AoE: Why Some Critics Are Idiots

It gets me that the critics seemed to love Spider-man 2 and X-men Days of Future Past, yet hated Transformers AoE.
Any one of those 3 movies can easily be watched with an eye out for flaws and a bit of common sense, and come away with plenty of things that made very little sense, but in my opinion, TF was as much better than either as the amount more profits it made. Those better profits were earned. It was plenty flawed, which is to be expected not only in a sci-fi action movie, but from Bay especially, yet it was pretty good. I can't even say the same for Xmen or SpiderMan, which both had far too many stupid suspension of belief moments I couldnt get past.
In Xmen, they played with time travel far too loosely, and didnt explain things that make no sense if you watched all of the old movies back to back, which I had. Its too off the topic of AoE to go into (at least here in the opening post) but no way we had the technology to mass produce giant flying sentinel robots with advanced AI that could FLY in the early 70s. One of so many examples of taking the viewer for a dummy there though...

While browsing in boredom on the internet today, I found this article "The 10 dumbest things about Age Of Extinction". It is such a great example of how the critics dont try to put 2 and 2 together when it is there in front of them, and see what they want when they already plan to hate something.
I'm going to explain or at least comment on all 10 of this guys dumbass comments. Feel free to chime in with your opinions too if you agree or disagree. Oh and here is the article- The 10 dumbest things about 'Transformers: Age of Extinction'

1) The alien race that created the Transformers were also responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs went extinct when a meteor hit the Earth and made a huge crater in Mexico, blotting out the sun with a massive dust cloud, right? Nope. It was actually a race of aliens dropping little bombs which turn organic matter into the malleable metal that Transformers are made from.

So this guy went in ready to hate the movie right off the bat. It is a movie about 80s toys and alien robots... This opening story is not really any worse that the opening Moon story of DoTM, which was pretty creative and worked for the plot.



2) The autobot Drift looks like a samurai and speaks with a Japanese accent.

Remember when pretty much every critic who saw Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen slammed the film for portraying two autobots, Mudflap and Skids, as racist black stereotypes?

Apparently Michael Bay and his production team learned nothing from the experience. Age of Extinction introduces Drift, an autobot the filmmakers decided to style after a stereotypical Japanese samurai.

OK, the Autobots have had a lot of free time on their hands. And maybe Drift spent the last five years watching Kurosawa movies. But why would someone who’s spent five years watching his people get murdered by humans want to emulate humans in any way?

Right. Because only Japanese people fight with swords.

Gotta love the people who outright search for racism. The transformers have had exaggerated characters in all of these movies. They probably did get a bit out of line with Skids and Mudflap, but Drift was a Samurai for the same reason the Dinobots are in the movie, and the same reason they cram Dragons into so many things these days. Samurais are COOL and kids love that kind of stuff. How is that a problem in any way? I don't think he is Samurai to honor humanity, but more because it is the closest thing to who he was on Cybertron and they incorporate Earth things into themselves, like Jazz explained in the first movie.



3) The humans are making civilian models of Transformers.

In Age of Extinction CIA agent Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) is hunting down the Transformers because he wants to melt them down and give the raw material, which is called “transformium,” by the way, to an evil Steve Jobs-type technologist, Joshua Joyce, played by Stanley Tucci.

Joyce is using the metal to make human-constructed Transformers, some of which will go to market as civilian models.

What the hell are Tom, Dick, and Harry going to do with their own, private Transformer? Ask it to mow the lawn? Send it out for groceries? Get help washing the dishes?

I'm guessing people rich enough would like to have a car that can defend them if alien robots attack again. Who needs bodyguards with a transformer at your command. Sure, its a little silly, but Joshua was obviously thinking too fast and ambitiously, which is a key plot point on why things got so bad.



4) There was a human-sized weapon on Lockdown’s ship.

Lockdown, a Transformer bounty hunter assisting Attinger, captures Optimus Prime in the middle of the movie. Our heroes, including Mark Wahlberg, playing down-on-his-luck inventor Cade Yeager (which almost deserves a spot on this list), infiltrate Lockdown’s ship to rescue Optimus.

During the rescue, Wahlberg discovers a cache of Transformer weapons, including one that’s just about the size of an assault rifle.

I remind you how big the Transformers are. Wahlberg finding that gun is like you finding tweezers that shoot bullets in a weapons locker.

First off, they have shown that Transformers come in all sizes, from much smaller to much larger than humans, but even if they were all larger, that rifle to Marky Mark would have made a nice easy to hide dagger with firepower for a Transformer around Bumblebee's size.



5) Lockdown’s ship is held in place by some flimsy cables.

Our heroes need to buy time to get off Lockdown’s ship, which is spinning up its dark matter drives to escape Earth. So, they fire some flimsy mooring cables into the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago, which is apparently enough to hold the ship in place.

