Just gonna leave this here Is Transformers Age Of Extinction Really as Bad as Everyone Says It Is? | moviepilot.com

 

It's right there in the thread title.

And I'm too busy to read the whole thread and find out for myself so I'll just have to ask.

Am I the only one here who agrees that the reasons cited point-by-point in the OP tend to illustrate an idiotic failure of the critics harping on those points to actually pay attention and use their brains?

C'mon, everyone. Give the OP a break. Those were mostly extremely stupid criticisms made which they listed to demonstrate their point.

 

 

I don't get that either.

Heck loads of people (morons in my opinion) say Skids and Mudflap in ROTF were racist.

How were they exactly when they're not even human, their robots.

 

While I don't think see Drift as racist either, I do see him as a stereotype. Cool, he's a samurai-type character, but did he have to be a near replica of the stereotypical samurai? Nah, they didn't.

Though here's the thing about people calling this out. They take notice of this not because he's really a racist character, they notice of this because Bay's film are repellent with stereotypical characters/perceived racist characters/jokes. If you're at all familiar with his previous films, you're going to take automatically take notice of insertions into his films. It kinda like Bay just can't help himself.

First, the gay cowboy joke at the beginning. Second, the loud obnoxious black women joke, and finally the all Asians know martial arts thing in the elevator. Your degree of tolerance may vary, but those things are present and they can't be ignored. And to be fair, the elevator guy is some famous martial artist guy in China, but American audiences don't know that, and upon viewing it does come off as a stereotype.

So yeah, Drift might not be as offense of a stereotype that the twins were, but when there is precedent, people will take notice when they see similar things reappear. Is it nitpicking? Maybe, but the only person to blame for that nitpicking is the person that even allowed those things in the film in the first place.

 

People who consider the robots possibly racist are morons, but not the person who can't see why a non-human character can be a portrayal of an offensive stereotype? They're based on human traits.

That was probably the worst written review I have ever read.

 

Not even gonna debate the merits of the movie in that article, but I'll go head on with the Spidey 2/X-Men comparisons.

First, those movies had a story to tell, and told it through the characters and the acting, not action and macguffins. Sure, you had the train scene in Spidey 2 as a big action set piece, but guess what, it had an actual meaning to the story, it wasn't there just to look cool, or just for explosions. Sure, it was heavy handed, but still. I'm not saying AOE had bad action, because most of it was cool, but don't act like it served a purpose.

As for DOFP, the only major set piece came at the end with the stadium. The rest was a character study for Xavier. Where was the character development and focus like that in AOE?

Then let's go to acting. Outside of Mark and Kelsey Grammar, the acting was pretty atrocious. Nowhere near Fassbender/Stewart/Jackman or Alfred Molena levels. Hell Tessa was somehow worse than Kirsten Dunst. So that's another check in favor of acting for Spidey 2 and DOFP.

Script wise, AOE gets a lot of hate, and I think with a little editing it's much better. Not as clean as Spidey 2, but DOFP level for sure. However, the reason critics liked what DOFP managed was because it managed to be semi-coherent while balancing a complicated time traveling narrative. AOE was just over complicated for the sake of it.

AOE got panned way too harshly, but to say it's as good or better than those two films is ridiculous.

 

I think what they are getting at (Though badly written) is that we aren't getting a new thread here - its the same topic as the prior threads. Essentially another 'so and so is an idiot for having a varying opinion' thread. While making threads is necessary for the continuation of the movie forum - the issue is that repetitive threads end up being made and thus the same topic is discussed over and over to the point where people get annoyed.

Its basically that Bay doesn't know how to show characters on screen - as such he turns them into stereotypes. Its evident from a majority of his movies. The issue is where the stereotypes may become slightly racist.

An example of a stereotypical over-the-top Transformer is Drift;
- Drift just happens to be a Samurai robot who just happens to refer to his leader as Sensei, be voiced by a Japanese voice actor, have thin slanted eyes and have a Japanese style goatee and preaches Japanese teachings occasionally.

 

Oh, OK. Because I thought Amazing Spider-Man 2 was pretty awful.

DoFP I thought was excellent, though. And there are explanations for quite a few of the things you've mentioned, and even the ones that don't have pure explanations have some decent theories, such as Professor X still being alive.

It is shown at the end of The Last Stand that the cure didn't completely work, and Magneto's powers are not completely gone. And there is an after-credits scene showing Xavier waking up in the body of the brain-dead patient from earlier in the movie. But, pretty much all of TLS was shitty, so I'd understand if you didn't watch it all that closely.

But trust me, each of those movies both got the critical eye as well. TaSM2 dd not do well nearly across the board, but DoFP did well because it was such a strong story.

 

That is so horribly written, I couldn't make it past the first paragraph.

 

I think there's some confusion, he seems to be talking about the "first" Spider-man 2.

