Yes, the true power exists in randomly relinquishing things everywhere!   It was an odd defense on my side, but in all seriousness, I guess it's depends on what we experienced out of that scene.

 

Just saw it and hated it.... Like galvatron this movie has no point and no soul or substance.... We deserve a better writer than Kruger... What a hack

 

Okay, I admit, I kind of feel bad hating this movie, mainly for two reasons:
A) It's a Michael Bay production, and part of the film franchise that created Devastator's Wrecking Balls. I've seen the last three films of said franchise. I knew that I was going to be watching a piece of shit movie, so I can't complain about seeing a piece of shit movie without that voice in the back of my head saying "well, what did you expect?".

and

B ) After dragging my uncle and grandfather to see this movie, and paying twenty dollars worth of movie tickets to see the movie (and basically validating Michael Bay's quest to make terrible movies, ruin franchises, and more or less run Hollywood further into the ground), there's something wrong in not even having the decency to enjoy it.

On the other hand, that doesn't change the fact that this movie was far too long, and had too much going on at once. Seriously, the Lockdown plot and the human plot should have been made into separate movies. Instead, we get a movie that feels like it should have ended halfway through, the Dinobots (who, mind you, have been marketed like crazy for a while now) being shoehorned into the last 15 minutes, the two main plots having little to do with each other, the new Decepticons feeling wasted, and generally feeling like Michael Bay didn't give a shit about making the movie watchable, as if he knew that he would make tons of money no matter what he put onscreen.

Though, to be honest, I got a laugh out of Bumblebee's initial reaction to Stinger, and I liked the Autobots...but then again, that might be because I'm part of the lowest common denominator and therefore part of the problem.

 

Agree, it just felt like a slap in the face. Oh, you wanted more Shockwave? Too bad! Have this mutant thing with his heads that doesn't transform or do anything threatening and there's three of them.

I think the lack of "Real Decepticons" as you describe really sums up my problem with this movie. I go for the Transformers... but this movie had fewer of those to root for. I can get behind Constructicons forming a King Kong Devastator. They're characters that I can recognize and appreciate this reinterpretation. Plus I get to watch their badass transformation scene as they reveal themselves. AOE has Lockdown, who was cool, and Galvatron, who had the potential to be cool but was never on screen long enough. Plus all of the human-built Transformers don't transform properly, and they don't even have any personality. At least the genericons in the previous movies loped around and snarled like monsters. These guys just stand places and get shot. It's literally all they do.

 

A lot of this seems a bit nitpicky, but to each their own.

 

I assumed his soul was that chest death hole since he's all about chaos.

 

First off this films starts off like ROTF.

Instead of the Fallen, It's now "The Creators" who visited the Earth but this time in the prehistoric era. DOTM started with the Moon incident.

In the entire universe, everything has to crash land on Earth or have been visited millions of years ago. Isn't once not enough, there should be a reason for Transformers besides finding some artifact which always seems to be the main thing in these movies.

This film is confused and too bloody long. One minute it's serious, one minute it's comedy, one minute it action. It really needs to establish itself as a film and what target audience it's going for, at the moment it's like a big bowl of Bipolar script writing & editing

The Father/Daughter relationship was pointless, what would have been more interesting would be Tucci going against Kelsey.

People said there is more Transformer screen time, I would like to point out while it has slightly increased, it still feels like the human story and screen time still dominate this movie.

Reboot or TF5, all I ask is for:-

*Better Editing
*Better Writers
*Decepticons not drones
*If you introduce something like Knights Of Cybertron, explain it!
*All you need is 2 human characters. One bad guy One good guy.

 

I wouldn't have minded the Vehicons as a mass of soulless drones, if they were portrayed as a large, intimidating force.

But they weren't.

They're not even active until the last action sequence, most of them die in one hit and then any tension is lost when the Dinobots show up and effortlessly slaughter them. There aren't even that many of them(only 50).

And then there's nothing to counter the Dinobots *(Lockdown's giant ship has no artillery? WTF) so the movie just shrugs it's shoulders and has Lockdown fight Prime so the movie can end.