Later in the movie, we see that Lockdown’s ship is so powerful it can produce a magnetic field to lift multiple, huge cargo ships into the air and suspend them, before dropping them on the hapless bystanders below. Yet some wispy cables are enough to hold this powerful spaceship in place.

... I don't think this guy was even paying attention. I don't think those cables were supposed to be stopping the ship fum blasting away at full power, but rather anchoring it in place better when it was stopped and preparing to leave soon. One of you guys can probably explain this better than me, but I dont recall thinking it was odd or stupid when I saw it.



6) The people of Chicago are out running errands.

The last Transformers movie, Dark of the Moon ended with Chicago pretty much devastated during a massive fight between the Autobots and the Decepticons.

In Age of Extinction, when the Autobots finally make their escape from Lockdown’s ship, which has been hovering over downtown Chicago for a good 20 minutes or so, a running, aerial firefight ensues, during which little Transformer gunships fly over major roadways.

Roadways filled with civilian vehicles. Because no one remembers the aliens who tore their city apart five years ago. “Honey, I need a new sportcoat. I’ll be back later. Big spaceship hanging over downtown, you say? It’ll be fine. I really need a new sportcoat.”

Okay, I'll give him this one. I hadn't considered it, but like I said, its a Bay movie. But then, you could assume not everyone had seen or heard about the ship yet, and that people do still have to drive to get home, to family, or out of town.



7) Mark Wahlberg has evil Steve Jobs’s phone number.

Joshua Joyce’s company has been designing civilian Transformers based on knowledge pulled from the head of Megatron, the leader of the evil Decepticons. This, of course, worries no one on a team of highly intelligent human technology engineers. Yet Mark Wahlberg understands that Megatron is corrupting these human-built Transformers, and turning them into latent Decepticons.

Wahlberg tells Joyce this by making a phone call. How, pray tell, does Mark Wahlberg have the phone number of an ersatz Steve Jobs? This is like you or I placing a call to Bill Gates to ask what the weather’s like in his neck of the woods. Because, you know, his number is listed.

Without making the movie even longer, considering it was long enough already, they DID sort of explain this when Drift had his had to his ear and said He was encrypting communications on Joshua or whatever (not sure exact words). They have Autobots with them that can access everything on the internet. Cade didn't just happen to have his number, but further explanation there wasnt necessary after Drift said he located Joushua.



8) Mark Wahlberg kills a CIA agent with a football.

During the penultimate fight scene, Kelsey Grammer sicks his CIA attack dogs on those pesky humans foiling his plans. Wahlberg finds himself in a tiny apartment in a poor neighborhood in Hong Kong face-to-face with a CIA black ops agent.

When the CIA agent pulls a wicked-looking knife out of his pocket, Wahlberg takes a football (why is an American football sitting on a shelf in a poor family’s apartment in Hong Kong?) and throws it at the head of said CIA agent, who then falls out a window to his death.

And at this point whatever credibility this writer had flies out the window. Cade was shown to be good at throwing a football just for this scene to happen, and he did not just "football the guy out a window". He distracted him, then pushed him out the window. Why even talk about a movie you didnt actually watch?


9) Where did the Dinobots come from?

While Wahlberg is tossing CIA agents out windows, Megatron has activated his new Decepticon army, and they’re hunting down the Autobots.

Optimus Prime crashed the shuttle he used to escape from Lockdown’s ship, and the shuttle is filled with prisoners in cells. Optimus lets some of them out, tells them they’re free, and then beats them up until they agree to help him fight the Decepticons. It turns out these are the Dinobots.

That means they were captured 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Lockdown hasn’t had a chance, over 65 million years, to drop the Dinobots off at Transformers jail?

Optimus also seems to recognize the Dinobots. But if they’re 65 million years old, and if Optimus didn’t visit Earth before 2007… oh, forget it.

This thought also crossed my mind, but there will be 2 more movies to potentially explain it some. I personally didn't assume those Dinobots had been there awake on that ship in cells for millions of years. I figured Lockdown dug them up from stasis as some of the last of the Knights, possibly part of his current contract to get Optimus on his business visit to earth.


10) Optimus Prime flies into space with his adorable rocket boots.


At the end of the movie, having helped the Autobots slaughter the Decepticons (other than Megatron, who is actually now Galvatron, who… never mind), Optimus Prime announces he is going into space to find the aliens who killed all the dinosaurs.

He does so only with the aid of these cute little rockets attached to his feet. Optimus Prime doesn’t need a spaceship to travel the vast reaches of the galaxy! He has rocket boots!

It was around this time I was laughing so hard I was seeing spots. I felt kind of bad for the people in the row next to me, but they were also clappy and cheering at the time. I think we’re even.

They already showed in the first movie that Transformers can take on a protoform space travel mode, and Optimus has been upgraded on earth by ancient Cybertron tech at least a couple of times now. The ships in these movies seem to me to be more like weapons and a way to carry things like smaller ships, than their only way of traveling the stars. This is just another thing not worth even bitching about, but this guy did.

