Transformers: Age of Extinction—the fourth installment in Michael Bay's quest to turn Hasbro toys into VFX piggy banks—is about what happens when we as a people fear the "other" so much we're willing to turn on each other to extract it from our lives. No, wait, it's about American exceptionalism and intergalactic jingoism. It might also be about terrorism. Well, not really. It's definitely about people being filmed from the ground up getting out of cars in slow motion, and Mark Wahlberg in a really tight T-shirt. Probably.
Actually, I have no idea what Transformers: Age of Extinction was supposed to be about—I don't think it did either—but by the end Optimus Prime had ridden a fire-breathing Dinobot like he was President Obama on a unicorn in an internet meme, so I guess it wasn't all bad.
Here's the thing: No one is going into the latest Transformers installment without the ability to suspend disbelief. Like its predecessors, it's a movie about alien robots that turn into automobiles and get into massive fights. Plus it's a Michael Bay movie; he's sticking to his flashy, well-shot guns, so expecting Martin Scorsese is ridiculous. But in Age of Extinction, the movie's multitude of inexplicable plots go nowhere and, in addition being largely incoherent, put the movie at a runtime—165 minutes—that means it stays way past its welcome.
Age, which opens today, starts somewhere in the Arctic, where a metallic dinosaur skeleton has been located. We're told, though some unwieldy exposition, that this space-metal-Sue discovery is a big deal that changes the course of history. (Guys, what if the catastrophic event that killed the dinosaurs was aliens?!) Anyway, that immediately stops mattering until the last third of the film because now we're zapped to "Texas, USA" where Cade Yaeger (Wahlberg stepping in for a blessedly absent Shia LaBeouf) has discovered a tractor-trailer in an abandoned theater and brought it home to strip it for parts. However, Yaeger is an "inventor" (at least when he has his glasses on), so when he starts digging around in under the hood he discovers that this is no average truck, it's a Transformer. (This is after Transformers: Dark of the Moon destroyed Chicago, so now everyone knows Transformers are a thing.)
However, Transformers, be they the Autobots (good) or Decepticons (bad), are now "enemy combatants," according to some dude at the CIA named Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer). So as soon as the spooks find out Cade has a Transformer—it's Optimus Prime, duh—they descend on his home and threaten to kill his daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) if he doesn't tell them where Prime is. (This is how the CIA smokes out terrorists, obvi.) Optimus comes roaring out of hiding to save the family, and the Yaegers, along with their friend Lucas (an underused T.J. Miller), escape with Tessa's boyfriend Shane (Jack Reynor), who just happens to be driving by in the field nearby.
From this point forward Shane, the Yaegers, and a rag-tag team of Autobots who survived the CIA crack-down are on the lam. It's hard to explain, but basically the feds, who were just supposed to be rooting out Decepticons, are capturing all the Transformers they can and selling them to a company run by a Steve Jobs-ian guy named Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci, bless his slumming heart). That company, KSI, is then in turn building its own 'bots out of "Transformium"—including the Prime kinda-clone Galvatron, which was made using Megatron's intelligence (long story). Meanwhile, Attinger has made a deal with a whole other band of Transformers—lead by bounty hunter Lockdown—who want to bring Optimus back to his creators and have offered the CIA, and by extension Joyce, a "Seed" (aka MacGuffin) that will turn a whole city into Transformium in exchange for the Autobot leader. If this movie is starting to feel like an elaborate childhood Transformers play-date where you and your friends started to tell a cool story and then it devolved into just crashing a lot of toys into each other, you're right.
There are plenty of moments in Age of Extinction that are bound to make you ask "Wait, why would they do that when they can do X?" And that's to be expected; they're in nearly every Transformers movie (see Honest Trailer above). But the head-scratching really begins when the movie tries to make a point—or at least an allegory. You see, in this world Transformers are "alien terrorists" and in the interest of saving "freedom" it's necessary that "innocent people die all the time." (This is actually something someone says.) It's also OK, in this scenario, to imprison Transformers for information. So much so that Brains, who has been captured and forced to translate Megatron's brain for KSI, says "this is waterboarding." By the time Attinger threatens Cade Yaeger because now "it's just us and them and you chose them," it's all a bit too much, especially for a movie about alien robots.
(It's also probably worth noting that Tessa, being the only female in Age with much screentime, is largely a cute/scared girl trope whose father and boyfriend spend more than a few beats bickering about who gets to protect her while she never chimes in to say she might be able to look out for herself. But that's a whole other piece.)
Shortcomings aside, there is one thing Transformers: Age of Extinction—and really every Transformers movie—gets right. And that's awesome transforming robots that have amazingly choreographed fights, for a spectacle that verges on the hyperreal. Once again, the geniuses at Industrial Light & Magic have upped the bar for physics-defying metal transformations. I'm an avowed Transformers fan, and if the nearly three hours of this film could be boiled down to 30 minutes of transforming and fights, it would be on repeat in my livingroom at all times. It might even make a good screensaver. So, if you are going to see Age of Extinction—and why not?—go ahead and see it in IMAX and/or 3-D. It'll at least look cool, especially that part where, I repeat, Optimus Prime rides a Dinobot. And it'll make those product placement/ads for Beats by Dre, Bud Light, and Victoria's Secret (lest we forget about Bay's side hustle) really pop.
That's what Transformers movies do best: pop. (And make tens of millions of dollars.) They're still more than meets the eye, even when they're attacking your retinas—in good ways and bad.