Not exactly a thrilling finale.


*This would have been an occasion where some giant mechanical thing like Devastator or the Driller actually would have helped the movie out. But of course, the one movie where the Autobots have giant robots on their side, they don't give the Decepticons anything.

 

The scene was very cool visually but absolutely pointless in every single other way. It was long and led nowhere, nobody was captured (assuming that's what he was trying to do?), nobody was killed, nobody was even injured, nothing changed during the scene. Cut the scene and everything happens exactly the same way.

 

I walked out halfway through and got my money back.

 

Let's be honest.

This movie is such an atrocious affront to filmmaking and storytelling that it's almost pointless to break it down, as if some short laundry list of alterations could have saved it (although some heavy editing could make it much more watchable).

What's so infuriating about it is that Kruger and Bay prove they're totally capable of nailing a scene's worth of tone/action/drama/etc... here or there. But they seemingly can't be bothered to keep it up for an entire feature (or even more than a third of it). And even if they could Bay has no sense of how to coherently string those scenes together.

The only thing that's more frustrating than this film series has been it's (loud) supporters (mostly found in the fan communities), that will swear up and down that the Bayformers films have been AMAZING! UNBELIEVABLE! THE BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR!... and will tell everyone that it's the professional film critics who "don't get it" and not to listen to the "haters" because they're just "incapable of liking anything."

Gah. I can't wait til one bombs and they get a new team on it.

 

Hate is a strong word. I think there may only be one movie that I truly hate, and that is "Primary Colors". And part of that is because it was the in-flight movie on an absolutely horrendous flight from San Fransisco to Hawaii. Still a bad, bad movie.

But I digress.

When I got wind of Quintessons being involved, I thought I was gonna really like this and where it was going. My fault for getting my hopes up. Cause I strongly dislike this movie, and I will most likely never watch it again. I actually do think its worse than Revenge of the Fallen.

The thing is, the length itself wasn't a problem for me. I got no problem with long movies. That it was a bad movie that didn't deserve its length was the problem.

Some of the issues I had:

-It just wasn't funny. It tried to be, but Kruger just doesn't have the knack for it like Orci and Kurtzman did on TF1. The audience barely laughed at all.

-The CGI was bad and completely unbelievable. The worst offender was the my little pony scene. How that got out of ILM without somebody being fired, I don't know

-Jet pack Optimus. WTF did that come from? Why didn't he use it sooner. It could've been a real help! And why not use Lockdown's ship to go into space. Hell, it was practically yours to begin with!

-Why trust the bomb to a hand of a carfull of humans when you got at least 3 Autobots that can fly? Especially one of them being Optimus who is the great Decepticon slaughterer.

-Autobots are mean and unlikable. All of them are always threatening to do something to someone else or each other

-Human cast was too big and uninteresting. Too many characters. The notion of creating a human interest story should stop. It worked with the boy and his car motif in the first film. But there have been so many movies on going to college, finding a job, or dad's protecting their daughters, enough is enough.

-Lockdown was either a coward or a dumbass. You're a Lamborgini. Why not chase down a beat up old semi truck? At that point he didn't even have the bots helping him out. Instead he just drives in slow motion past the human statue.

-Dinobots. Don't need to say much of this. They just come out of nowhere and are pointless. Then they let the pointless robo monsters back into the wild.

-Bad names that should've been placeholders in the script. Shades of Cobra La from G.I.Joe here. Like Transformium or whatever its called, and "The Legendary Warriors" or whatever they were.

-Transmorphers has now become a reality. I would like to say this was the end of it, but we know its not. After all, Galvatron is still lurking around.

That's enough. I spent 3+ hours on this piece of garbage, and I don't wanna dwell on it anymore.

If they insist on using Bay to keep making the money, he needs to reign these films in. They have gotten out of hand. Fire Kruger, and try to amp up Spielberg's involvement once again. Also more Bingbing Li.