 

This is a long post to lament that some people don't share your opinion.

 

Careful dude, people who dislike this film are going to strongly disagree with you. Heck, some might not take you seriously!

 

Such a tired old thing to toss out there when you don't agree. Its not at all about wanting everyone to have my opinion. I'm simply saying that sometimes the TF movies aren't really judged very fairly. By comparison, other movies that have just as much suspension of belief and things that outright make no sense do not get the heat bay TF movies get.
Fine, ROTF was a mess, but the others have been at least pretty good movies.

Oh so then I better shut my mouth and not discuss my opinions with one of the biggest TF fan communities online. Thanks. This is exactly why so many people just don't anymore. But I did didn't I, so deal with it.
And yes, when they are paid to tell the public if a movie is worth seeing, they shouldn't be biased against specific directors or styles while calling basically the same thing with another title and the same problems a masterpiece. That is kind of an ass move, but i went with the word idiot. We all do idiotic stuff. I am just pointing something for discussion.

Thats fine by me, and expected.
Its very sad though. I see an anti TF4 post backed up by fellow haters at the site, and decide to see if the actual TF fan community thinks he posted mostly nonsense, as I do. Its hard to take the guy's side when he was talking out his ass and didnt even pay attention to the movie he is bashing, but people will find a way to at least put me down for disagreeing with him and bringing it here.
It'd be cool if the split TF fanbase did more discussion than bashing each other.

 

This won't end well.

Look, those criticisms might've been pretty cruddy, but just accept that there are people who don't like stuff.

 

I think the reviews for this movie are way too harsh. It feels like Bay and Co. fixed the problems that the critics complained about, and they're angry that they can't complain about that much. I mean, there's plenty of problems with AOE, but it fixed a lot of things.

 

What really grinds my gears is the whole 'stereotype' subject?  

Skids & Mudflap, racist? Stereotypical? Not once did I even hear either of the pair say anything to or about any religion, age or coloured person. "Shrimp taco" is hardly racist, is it? Why are they stereotypical? Is it because they talk in a manner in which some people may seem to think you can only get in an African American hipster? Childish... Mudflap's Voice actor was an African American and didn't even have an idea that he offended himself.....

NOW, Drift, a samurai is stereotypical? What an obvious stupid thought from a 'jump-to-conclusion' critic. How long has Drift, as a character in the Transformers universe been a samurai? Idiotic stupidity. What is wrong with him speaking with in a Japanese accent? Ken Watanabe has no quarrels with the character.

Yet another crouton who fails to grasp that Optimus obtained the jet boots in the Knight upgrade.

 

I love how any insinuation that a stock Japanese archetype, not developed beyond that role at all, might be a little insensitive given the history of this director are immediately shot down and decried as bias.

I liked Age of Extinction. But I think the most compelling arguments against it are coming from the fans.

EDIT: And yeah, the article's pretty shit. I mean it's a hacky comedy bit that's been done do death. But it's definitely no reason to call all critic's "idiots".

 

I thought so. Nice not to be told to "get over myself", "deal with it", "not everyone has to have my opinion" and so on for a change, considering I'm just talking here and that's what forums are about.

Sad that adult discussions involving the TF movies are rare here... Whether someone tries to discuss things they liked or didnt like about a TF movie, they will usually get some hateful and childish responses.

 

I agree with OP. When I read this review it comes off as a guy who watched the movie while doing something else then looking up at the screen wondering why Optimus is flying. If you actually pay attention the movie while watching you would understand what going on yes. But no, this is a M Bay film. Why should we pay attention? He doesn't know how to do anything right with these films right? Except make billions of dollars that helps transformers grow into what it has become.

 

Wait a minute...he wondered why someone in China wouldn't have a football...

Can't the Chinese love it, too?

 

Yep. I felt like if this guy wanted to take the time to post his 10 reasons why the movie was stupid and they were almost all opinions formed from bias and not paying attention, it wouldn't hurt for someone should post why he was way off base too.

 

Seriously huh. And he has the balls to talk about racism.

 

5. the way I took those cables firing was that that ship actually fired them off itself as a sort of fail safe or back up. When Crosshairs pulls that little round thing out of the ship (can't remember the name) it recognizes there's an issue and then fires the cables by design. not like a bot or human pressed some big anchor button on his console. just what I was thinking anyway

 

Because they don't have football?

The odds of finding a Chinese home with a football in it are astronomical.

 

wrong. google american football in china. Its a growing trend there since 2012 with teams popping up and they're even bringing Arena Football there too About AFL China - AFL China – Professional American Arena Football

 

I live in Britain and they sell American Footballs.

Anywhere can do the same

 

Now now be nice to these critcs, they're just doing their job..........now granted it's a simple yet cushiony job, and a job most people (people who actually do real work for a living) would love to have, and a job that makes them think their word is the final ruling but come on cut them some slack.