After Transformers: Dark of the Moon hit a franchise high for box office, Michael Bay announced that he’d be leaving the series on a high note to go make smaller, personal films. He did exactly one of those (2013’s Pain & Gain, which underperformed) before crawling right back to the safe haven of the robots in disguise. His fourth installment, Transformers: Age of Extinction, was his biggest and most impersonal yet. Fans once again ate it up, to the tune of another $1 billion gross.
Even with that financial success, the seams in the franchise had clearly started to show. Critics, who’d never cared much for Bay’s Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots nonsense in the first place, really lashed out at this one even more viciously than usual. Even fans predisposed to like it came out with mixed feelings. Most of the complaints focused on the film’s excessive length. At 2 hrs. 45 min., Age of Extinction may only be eleven minutes longer than the last entry, but feels like two or possibly even three separate movies smashed together with no break in between. Trying to watch it in one sitting is exhausting.
| Title: | Transformers: Age of Extinction |
| Year of Release: | 2014 |
| Director: | Michael Bay |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray 3D |
| Also Available On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Blu-ray Amazon Prime Video Paramount+ MGM+ Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
Age of Extinction represents something of a soft reboot for the series. This is the first Transformers movie with no Shia LaBeouf. Taking his place as lead is Bay’s Pain & Gain star Mark Wahlberg. Personally, that seems like more of a lateral move than an upgrade to me, but I do appreciate that it was more than time for these movies to leave Sam Witwicky behind. Also absent are John Turturro or Josh Duhamel. In fact, almost all of the human cast are new this time around.
Following the destruction of Chicago in Dark of the Moon, the American government and military have severed ties with the Autobots. A new political administration considers all sentient robots a threat to be either destroyed or at least kicked off our planet, yet is hypocritically working with a Cybertronian bounty hunter named Lockdown to do that. The Autobots have gone into hiding, and for reasons mostly unexplained Optimus Prime is a wreck that winds up in a junkyard owned by a down-on-his-luck Texan inventor with the silly name Cade Yeager (Wahlberg). After fixing Optimus, Cade gets roped into the war between the Autobots, the Decepticons, the new third-party robot villain, and America itself.
The convoluted plot has far too many characters and story threads competing for attention. In addition to the points already mentioned, other notable faces include Kelsey Grammer as a sleazebag corrupt politician, Thomas Lennon as a goofy White House Chief of Staff, Titus Welliver as a human robo-hunter working with Lockdown, and T.J. Miller as Cade’s dumbass best friend. Rather than give the hero a hot girlfriend this time, Bay instead gives him a hot teenage daughter (Nicola Pelz) with an older boyfriend (Jack Reynor) that daddy Cade disapproves of. Stanley Tucci also gets significant screen time as an evil tech company CEO who, despite straight-up murdering Autobots to recycle their parts into his own army of remote-controlled drone Transformers, is granted a convenient redemption arc in the second half in which all his crimes are forgotten or forgiven.
The robot cast, meanwhile, has been somewhat slimmed down, and Bay thankfully puts a little more effort into making the Transformer characters distinct from each other, both visually and in personality. In addition to the usual appearances from Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, the samurai-bot named Drift (voiced by Ken Watanabe) and old war veteran Hound (John Goodman) leave colorful impressions. No, it makes absolutely no sense why a robot would look like a samurai, nor why (or how) Hound continually smokes a giant metal cigar, but those are questions best left unasked. That it’s possible to tell these characters apart at all is a huge improvement over the last three movies.
On the Decepticon side, the carcass of Megatron is rebuilt into a new human-controlled drone called Galvatron, who transforms into a tractor trailer meant to be an evil mirror for Optimus. Unsurprisingly, a little too much of Megatron is still left inside and doesn’t care for being used as a puppet. Galvatron also has a brand-new ability (via a magical new element with the stupid name “transformium”) to split into a million flying nanobots and reconfigure into any shape or form.
Most of the marketing for Age of Extinction focused on the introduction of the fan-favorite Dinobots, but they don’t show up until very late in the movie, aren’t allowed to speak any dialogue, and aren’t even identified with names. That feels like a huge missed opportunity. A smarter decision would’ve been to split this script up and hold the Dinobots back for an entire movie about them. That said, the image of Optimus Prime charging into battle riding a fire-breathing robotic T-Rex is exactly the kind of awesome cinematic moment that Michael Bay lives for and that his fans adore. I can’t begrudge him for wanting to use it as soon as possible.
Needless to say, the story is dumb and the characters are mostly annoying. This is another Michael Bay movie, after all. Of course, these problems are shared with all the prior Transformers films as well. If not for the length issue, I might put Age of Extinction about on par with either the first or third entries. Despite its shortcomings, the film delivers as much impressive spectacle as any fan could want. However, the sheer bloatedness of the picture really makes it a chore to sit through. It has so much time-wasting filler I wanted to yell at Michael Bay to hire a damn editor who’d understand how and when to cut some of the pointless bullshit.