 

The only problem I had was the transitions and Nicola Peltz being an annoying bitch like she always is.

I liked the tone and how the movie was trying to make you feel invested for a good reason. I'm not a fan of stupid shit like Stonecrusher (No offense), so I was glad that I actually felt some emotion during the film.

Also, the movie dragged on for way too long, fuck they could have made 2 movies with how much shit they put in it.

 

It was the whole planet. It's what killed the dinosaurs, as stated later. We only saw part of it.

Just a reused visual effect. Routine in media.

It sets up Transformium. It was also where the Dinobots (Grimlock) were discovered. Lockdown probably swopped buy and picked them up between scenes. There is nothing to imply Grimlock and the others were longterm prisoners.

Hey remember that G1 episode where Spike and the Dinobots went to Cybertron to retrieve Cybertronium because Autobots and Decepticons started to break down? Yeah how many times did Random Transformers metal get referenced before that? 0 times. Frankly, they should have called it Cybertronium. But whatever! It's the same idea. Plot device resource.

Inspired by these:

During the Iraq War, US servicemembers were given cards with 50 Iraqi government fugitives on them. The practice was used during World War II as well. It's useful in getting pictures of obscure (but sought) people into the hands of boots on the ground. There is also of course, a propaganda value behind it.

History and usage aside, the transformer cards were an intentional reference to these famous Iraq War cards.

An entirely new human cast needed set up.

Would just have been a rearrangement of the scenes and would have been a flat opening instead of one where the villians and macguffin of the film, so to speak, was set up.

Agreed. He didn't need to be in the movie. Probably was because Mark Whalberg is what... 42 now or something? And Tessa is 17 in the movie, 19 as an actress.

It got a lot of laughs in the theater.

Is that necessary? It was very clear Lockdown wanted boots-on-the-ground help getting Prime and Attinger wanted the seed. How the arrangement got formed doesn't advance the plot.

He was brought up, repeatedly. Most notabely Cade being guilt tripped by Tessa over not calling the hotline for being so driven by technology and not by reality.

That's nitpicking. I doubt anyone but you thought of that.

Nefarious movie villian is villianous. He also has the power to have a black ops team that violated pretty much every constitutional right there is. Do you know what happens if the movie didn't have this? A boring movie.

You're making that up. No where is that even implied. They've been hanging out there for who knows how long. A few days? An hour? A year? Simply: it doesn't matter.

Jazz was killed by Megatron in a battle, in a war the Autobots came to Earth to continue to fight.
Ironhide was killed by Sentinel Prime in his betrayal. Optimus had bigger things to worry about than a rage moment.

With Ratchet, first in the film the line "Medical Officer" was intentionally mentioned right before Optimus went berserk (the "you don't kill doctors" trope). Secondly, it was done by humans... by "young race" Optimus had fought so hard for and looked at rather paternalistically, which is very different from his relationship with the murderers of Jazz and Ironhide. Thirdly, unlike Jazz or Ironhide, who simply died, Ratchet was killed, torn to shreds and had his body intentionally melted down to harvest Transformium.

I thought him going nuts was perfectly reasonable. If the Humans just killed Ratchet that would have been one thing... but then they desecreated his body.

Going nuts over that made sense.

You missed this in the movie. They were very clear about this point and they covered it, clearly, at least three times. The President knew that transformers were being hunted down but they were told (and this part was made clear repeatedly) that it was Decepticons being hunted down. The Autobots, while the alliance was canceled, were thought to be safe and on the "white list". In fact, the chief of staff actually asked for a President-Optimus photo op furthering the assumption the Autobots were not officially the enemy.

Attinger lied, and that was a huge part of his motivation. He wanted ALL transformers gone, so he hunted down Autobots too and told his bosses they were Decepticons (there was even a scene when he and a lackey lied to someone, might have been the Chief of Staff that a Decepticon had been killed, when it was really Ratchet). And then he had KSI melt the Autobot down quickly.

And besides, is government agents lying to their superiors over what they're doing really so far fetched? The VA Scandal says hello.

