7 years later: my tirade against “Age of Extinction”

Okay so hey, it looks like the Transformers movies are going to do what we expected instead of what we hoped, and they’re making sequels in the vein of the first 5 (terrible) movies instead of following the soft reboot of Bumblebee. The next one is set in the 90s and will have Maximals and Predacons in it.

I’m not going to get excited for this. There’s just no point. They should have done an Optimus sequel to Bumblebee, and then concluded the trilogy with a Megatron finale. Let it come to the present, erase the other five movies from the timeline, and then go from there.

There was even talk of a CGI Beast Wars movie trilogy on a streaming platform in the coming years, likely Netflix. Now I don’t know what to think. They just casted Ron Perlman to be the voice of Optimus Primal. Solid meh from me.

I didn’t realize that I was part of the problem by making these movies successful until I sat in the theater for the 4th one, got halfway through, and slowly put it all together.

These movies were never going to be good with Michael Bay at the helm. Bumblebee was good, really good, perhaps not great, though it had moments of greatness. (I mean, it did have John Cena in it, so there’s a ceiling on this thing.)

But as I was a month away from turning 30, and I had one kid in the world, and we were planning on our second, something must have clicked for me in the Maturity Department and I saw what was going on. I was being taken for a ride, for my nostalgia, at the cost of my bank account, but worse, at the cost of the legacy a beloved franchise from my youth.

It could have been great. Instead it was this.

Bored at the new transformers movie. It’s pretty bad.

They could have made a wonderful apology for the last three, but they made this. No Dinobots yet. 90 mins in.

I actually want Shia back. I am rooting for the human characters to die. (If memory serves, this was right when the Irish adult explained the law that allowed him to bone a teenager in Texas)

Oh look, they are wrecking Chicago again.

Do they just hate the idea of properly executing the Galvatron/Unicron story?

Hey hey, the plot showed up! Let’s see how long this lasts.

Thirty seconds of plot after fifteen minutes of pointlessness and awful dialogue on a spaceship. No reason.

John Goodman as the voice of Hound is the most defensible thing about this so far. The soundtrack is good though. (Author’s note: I meant the score. The soundtrack had Imagine Dragons on it, which is like having Nickelback but with herpes.)

If they had cut out the last thirty minutes and gotten right to this we would be in good shape.

I don’t know why I expected any different.

And F-bomb. Greeeeeeat.

Kelsey Grammar was wasted on this script.

Why in the hell did I think this movie would make sense?

Anyway, there it is. I still haven’t seen The Last Knight and I promise you, I never will. I’m not excited for this. I’ll have to wait until I see a trailer, and if I’m enticed, then I’ll wait until I can get the DVD from the library, but dammit I am not paying for this movie. Not happening.