On the one hand, Transformers: Age of Extinction is barely coherent, narratively disastrous, and oppressively long. On the other: OPTIMUS PRIME RIDING A DINOSAUR ROBOT WHILE SWINGING A GIANT SWORD!
Apologies for all of the capital letters, but they feel appropriate: Transformers frequently comes across as an angry YouTube commenter trying to bludgeon you into submission, digitally shouting as loud as he can in order to paper over the logical flaws in his argument and to convince you that his narrative is rock solid.
Age of Extinction takes place some time after the events of Dark of the Moon, which resulted in the destruction of Chicago. Both Autobots and Decepticons are being killed by the CIA, and by a mysteriously powerful transformer who wants to capture Optimus Prime. The betrayal of the Autobots by the humans who fought alongside them has forced them into hiding, which, I guess, kind of helps explain why Cade Yaeger (Mark Wahlberg) finds a damaged Optimus Prime hanging out in a movie theater.
Let’s take a moment to discuss this in greater detail, because the whole sequence is representative of everything that’s wacky about this series. Cade is in a run-down movie palace searching for valuable junk—lenses, cameras, lighting, etc.—that he can repair and resell. This entire sequence seems to exist solely so one of the crotchety old-timers who owns the place can joke that movies today are "sequels and remakes, a bunch of crap." In order to make that lame meta-joke work, however, there also needs to be something in the scene that moves the plot forward. Hence, Cade’s discovery of a broken-down Optimus Prime in the cheap seats.
Now, it makes no logical sense whatsoever for Optimus to be there. He’s too big to have gotten into the theater as either a truck or a robot. There doesn’t appear to be a giant hole anywhere in the walls of the theater. Yet Cade tows him back to his farmhouse, where the real action begins. Because screw you, logic!
One could spend all day breaking down the narrative idiocy of this film—the subplot with the CIA and the military-industrial complex and globalization that’s represented by the film’s final set-piece taking place in a Chinese factory where American arms are to be made requires a dissertation-length study. But that’s not really the point of this picture, or of any of the Transformers pictures. We come to these movies to see things blow up real good.
And blow up they do! For an unrelenting 165 minutes, we are treated to the finest chaos cinema Michael Bay has to offer. Coherence is at a minimum and explosions are at a maximum as robots punch and launch missiles at each other and change into Lamborghinis and Chevys and helicopters and, eventually, T-Rexes and Triceratopses and Two-Headed Pterodactyls. And there are space ships! And a new mineral called "Transformium"! (Seriously.) And PRAW! And SCRAASHH! And PSSHEWWW!
Naturally, it doesn’t matter what I say. This film will gross somewhere between $1.2 and $1.4 billion worldwide. Because people like to PRAW! And SCRASHH! And PSSHEWWW! Who am I to judge?