In short, no, the President had no idea. Attinger lied. Just like Obama had no idea about the VA. We could go down a long list of times the President has been duped by subordinates.

It was brought up. Optimus Prime brought it up. Furthermore lying about the Autobots is cover for it. Remember: Chief of Staff wanted a Photo-Op.

This is basic continuity with the first trilogy you might have missed. The battle of "Mission City" (aka LA) was denied by the government and covered up. We learned that in Revenge of the Fallen. Within the fictional universe, Transformers became known to the world after the 50 decepticons landed on Earth in Revenge of the Fallen, blowup up clock towers, sinking carriers, and transmitting the Fallen's message anywhere.

As for why chicago's prevalance, ask yourself, what sit's more in the mind of Americans: 9/11 or the USS Cole bombinb a year prior? The former happened in our largest city with millions of cameras watching, the latter happened in the Gulf of Aden.

Similarly, the Battle of Chicago, with it's dozens of warships and 200+ Decepticons and Cybertron in the sky dwarfs a battle in the middle of the Desert with twenty decepticons where the world's fate really didn't hang in the balance.

No. You got a couple things messed up. Attinger worked for "decades" for the CIA's black ops program. Tucci founded KSI 25 years prior. They have only been working on TOGETHER transformers (and Transformium) in the last few as Tucci wanted to do his biggest breakthrough ever. Attinger wants to retire from public service to a KSI job after handing over the seed.

He even called this his "Golden parachute", explicitly. And in real life, this is common. Look who sits on the boards of major defense, technology and industrial firms: ex-military, ex-CIA, ex-FBI.

Second body. Megatron had the same body in the first three films, just with different alt-modes. Prime and Bumblebee both also changed (most notably in DotM) in the original trilogy.

Also killing Megatron at the end of DotM was a last minute decision. Every other piece of tie in media had Megatron and the Decepticons agreeing to the proposed truce with prime, and then leaving to restore Cybertron while the Autobots stayed on Earth.

Michael Bay even talked about why this change was made. It was because Megatron had engineered this cacaclysmic attack and if he just walked away (and Optimus let him), he basically would have gotten away with it.

Imagine how many angry threads there would have been if Optimus let Megatron take cybertron and go home, having essentailly gotten his way? I'm being cheeky here of course, but really Megatron had to die at the end of DotM to close out that movie and trilogy.

Personally I never liked that they killed him, and hope they don't make that mistake again with Galvatron, but I understand why they did it.

You might have gotten your way is Hasbro had done as they originally planned to do, and named Megatron at the start of Revenge of the Fallen "Galvatron". But really, this was a more opportune moment for it. They even mentioned, explicitly, how Galvatron had "focused grouped well". The name was product driven by KSI.

Would they really call him Nemesis Prime for something they intended to sell? Notably Galvatron never called himself by any name. So it's a good question: does he think of himself as Megatron or Galvatron?

And another thing, do we really need an "Evil Prime" after Sentinel Prime in DotM, though really an evil Alpha Trion, was an "Evil Prime". And that was after The Fallen, also a Prime in a senese.

Because it's his identity and he was having KSI build him a new body by essentially leading them along. His body, his face. And try as they might, they couldn't change it. That was made abundantly clear in the film.

Logically though, Megatron new the the Autobots were being hunted down (due to the fact that he was having an army made of Transformium as well) and the Autobots didn't know he was still alive. So why hide when everyone things you're dead? Another classic movie trope.

He died in DotM. But his brain remained at least partially intact, and when KSI studied his corpse, it started to reassert itself. This was made clear in the movie.
He learned of the Seed through his time leading KSI along to building him a new body (and army). It likely started with "new body" and turned to the Seed when he learned of the scarcity of naturally occuring Transformium from KSI, and then their solution to it.

And Brains (not Wheelie) told them straight up what the plan was. The autobots made a logical guess, that's it. In the conversation you're referencing, before they go to China, each piece of dialog laid out the plan pretty clearly.