 

Except Amazing Spiderman 2 was not universally loved by critics. It got 53% on Rotten Tomatoes and if you read many of the positive reviews it often only just got the 3.5 out of 5 required to count as positive. Hardly a beloved film and without the chemistry between Peter and Gwen the film would have gotten beaten to death by critic.

We've been over this a billion times but lets go one more time. Money does not equal quality. If that was the case then Avatar should be the greatest film ever. But after the whole oh look 3D thing wears off you find that it's only an okay film at best. Even Michael Bay talked about how the biggest problem his movie The Island faced was that the marketing team for the film just didn't know how to sell it to the target market.

Science fiction doesn't mean critics are going to say I don't like that. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has some silly concepts if you know chimp biology and yet critics were handing out positive reviews left and right for the film.

I think what so many people seem to be ignoring is that if you love something going in then that can bias your opinion of it. I really love the Tolkien books so I've been more than happy with the Hobbit movies and I'm okay with The Hobbit being expanded like crazy to make three movies. But for people who aren't super Tolkien fans I think it's a legitimate criticism to say the movies are too long and there is too much stuff they don't get.

If you are a Bay fan and you love his version of Transformers then a 2 hour 45 minute movie might be the best thing ever. But if you aren't into his style of film making, his take on Transformers, or the Yager family then maybe you aren't going to grab all the little details a super fan would.

 

That was horrible, barely literate in fact. Also, he spent most of it just summing up the movie.

The thing I hate about this entire situation is that most of the reviews, positive as well as negative, are complete throwaway trash. The negatives are all "bay sucks blah blah Transformers sucks blah blah" instead of getting into the movie as a whole, they resort to pointing out individual plot holes as reasoning. Or they just keep harping on about how "bayformers is killing the film industry" but not talking about the movie itself.

A fair amount of the positive reviews are just overly defensive fanboy garbage, and I don't think any more needs to be said about that.

As for my thoughts, I thought it was okay, at least an improvement over the last two.

 

Wait we were talking Amazing Spidey 2?

Oh lol yeah AOE is better.

 

What most saw as racist in ROTF I didn't. Simple as that.

 

That's not true. I love Tolkein, especially The Hobbit, and am a huge fan of both the LOTR books and films but The Hobbit movies are just filler-filled trash which sacrifice a cohesive and well-paced plot to assure a three film budget.

 

Just another addition to the 'stereotype' subject, Roadbuster had an Scottish accent and did anyone segregate him as 'stereotypical'?

 

Just having an accent doesn't make someone stereotypical.

It wasn't just the voices that offended people with Skids and Mudflap. It was their designs, personalities and mannerisms on top of their voices. Anyone would've been ignorable, but put them all together and something doesn't seem right.

 

No, they're in the seperate ''redneck'' category cause of their looks.

 

Wow! That was a terrible article. That guy went in already wanting to hate the movie and then clearly did not pay attention. He was probably taking notes about every nitpicky thing he saw as it was happening and then missed key things.

1. This guy has no imagination. He cannot suspend his disbelief for a second about the creators? They never said the meteor extinction never happened. Maybe both happened? He must have been pissed when he saw the Sun harvester inside the pyramids or alien ship on the moon.

2. Drift. Read a comic.

3. Human Transformers. So I guess if there were alien tech laying everywhere after a battle, no one would pick some up and see if they can do something with the technology to benefit humans.

4. Human sized weapons. Has this guy actually watched ANY of the movies? TFTM: Frenzy, ROTF: Wheelie and kitchen bots, DOTM: Wheelie and Brains and also Arcee bikes were not very big.

5. Flimsy cables. I guess this guy has never heard of anchors. I'm sure if a ship tried to leave while anchors are deployed or tied to docks, there were be unnecessary damage done to the ship, anchors, and cables.

6. So is Chicago supposed to come to a screeching halt when anything happens?

7. Phone call? Really? You have a little robot named BRAINS (which again, this missed because all TF's are HUGE) who is able to help reverse engineer and also figure out that Megatron's head is actually alive and in control, and he can't assume that maybe getting a phone number would be no problem?

8. Kills with football. Ok. This guy did not watch the movie at all. Also, "why is an American football sitting on a shelf in a poor family’s apartment in Hong Kong?" !!!!! HOLY SHIT! What are Hong Kong movies and Japanese animation doing in my American home?!!!

9. Dinobots...This guy not only did not watch the movie, he had his eyes shut while covering his ears going "LALALALALALALALALALA" for over 2 hours. They were legendary knights and trophies for Lockdown.

10. Rocket boots. He says that like it's a bad thing. This guy must have had a fit when Ironman uses his "rocket boots". "ROCKET BOOTS!!!" Again, I guess this guy did not see TFTM and ROTF which shows them arriving from space in their protoforms. Prime does not fly but I'm sure that in this universe the can use some kind of boosters to launch them to space.

Nope. This guy was an idiot.

 

I really think a lot of people don't pay attention or listen while watching these movies.