OTF's Blue Publication July 2014
Transformers: Age Of Extinction is a typical, but still delightful, outing for Michael Bay. Full of chase scenes, explosions, cities destroyed, and weaving new life into the established Transformers mythos, the movie turned out excellent performances by Mark Wahlberg, Kelsey Grammer, Stanley Tucci, as well as the vocal performances of Peter Cullen – the one voice forever linked with Optimus Prime, and John Goodman. The writer of the film, Ehren Kruger, gave many the best comedic lines to John Goodman, but saved some for Wahlberg.
The movie starts out by once again rewriting Earth’s history – this time it’s prehistory. A crashed alien ship would destroy the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and use the templates of life on the young planet to create new robotic life for themselves. Fast forward to present day. Sophia Myles, who once portrayed Madame de Pompadour opposite David Tennant in the 2006 Doctor Who episode “The Girl In The Fireplace” is now a scientist. She finds the remains of the crashed alien ship, deduces that everything we know about the annihilation of the dinosaurs is wrong, and delivers the line “I think history’s about to change.”
The actions moves to Texas, to introduce Mark Wahlberg and Nicola Peltz, who play father and daughter. Wahlberg is a failed inventor, many times over, and Nicola is coming of age, graduating high school and tired of her father’s notion that the next big thing is around the corner.
She’s also hiding a secret. Little did they know, something big would be around the corner. Wahlberg is called in to clean out an abandoned movie theater, and finds an equally abandon truck cab, in really bad shape. Richard Riehle, who has had at least 2 outings in the Star Trek universe delivers a wonderfully meta line about today’s cinema being nothing more than remakes and sequels of old movies. With his skills, he manages to bring Optimus Prime back to life, but no sooner than he does that, a secret government agency steps in, led by Titus Welliver, from Voyager’s “Equinox”. It’s been four years since the Battle Of Chicago, and the Transformers – Autobots and Decepticons alike – are being hunted down, in a story that reveals a sign of the world we live in – a parallel to the war on terror. It’s a parallel complete with a deck of cards with likenesses of the “renegade” Transformers still “on the loose”.
Wahlberg’s character gains the upper hand with the help of Prime, and uses a government drone to open up the plot of the movie, shifting the action to Chicago, where he, his daughter, and a boyfriend his daughter’s been hiding, realize that Stanley Tucci has a tech empire that is now creating their own Transformers. Except there’s a problem. The prototype Galvatron is not all that he seems to be.
And speaking of robots that aren’t all they seem to be, who is Lockdown? Why is he the captain of a prison ship on a mission to capture Optimus Prime? And who created the Transformers in the first place? All these questions will apparently be answered in yet another sequel.