I don't recall him calling himself Galvatron once, except vaugely, maybe, when he came to life and escaped.

And by the way, since he is 'Sparkless", he isn't ALL of Megatron in his head. Just parts of him.

They didn't die easily. Hound ran out of all of his weapons. Bumblebee and Stinger got into a long fight.

Maybe he's a good shot and just aimed to disable? This is nitpicking.

If you went up to the international space station and detached the Japanese Science Module and pushed it away, after the initial vibration, no one would notice. It's a small enough component it would't change the atmospheric drag (and thus the "feel") of a space station considerably. And there is no "indicator of attached modules" screen on the ISS.

I don't see this as a plot whole at all. It's not something that requires explanation. That's how the ship functions, the end.

I think the sword design was because of the "knights" theme in the movie, but aside from that, I think the writers wanted to give Cade a way to fight, but any transformer-focused humansized gun would have been too small. Sword was a sloppy, but not unreasonable compromise.

Brains, not Wheelie. And no he didn't. He was on the ship the Autobots commendeered that had a hard landing (but not a crash) outside Hong Kong. He was ready to go home. He was probably still on the ship when the Autobots and Dinobots charged into battle.

He meant for his guns. He used grenades a knife, and i think the arm of a drone he killed.

Silly scenes that made people laugh. Enjoy m ass media.

A Chinese company co-financed this film and Li Binbing is one of that country's biggest stars. The company was intent on the film not doing a "bait and switch" like Iron Man 3 did.

They put down money, they get their star a role in the movie.

But frankly, the one point in the film I was REALLY nauseated was was Hong Kong governor saying "we need help from the Central Government". If you know the politics of Hong Kong (the people who said it), or anything about how the Chinese government works, this was blatant Communist Party of China propaganda that has no place in a western movie theater.

I'm surprised no one else caught that. I'd take more Li Bingbing, who I don't care in the slightest for, if we keep that propaganda crap out of co-financed films.

A movie whose central hero has the tag line "Freedom is the Right of All Sentient Beings" shouldn't also be in a film that extols the necessity of the Chinese government.

Random scrap bots. Who cares.

Excessive I agree.

These are also Autobots on the brink. These were autobots ready to slag each other.

No they weren't. Hound controlled the ship from a COMMAND CHAIR with Hud. Optimus was talking to the sword, which interfaced with him. You'll note: his armor (particularly on his forearms) changed after he grabbed hold of the sword.

Really? I felt plenty of tension. I expected him to die. I was glad he didn't. I thought it went on perfectly... long enough for the Dinobots to be tamed an enter the city.

They were explained perfectly and semi-explicitly. 65 million years ago the Creators dropped seeds on prehistoric earth. They cyberformed the organic matter and wiped out the dinosaurs. We saw this at the beginning of the movie.

The creators then used that Transformium to create the Transformers. And they were doing it on Earth.

Some of those transformers were the "Legendary Warriors", the Dinobots, which were found on Earth, in that Arctic scene you were dismissive of.

I'm find with that in this characteriziation. Especially when the Autobots and Galvatron got more talking and characterization time than any prior film by a light year. The transformers in this film were really fully fleshed out.

Dinobots being Dinobots is something for the sequel.

Sequel. See the writer's recent interview.

Sure if you put aside them turning the tide of battle and wiping out the 50-strong drone army.

Lockdown was trying to kill them using a weapon he had on the ship. Maybe it should have been a nuke so the movie could end 20 minutes faster and we could have no more Bayformers movies?

It was terrible, I agree.

Disagree. I liked it. I liked Lockdown's theme a lot.

Yeah because human leads should do nothing in a movie they star in. Exactly how many movies is it going to take for people to just accept the role of humans in them? An all-CG transformers movie looks like Transformers Prime. You're not going to get that. Ever. Not while movies with Human leads make a billion dollars each.

I thought they were used perfectly in this case. Especially when you consider that the entire movie was Optimus lamenting Humans were helping Lockdown kill Autobots, and here you had humans save an all-but-screwed Optimus.

