Trans4mers - Weinberg Review

The following is my video review of Transformers: Age of Extinction, and then Devin Weinberg's (a good friend of mine) review of the movie in response to my video review.

Noodles Review

Weinberg Review

Note: what follows was originally a ridiculously long text message that has since been slightly edited. In other words, excuse the lols.

DISCLAIMER: things get real this time! I'm a little beat from that long movie, so my writing might be a little less clear than usual. However, I think the ideas are stronger than usual, just dig a little!

Okay let's see. Well I honestly went in to the film not expecting to like it much. And I really didn't mind it. Well some of it. When I wasn't cringing at that script at least! Ugh there were some really, and I mean REALLY bad/weak lines in that script. And they annoyingly kept distracting from Bay's (tbh) salvaging production efforts. Say what you will about him...and I've heard/read it all...I think he pulled off some well-paced direction—yes full of some particularly EGREGIOUS choices—that honestly looked pretty good overall visually. Some really crisp, refreshing shots. Especially in the West! Well fine maybe only in the West... Cuz in the latter acts Bay tends to seep back into a cinematic bang-bang monotonous urban banality that we've already seen explored in the last 3, esp. with DotM. I do agree with your comments about the overlong, bloated 3-act structure (Texas, Chicago, Hong Kong) of this wannabe epic. Too repetitive to be an epic I think.... Things just (try to) keep getting bigger, but still we keep returning to familiar (Megatron!) stomping grounds. Anyway, the acting was fine. I liked the ensemble by the end, but honestly Wahlberg bothered me for a while early on. I will ignore his sudden unexplained fighting/marksmanship skills and his (I think kinda anticlimactic!) semi-Chekhovian football spiral knockout reoccurrence in the Hong Kong apartment fight. And sure, the sets were consistent and for the most part...realistic. But that last word, 'realistic', is where my big problem comes up, execution/story-wise. And yes I know it's a 200 million dollar movie about truck alien toys, but still! The series is based on technology with some semblance of futuristic, mechanical feasibility and life, (more of that post-Nolan/Batman Begins realism fad...) but this installment, however, tended to cross the science/magic line too frequently without sufficient exposition (cuz no amount of exposition could even rationalize it!). —Tangent: and they sure did love their exposition!!—Anyway back to science/magic: the Transformium (a cringe-worthy name that even the movie had to recognize is bad!) was too unrealistic. The way it disassembled and reassembled in motion, in thin air, in battle, in the lab, whatever. The fact that one could turn a My Little Pony into a Beats speaker (OH MY GOD THE INSUFFERABLE PRODUCT PLACEMENT! BEATS. VICTORIA'S SECRET. YEAH WELL THOSE ARE THE ONLY BRANDS I TRUST ANYWAY POINT TAKEN UGH CONSUMERISM) with a wave of one's hand with no regard for rational controlling mechanisms, or material, or heck the rules of space and size (small Transformers stay small!) drove me crazy. It became hard to imagine realistically, and it introduced a weird element of fantasy into a mechanical, alluring world with CGI usually so good it *could* be real. The magical particles went too far... 

From all of this mess though, I actually found myself coming upon a thematic through-line that managed to make me question my life and my own existence and future, which I think IS the point of art (but hey I'm not sure whether any of what follows was intentional or not lol, or if I'm just grasping for straws in a vain, pseudo-intellectual endeavor to produce intriguing criticism and validate the ridiculous amount of time I spent writing this). And anyway that theme was...progress, and so the danger and the uncertainty of a suggested-to-be-inevitable future of technological/moral progression and its effects on nature. A subtle but strong vein of environmentalism persists, perhaps! We use and abuse the autobots, who only want to help us, and we suck them dry until we master what they have to offer and don't need them any more. Same with nature, right! Except this movie turns the tables a bit and gives technology some of what I have pretentiously described (in a short story anthology I was once working on) as "nature's timeless mystique". It's a twisted look at our modern era, with (OMG IRONY) technology, so the Transformers, actually representing nature(!). Just something else to 'conquer'.... That line "Don't you get it? We don't need you any more" fits in with this whole environmental theme. 

A favorite shot, that really cemented this interpretation for me, was of a destroyed bicycle in the third act. It conjured images of industrialism and the very point and net human benefit of technology and our impact on the natural world; I remember a character (I think the business head guy) saying "If we don't do it, someone else will". Inevitability! (Or just a dumb cliché). So this was all one huge role of 'progress' in the movie (nature-technology-humanity) but then the theme is also incarnated in that silly science-to-magic progression I complained about earlier. The film then took this progress motif to the self-referential extreme(!) with that all-around-meta third-act story explosion about these mysterious Creators of the Transformers, and Optimus's newfound plight. Everything just keeps getting bigger.... And I would also argue that the film itself echoes/questions/satirizes (I'm obsessed with the idea that meta=satire, in my own work and the work of others, so you'll prob hear me bring that up again in future, sorry lol), on an even grander scale, this same idea of progress and progression and conventional escalation in a cinematic sense. A reboot with a new cast certainly says something. Look at the duration, look at the budget, look at the cast size, and look at that near-convoluted story structure, I believe the most complex we've seen yet in the franchise. Everything is bigger! And it's just too much. It's like Bay is asking about this blockbuster culture and the cycle of inevitable expansion into madness. And the same with technology and nature. And science and magic. IT'S ALL PROGRESS. Or not. Probably not. But you know what? If I can look for these ideas, and if I can think about them, and evaluate them in human context, then the film must certainly have done something right. But hey whatever. I enjoyed it. Maybe a 6 out of 10 Noodles...