Age of Extinction may actually have a pretty good 90-minute Transformers movie buried somewhere within it. Unfortunately, finding and extracting that from this 165-minute endurance test was beyond Michael Bay’s skills as a filmmaker.
The Blu-ray
Transformers: Age of Extinction was initially released on Blu-ray in late 2014 in both 2D and 3D versions. I bought the deluxe 3D set at that time as well as a SteelBook copy (2D only) to satisfy my collector’s OCD. I then stuck the 3D disc into the SteelBook. The film was eventually released on 4K Ultra HD in late 2017, but I have thus far resisted making that upgrade. As with Dark of the Moon, my feeling is that this movie was specifically made with 3D in mind, and 3D is its primary premium format.
To that end, the 3D here is even more impressive than Dark of the Moon. Having gotten a good feel for the format the first time around, Bay pushes for a stronger sense of depth and more pop-out. The whole movie has a very naturalistic three-dimensional appearance as if the characters existed in the same room with you, while particle effects such as snowflakes and explosion debris float out in front of the screen.
Aiding that quite a bit, the 3D disc has been mastered with a noticeable brightness boost compared to the standard 2D copy, to counter the dimming effect of wearing 3D glasses. Whereas I struggled with brightness on my projector with Dark of the Moon in 3D, I had no issues with that this time. Age of Extinction looks bright and sharp and colorful even projected onto a large screen. This may turn out to be one of my favorite 3D demo discs.
In addition to the 3D, Bay also shot parts of Age of Extinction with IMAX cameras (digital this time) for a Variable Aspect Ratio presentation in IMAX theaters, similar to Revenge of the Fallen. On Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD, the 2D version of the movie is presented entirely at 2.40:1, as it was seen in all theaters other than IMAX. Only the 3D Blu-ray is transferred with an alternating ratio that jumps from 2.40:1 to a taller 1.90:1 during select scenes.
As a Constant Image Height projection user, I often find VAR movies annoying, and am inclined to use my projector’s digital blanking feature to crop the IMAX scenes to match the regular “scope” footage around them, so that I can project the whole film using the full width of my screen. Viewers with traditional 16:9 screens may feel differently and prefer to see the full image, but that doesn’t work nearly as well on a wider screen, where the 2.40:1 scenes (still the majority of the movie) will be shrunken down and displayed in a small window within a similarly-shaped frame, with black bars on all sides. In that case, some compromise is needed.
I’ll also point out that Michael Bay’s use of the Variable Aspect Ratio format is haphazard and feels like it has no rhyme or reason to explain why one ratio or the other would be chosen for any given shot. As much as you’d expect big action scenes to expand to full IMAX height while close-ups of actors talking remain at the standard scope ratio, that isn’t always the case and he’s just as likely to do the opposite. Frankly, even on a 16:9 screen I’d find all the random aspect ratio switching distracting.
Depending on how the movie was transferred, cropping to a common scope height sometimes works better than others. I’m relieved to say that Age of Extinction crops just fine. I had no issues watching it on my CIH screen with the IMAX footage masked down. In a direct comparison with the official 2D home video version, the framing is not an exact match. Although Bay may have taken the 2.40:1 extraction from the center of the screen (or very close to it) in some scenes, he adjusted the framing up or down in others on a shot-by-shot basis.
Even with that being the case, a symmetrical crop from the direct center still produces a satisfying viewing experience. All critical picture information (such as character faces) remains within the 2.35:1 or 2.40:1 safe zone and nothing important is lost beyond some extra headroom and footroom. Short of looking at side-by-side comparisons like I’ve provided in this review, most viewers would never realize that anything was supposedly “wrong.”
Both the 2D and 3D Blu-rays (as well as the 4K Ultra HD edition) provide the movie’s soundtrack in full Dolby Atmos form, thus proving that there’s no technical reason 3D and Atmos can’t co-exist on the same disc. Studios that choose to make Atmos a 2D or 4K exclusive feature do so only for marketing purposes.
This being a Michael Bay film, the Atmos track is of course very loud and filled with tons of rumbly bass and blaring sound effects. The surround speakers are used aggressively and the heights are put to good use to create an immersive three-dimensional listening space that works extremely well with the 3D photography.
The Blu-ray package promises “Over 3 Hours of Special Features,” all of which are found on a dedicated supplement disc. These are mostly comprised of a bunch of making-of featurettes strung back-to-back to make something resembling a documentary. In addition to that are an interview with Michael Bay, a piece on Hasbro toy design, some lengthy nonsense with T.J. Miller doing some bullshit I have zero interest in ever watching, a couple trailers, a commercial for an Angry Birds Transformers game, and a moderately amusing parody short in which animated Kre-O toys (Hasbro’s Lego knockoff brand) recap the plots of the franchise’s movies.
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