and there was a transformers version of a guy halfway between Gragas from League of Legends and the Heavy from TF2. Yeah, they all suck. I hate them all. And how do they have earth stereotypes if they're aliens ah fuck it.
They go to save and they save Optimus and the entire time Wahlburg, his daughter, and her boyfriend are along for the ride and hey look, his daughter and that guy are all in love and Wahlberg doesn't approve do you see it audience do you see how Mark doesn't want this relationship to happen but they do things anyways and he gets angry at them do you see it DO YOU SEE IT YET? And her boyfriend has a terrible accent that he occasionally loses. I thought it was just generic southern, honest, but Wahlberg keeps calling him Lucky Charms, hahahaha, it wasn't funny the first time, but maybe it'll be funny the next thousand times he calls him that. He may be an inventor, but he's not creative. Everything they do sucks. Why are they in this movie? Why can't it just be about robots doing punch ups? Why does it have to involve these assholes?
Either way, Optimus is pulled off and they... all go to China? Yeah, KSI moves their R&D to china because... people in America might get suspicious? Whatever. The villain in the ship goes back to get them, there's a villain in the prototype made by KSI named Galvatron, and all the vehicles they made as prototype transformers join him by transforming in a manner similar to Chris Brown in his video "Transform Ya." In a convoluted and contrived manner, the three humans and also the baddie from KSI who is now not a bad guy and also a comic relief character so insufferable you just want to shove the bomb so deep down his throat his farts explode.
Gragasbot and Bumblebee are protecting the 4 humans, which involves KSI asshole to complain about how his protection isn’t good enough. OH LAH DEE DAH the huge robots saving me from the other robots that I MANUFACTURED BY THE WAY aren’t doing their job up to my standards. I’m not satisfied well FUCK YOU. The two bots are somehow holding their own against the swarm of protobots and a lot of the focus is still spent on the humans, which involves Wahlberg shooting an alien gun at them. The things are like a thousand times his size and he’s shooting peas at them. What the fuck.
They do that and the other three go get the robo dinosaurs, what? How did they get there? Why are they there? Why do they transform into dinosaurs? Why does the robo t-rex still have tiny stubby arms, why, why, why? Whatever, they commandeer them into the city, robots are riding robots, shooting robots, it looks ugly, we’re never completely sure what exactly is going on where, we have NO idea where these bots are spatially to the other two and the humans. Gragasbot says he’s out of ammo and ideas. Asshole, you just threw a goddamn car into a robot and you’re out of ideas? What, are you getting tired? Because you’re a ROBOT. You don’t hear Bumblebee complaining. You don’t hear him saying, well, anything.
But whatever, the autobots save them, then the humans get IN A VEHICLE TO DRIVE THE BOMB. Yes, even though we’ve seen hundreds of cars bring crushed like in foil, even though we’ve seen cars flung in the air without second’s notice, even though the transformers TURN INTO CARS THAT NEVER APPEAR TO BE HURT, no, go drive the thing that’s hinting at the destruction of a major city in a goddamn hotwheel.
They don’t even go anywhere! They end up at a factory thing. Optimus fights the big bad guy whose name I don’t even know, no, it’s not the prototype bad guy, it’s the alien bad guy. Optimus has a sword because I guess swords are better than guns, the villain gets it and stabs Prime in the chest and sticks him to the wall. Bumblebee comes in and saves him, the humans are there and they help distract the guy, pull the sword out of Prime, and Prime stabs the bad guy through his robo heart and tears him apart. Over his dead body, Optimus grumbles something about wing honorable. OH YES, having 5 people jump on this guy instead of having a clean one on one fight, yeah, that’s honorable. Fuck you. By the way, what were the other autobots doing in this time? Why was Bumblebee the only one to help? Where were the dinobots? What’s going on? Am I dead yet?
Something happens, some explosion goes off NOT the bomb, mind you, just some other one, Optimus protects the humans because fuck you, and all the protobots are destroyed. They all convene somewhere and talk about… something. Galvatron, yeah, remember him? He’s in the background and walks away. Why did nobody pursue him? They just forget about him? Whatever, it’s over. The movie is over. It’s over.
Sitting in this movie theater, this mostly empty theater of maybe 15 people, my friend and I unapolagetically talked throughout the entire movie. Everything had something that could be commented on. There wasn’t a single thing in this movie that I could point to and say, “Yeah, they did that right.” There’s not a single thing in this movie that didn’t deserve to be nitpicked and pulled apart. There are all sorts of things in this movie that I haven’t talked about.
—-
All robots have green blood.
There is a robot that has a parachute.
Fire and metal swords are more powerful against robots than bullets, or any projectile.
KSI man questions R&D about why he didn’t have control of his prototype. Next scene. KSI on a phonecall, says he has complete control over his robot. Next scene. KSI wonders why he doesn’t have control over his robot.
In the final fight scene, the bad guy punches Optimus essentially straight into his elbow and it makes a bone-snapping sound.
KSI asshole gets a text about how the seed he has is a tactical nuke, followed with an LOL. He sees this upon getting into an elevator in China with a Chinese man. Upon seeing the text, he starts laughing uncontrollably. This unfunny “joke,” though I can’t possibly categorize it as a joke, is him reading a text on his phone. He then goes to EXPLAIN this “joke” to the man in the elevator who not only looks completely uninterested in this dickhead, he also probably doesn’t understand him. Which is a good metaphor for the audience’s relation to the people who made this garbage.
They never explain what happened to the mother/wife. The establish that she’s not there, but we never once see her in a picture or a flashback, never hear anything about her. The only direct mention is when they say the daughter is just like the mother. The FUCK is that supposed to mean?! How are we supposed to understand this?
There’s a clip where we view a car in a topdown view where it just looks like garbage. It looks like it was rendered for the goddamn Nintendo 64.
There are a few instances of deep slow motion, where something is happening in slow motion and we’re either supposed to feel suspense or worry for a character, rather than just plain slow motion for cool action. Two times, the framerate is just absolute shit, it wasn’t filmed in slow motion so it’s slowed down and you can count the number of frames. It looks horrible.
When they’re driving the bomb, there’s a section where a propeller falls and almost hits the car. They jam on the brakes and stop. We see the propeller bounce over it, and as it lifts, it reveals the car with the people having the stupidest goddamn expression on his face. It’s like the director told Wahlberg to look like a cartoon character who just saw somebody ejaculate on his grandmother.
—-
There’s probably more I could say. Hell, I know there is. My friend and talked throughout the entirety of this movie and I couldn’t care less. No, I didn’t give this movie respect because it didn’t respect me. This movie didn’t care, but not only that, it was an impressive level of not caring. It feels like it was written by a 13 year old that saw the original trilogy when they were new. Nothing in this movie makes sense and it seems like the instant something came into his head, they tossed it in the movie wherever he said without question, without paying any attention to anything else in this movie.
He left the movie theater screaming.
I feel dirty that my friends and I gave money for this movie. I feel upset that people enjoy this movie. I’m not one to criticize people for their interests, but if they can justify their approval of this movie to me, I will give them everything I have.
This movie has a 6.4 on IMDB. I give this movie a 0/10.
