Why Did Michael Bay Get To Make Another Transformers??

Well that was the longest 2 hours and 45 minutes of my life... You probably know this by now, but that's the ridiculous runtime of Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Why is that runtime so disorienting to me? Because, when I was sitting there in the midst of it, I realized that the movie had no content. I can't even begin to imagine how someone wrote a script as long as that without writing in any character development or emotional arc... or plot for that matter. Age of Extinction is just a bunch of weird action combined with unnecessary vanity posses.

It felt as though every scene was specifically made with the hopes that it could make it into one of the trailers at some point down the line. And in many respects, that's what happened. If I had grown up on Transformers the way I grew up on so many other properties, I'd be freaking out right now calling for the studio to just start over, to release Michael Bay and say "we're so sorry to have put you through this agony for the last decade... please forgive us." Because the only even remotely good one is the first one and at this point, seeing what this franchise has become, I think even that is stretching.

Odder still, it turns out the studio was lying about the movie's success for some weird reason. And that is not cool. To try and convince everyone that they had the first $100 million flick of 2014 seems particularly petty. After all, they did manage to rake in a hefty sum... something to the tune of $96 million. But that doesn't change the fact that they tried to intentionally lie to the movie public. I work in a theatre and can personally attest that we did not hit any of the numbers we would expect for such a large opening. At this point I think Paramount should be apologizing for a plethora of things.

Essentially, Transformers: Age of Extinction is a terrible mess and the worst example of what "big sci-fi" can be. I wouldn't waste my time if I were you.