A still from the fourth film in Michael Bay’s Transformers Franchise which released on June 27
New York:
Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth film in an apparently inexhaustible, profoundly exhausting series based on Hasbro toys, raises, not for the first time, a basic question: Who are these movies for?
This one, like its predecessors, is likely to make a lot of money all over the world, but that only makes the matter more puzzling. The Transformers franchise seems like the most baldly and cynically commercial calculation imaginable - it is merchandising-based entertainment at its purest - and yet somehow it does not pander.
Certainly not to women, who are on screen mainly to be ogled, shamed and rescued. The few action-type things that the female characters are allowed to do - throw a punch, drive a car, fasten a cable to a big piece of metal - feel like grudging concessions to changing norms. The mysterious alien force that designed the Transformers made them all dudes.
But even though these robots with the power to change into vehicles started out as children's playthings, the movies are a little too vulgar, violent and nasty to have been made expressly for the youngest viewers. They're also a little too dumb for the adolescent or adult genre geeks.
The mythology seems to have been cobbled together at corporate strategy sessions out of notions ripped off from elsewhere. The battle between the human-allied Autobots and the treacherous Decepticons recalls the intramutant struggles of the X-Men universe. The sentient robots from a distant time who speak in catchphrases and smash buildings have some kinship with the Terminator. The elaborate, thematically overloaded martial backstory carries echoes of Tolkien and Star Wars.
Lasting 166 minutes - though it feels much longer - Age of Extinction makes clear what has always been true of the Transformers movies: Although they may look like soulless corporate studio product, they are really examples of personal cinema, expressions of the will and imagination of their director, Michael Bay. The narrative incoherence is a feature, not a bug. (The screenplay is by Ehren Kruger.)
Bay's strongest films (with the partial exception of Pain and Gain) are those in which the battle between sense and sensation ends in a rout. If you spend any time thinking about why the CIA and an Apple-like technology corporation would be in cahoots with an intergalactic bounty hunter in an anti-Autobot pogrom, you are missing the point.
If, on the other hand, you are bored by the sight of giant robots fighting, this will feel like a very long art film. Which, in effect, it is, albeit one that was made with unlimited resources. Those looking for conventional, middlebrow cinematic pleasures - witty dialogue, credible acting, the play of light and shadow across landscapes and faces - will find a few moments of satisfaction. Kelsey Grammer and Stanley Tucci are amusing as the CIA heavy and his tech-mogul sidekick. The evening sun in a place identified as "Texas, USA" (as opposed to Texas, Belgium, I guess) is golden and lovely. So is Nicola Peltz as Tessa, the teenage daughter of an inventor played with cheerful machismo by Mark Wahlberg. Tessa has a boyfriend (Jack Reynor). That's enough plot summary for now.
The story is scaffolding for the action, and like every other standing structure it is wrecked in a thunderous shower of metal, glass, masonry and earth. Chicago, pounded almost flat the last time, takes another beating, and is joined by Hong Kong. The obliteration of cities is a commonplace in summer movies, but Bay is a connoisseur of urban demolition, adept at using digital imagery and fast editing to bend and mock the laws of physics and flout any sense of moral consequence.
You can admire what he does without really enjoying it, and two hours and 46 minutes of pulverized architecture is a lot to endure. But in every Michael Bay movie there are at least a few moments of inspired, kinetic absurdity. Late in Age of Extinction, a giant spaceship hovering over Hong Kong, equipped with some kind of magnet, sucks up a lot of vehicles - buses, trucks, fishing boats, ferries, whatever - and drops them onto the city below. I could not tell you exactly why, because it doesn't matter, but the sequence is both exciting and revealing. It reminds you what these movies are really about: a boy at play, reveling in the creative and destructive power, and the glorious uselessness, of his own imagination.
This one, like its predecessors, is likely to make a lot of money all over the world, but that only makes the matter more puzzling. The Transformers franchise seems like the most baldly and cynically commercial calculation imaginable - it is merchandising-based entertainment at its purest - and yet somehow it does not pander.
Certainly not to women, who are on screen mainly to be ogled, shamed and rescued. The few action-type things that the female characters are allowed to do - throw a punch, drive a car, fasten a cable to a big piece of metal - feel like grudging concessions to changing norms. The mysterious alien force that designed the Transformers made them all dudes.
But even though these robots with the power to change into vehicles started out as children's playthings, the movies are a little too vulgar, violent and nasty to have been made expressly for the youngest viewers. They're also a little too dumb for the adolescent or adult genre geeks.
The mythology seems to have been cobbled together at corporate strategy sessions out of notions ripped off from elsewhere. The battle between the human-allied Autobots and the treacherous Decepticons recalls the intramutant struggles of the X-Men universe. The sentient robots from a distant time who speak in catchphrases and smash buildings have some kinship with the Terminator. The elaborate, thematically overloaded martial backstory carries echoes of Tolkien and Star Wars.
Lasting 166 minutes - though it feels much longer - Age of Extinction makes clear what has always been true of the Transformers movies: Although they may look like soulless corporate studio product, they are really examples of personal cinema, expressions of the will and imagination of their director, Michael Bay. The narrative incoherence is a feature, not a bug. (The screenplay is by Ehren Kruger.)
Bay's strongest films (with the partial exception of Pain and Gain) are those in which the battle between sense and sensation ends in a rout. If you spend any time thinking about why the CIA and an Apple-like technology corporation would be in cahoots with an intergalactic bounty hunter in an anti-Autobot pogrom, you are missing the point.
If, on the other hand, you are bored by the sight of giant robots fighting, this will feel like a very long art film. Which, in effect, it is, albeit one that was made with unlimited resources. Those looking for conventional, middlebrow cinematic pleasures - witty dialogue, credible acting, the play of light and shadow across landscapes and faces - will find a few moments of satisfaction. Kelsey Grammer and Stanley Tucci are amusing as the CIA heavy and his tech-mogul sidekick. The evening sun in a place identified as "Texas, USA" (as opposed to Texas, Belgium, I guess) is golden and lovely. So is Nicola Peltz as Tessa, the teenage daughter of an inventor played with cheerful machismo by Mark Wahlberg. Tessa has a boyfriend (Jack Reynor). That's enough plot summary for now.
The story is scaffolding for the action, and like every other standing structure it is wrecked in a thunderous shower of metal, glass, masonry and earth. Chicago, pounded almost flat the last time, takes another beating, and is joined by Hong Kong. The obliteration of cities is a commonplace in summer movies, but Bay is a connoisseur of urban demolition, adept at using digital imagery and fast editing to bend and mock the laws of physics and flout any sense of moral consequence.
You can admire what he does without really enjoying it, and two hours and 46 minutes of pulverized architecture is a lot to endure. But in every Michael Bay movie there are at least a few moments of inspired, kinetic absurdity. Late in Age of Extinction, a giant spaceship hovering over Hong Kong, equipped with some kind of magnet, sucks up a lot of vehicles - buses, trucks, fishing boats, ferries, whatever - and drops them onto the city below. I could not tell you exactly why, because it doesn't matter, but the sequence is both exciting and revealing. It reminds you what these movies are really about: a boy at play, reveling in the creative and destructive power, and the glorious uselessness, of his own imagination.
