Transformers : Age of Extinction

The fourth Transformers film has a completely new human cast, but sticks to exactly the same formula. We have a nerdy man (Mark Wahlberg as Cade) who wants to be a hero, one very pretty girl (Nicola Peltz as Tessa) who doesn't do much, and a bag of other people who are more or less useless as the story dictates.

I thought the last film was too long... and this one is even longer, at 165 minutes! That's about an hour too long for a film of this kind. I'd had enough way before the end, and the climax wasn't nearly good enough to make you forget all the padding that you'd had to sit through.

Even so, it is still quite entertaining because Transformers are cool. I wonder how much further the franchise can go though. They need to cut out a lot of the fat and work on the story a bit... otherwise even the fans will give up.

SPOILERS

There's not a lot to spoil here because you know most of the plot before the film starts: some Transformers want to do something that will put the Earth in peril, some humans are helping them because they are greedy / stupid / think there is no alternative, our heroes want to help Optimus Prime to stop the bad Transformers but are hindered by a lack of belief from all other humans... and the heroes win.

Far too much of the film is spent on the new human characters. And even then the characters end up woefully underdeveloped. Mark Wahlberg is a decent actor, but totally unbelievable as a nerdy inventor. Even less so as a single father to the angelic 17-year-old Tessa, who unsurprisingly turns out to have a secret boyfriend despite her father's ban on dating. The boyfriend also unsurpriingly turns out to be a nice guy... although Jack Reynor's attempt at an Irish accent is absolutely criminal.

Instead of a decent plot and a building of suspense, we get confusion about what the hell is going on. Even by the end you don't get much information on who Lockdown is, who or where are The Creators and where did the Dinobots come from?

In fact I spent most of the film just waiting for the Dinobots to appear (having seen them in the trailer). It was very disappointing how they were just thrown in at the end to make a lacklustre finale a bit more interesting.

Why did Optimus have to have that short fight with the (leader?) Dinobot? That didn't make any sense at all. Also, why didn't Galvatron / Megatron join in the battle at the end? He was supposedly a superior Transformer, but just left everything up to the pawns.

Too many loose ends. And too many stupid liberties: for example, Optimus Prime is pinned to a wall by a sword that has to be pulled out by a truck... but then at the end he jets into space on his rockets! I think the force needed to get into space is a bit more that the truck used to extract the sword.

Come on. I'm not asking for a clever story. I like Transformers. I don't need much. But I need something. If the makers can't do a decent story then just give us the robots in disguise doing cool stuff and keep it a lot shorter next time.