Barely. Dylan wanted to save his skin. Attinger was essentially a "Earth for humans" believer who wanted a nice retirement.

He clearly does. He cares enough for them to know that Lockdown just tore apart a city trying to get him, and that more would follow. So he left earth to take a target off of it. If he stayed on Earth, more would follow, and more humans would be killed.

Because Cade's little overpowered gun was blowing chunks out of him and couldn't be ignored.

He did try. he couldn't get it out.

Then something came up (the seed), he got side tracked, and found his target anyway. You follow through on everything you say you're going to do?

For the sequel.

Really? Because I distinctly remember him arriving on Earth as a flying protoform in interstellar travel mode, complete with rockets, just like the rest of the Transformers.

I in fact, was hopeful that when he was in orbit, he'd transform back into Protoform travel mode, but I understand that ILM probably didn't want to use an old model from really, 2006.

I thought it was made pretty clear that Galvatron created Galvatron by exploiting Tucci's drive to "create things". They even directly reference this with lines about Tucci's loss of control of the project and science he is working on.

For the sequel.

The final scene made pretty clear why Optimus had to go. he also ordered the Autobots to guard "this family" as he put it, because they're targets too now, by aliens and humans.

It's awesome.

For the sequel. Kruger talked in his interview about this being the best opportunity to introduce the dinobots. Now we get to see them again.

Would you have prefered the magnet to kill them? Because I expected that. I'm glad it didn't.

How does that not make sense?


Frankly after reading what you wrote, I think the problem is on your end. You missed a lot of an easy to follow film somehow.

 

Scorpio's list ranges from legitimate complaints to extreme nitpicks, but StrifeZ, your post equally ranges from proper retorts to laughable excuses.

 

I considered walking out, but I saw the movie with someone who was watching it mainly b/c of Mark Wahlberg, so that would've been rude.

Honestly, I was torn between the 'OMG!' visual effects and the 'WTF is going on?'. I felt confused about how Optimus went from barely functioning wreck to being able to scan a truck and becoming all shiny and new again (wouldn't scanning/transforming take a considerable amount of energy?). Also, WTF were those 'organic' aliens in the beginning...the creators? Who were those 'dinobots' and where did they come from?!  

The story seemed to me like a muddled and confusing mess. Of course my friend was 'SQUEE, MARK WAHLBERG!'....*sigh*  

I'm going to go watch the 2007 Transformers...I miss Starscream  

 

I can't wait to see all this on netflix  

 

WTF is going on in this thread. Seriously.

Aaaaanywaaaay...

The biggest problem with AoE is that was a really, really good movie buried inside an extra hour of horrible bullshit. That's both better and worse than any of the movies in the prior trilogy - better, because none of the other movies had much good in them, and worse because holy shit this thing was 165 minutes long why did they do that? Why was there so much useless garbage filling the runtime, when sequences like the escape from Cade's farm and the infiltration of KSI show that Bay and Kruger are, in fact, able to make quality popcorn cinema (when they, ya know, feel like it)?

It also suffered from being two different movies played one after the other. The first, the story of a ragtag team of humans and autobots on the run from the law, engaging in corporate espionage to stop unethical and dangerous experiments, was really good and pretty original for this series. The second was another MacGuffan chase where some alien artifact is being tossed around a city somewhere while things blow up; that movie was not good at all. It was basically the Allspark/Mission City battle from movie 1 stretched out to three times the length and tacked onto the end of an already overstuffed story.

I feel that once this comes out on Blu-Ray if some talented fan can get their hands on it and edit it down by at least 40 minutes, it could be the best movie in the franchise so far. It's just too bad Bay has no self-control.

 

I agree with pretty much everything in this post.

I do think it is the best of the four so far (or at least equal with the first) but it had the potential to be so, so much better then what it was with just a little restraint and a little better editing.

 

Damn, and here I sit pretty much convinced to wait for the bluray release on this one. I feel like I'm missing out on pointing out missed stupidity in this movie