Got through it last night. After watching it, I thought it was pretty awful, but after sleeping on it and reflecting on it this morning…it’s still pretty awful.
It’s just a dumb, hateful, shallow movie, packed to the brim with content seemingly designed to purposefully turn you off to every character, concept, and conflict introduced. No joke, around the end of the movie I actually found myself rooting for Galvatron and Kelsey Grammar, because at least their positions were mildly principled (if only in their own off way) and they could articulate them with some consistency.
You sure as hell aren’t going to have any love lost for the Autobots. After Optimus let half of Chicago get blown up in the last movie to ‘teach humans a lesson’, he suddenly takes it personally when the lesson they learned is “Maybe we shouldn’t rely on sociopathic aliens to save us all the time”, and turns into a berserker engine of vengeance, bellowing “I’ll kill you!” what feels like every five minutes and eventually having to learn from Marky Mark the same lesson he himself was espousing in the previous movies (“Humans aren’t so bad, they have potential”). The rest of the Autobots are similarly contemptible assholes. They’re brought together just to be annoying jerks to each other, seriously, there’s no camaraderie between the Autobots in this movie at all, they spend the whole time insulting and calling each other names and getting into scrapes on their downtime and generally just being douchebags. If the movie was supposed to be pushing the idea that this is a ragtag group of otherwise loners that’s being forced together by virtue of being the only Autobots left, then it might have had more of a point if they’d ‘come together’ as a team at the end, but they don’t, they stay independent and singular through the whole thing; Drift and Crosshairs leave Hound to defend the city by himself so they can go sit on their asses and watch Optimus fight the Dinobots by himself, then have the gall to comment on what a great leader he is. Don’t even get me started on when they suddenly turn into spiteful, murderous monsters for the whole time they’re on Lockdown’s ship. Hound liquefies a random alien for spitting on him. Our heroes, everybody!
The movie similarly continuously glorifies these hateful, mean-spirited moments. Marky Mark’s friend Adrian gets fried in the first hour, and the scene tastelessly lingers on his crispy corpse for naught but shock value. Tessa is treated less as a character and more as some macguffin for Marky Mark and her boyfriend to fight over (she makes almost none of her own decisions throughout the entire movie, everything counting down to whether she’s doing something for her dad or her boyfriend). We’re supposed to be shocked and appalled when Galvatron smashes some civilian cars up in his initial outing, but when Bumblebee’s flipping and exploding random boats and torching bridges, it’s all good! The list goes on and on.
Aside from all the nonsensical plot-holes already mentioned (Prime fixing himself is a big one, not to mention him taking a big, obvious, I’M OPTIMUS PRIME altmode when he’s still supposed to be on the run and in hiding) there’re some other big ones. Optimus gets dropped a SHOCKING REVEAL from Lockdown that he was built by Creators for some purpose, then just a few minutes later he’s telling the humans the whole story as if he knew it all along. The Dinobots just kind of show up in the last twenty minutes with little effort (Lockdown’s backstory on them is very rushed, mushed together with some nonsense blending Optimus into it which completely contradicts everything we know about him up til now and only exists to give Lockdown an excuse to want to capture him) only to do almost nothing.
Regarding some of the characters: Drift is horrid, playing like some horribly outdated “Wise Samurai” stereotype (seriously, was his dialogue written in the 70’s?). Cade Yeager (which is an awful, awful name), is immensely unsympathetic for his plights, violently chasing innocent people off his lawn and being a shallow manchild throughout the whole thing (And does he grow? Mature at all throughout the film? Of course not, he gets a cool new toy and saves the day!). As already mentioned, I could actually *almost* side with Attinger on this thing, given what unrepentant douchebags the Autobots are and how they seem to blow up any major city they try to ‘save’ in any of the films (seriously, they just purposefully blow up this plant in China in the end!), and at least his motivations and ideals were somewhat consistent (Grammar actually does a pretty good job, his character is rather wasted on this film). Galvatron is similarly decent, at least having a simple ‘revenge’ scheme and being a cool-looking and interesting concept (in fact I’m rather fond of the way the human-built TFs transform, it’s a very cool-looking effect).
Oh, and they make a point of bringing back Brains, a character I’m sure everyone was just clamoring for the return of.
Really, given that this is a summer action blockbuster made to sell toys and promoting itself chiefly on the spectacle of ROBOT KNIGHTS RIDING DINOSAURS, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to go into it expecting a modicum of fun or enjoyment, but there’s none of that; it’s all dumb, mean-spirited hatefulness. By the end you’ll be exhausted from all this crap, happy to watch Optimus fire up his boosters and fly into space (because, uh, he can do that now) and say goodbye to this whole thing forever. It’s bad, but it’s hard to say if it’s ‘worse’ than ROTF. ROTF was a poorly-constructed, incoherent mess. AoE actually holds together somewhat decently as a story, but that story is so pointedly unenjoyable, so cartoonishly unlikable on almost every level, that you can’t even eke some amusement out of it, it’s just a drag.
This turned into way longer of a rant than I intended, and I could actually still go on and on about how unhappy I was with this movie, but I think that’s plenty.
And hey, at least some of the toys are still pretty cool-looking.
