Transformers: Age of Extinction

The Heavy Metal Malady

At some point around the second hour of Transformers: Age of Extinction, it hits you that the movie has no intention of easing up. Not narratively—physically. The sheer force of its motion feels detached from anything as modest as plot. Michael Bay swaps Shia LaBeouf's jittery teen panic for Mark Wahlberg's permanently furrowed, broad-shouldered bewilderment and sends the franchise lurching into a new phase. Wahlberg plays Cade Yeager, a Texas inventor working out of a dusty barn, supposedly broke despite looking like he bench-presses tractors for cardio. Cade is trying to save his house from foreclosure and police his teenage daughter Tessa's love life, which is a very small domestic concern for a film that later throws robotic dinosaurs and the potential annihilation of the human race into the blender. I'm still not sure the franchise gets older here so much as worn down.



Bay is always a funny case. The New York Times' A.O. Scott once suggested that his blockbusters, while looking like corporate products, are actually deeply personal expressions of the director's will. Watching this one, I believe it. Every frame glistens with that overripe golden-hour sweat. The camera practically never sits still; it circles, swoops, crawls in the dirt, and looks upward like humanity is forever seconds away from being stepped on. Sometimes I wonder whether Bay likes human beings at all, given how often he frames them as shrieking debris beneath giant digital titans. Here the Autobots are fugitives, hunted by a black-ops unit led by Kelsey Grammer, and the movie turns that setup into a wall of paranoia and metal-on-metal noise. Overwhelm is the aesthetic.