Transformers: Age of Extinction arrived on June 27, 2014, as the fourth film in a series that had already made a fortune by turning toy shelves into a global franchise. Michael Bay returned to direct. Ehren Kruger returned to write. The original human cast did not return at all.
Paramount Pictures released it. It runs 165 minutes. Its tagline promises extinction, not war. The film grossed $1.105 billion worldwide against a $210 million production budget, making it the highest-grossing film of 2014 and the only film that year to pass $1 billion.
It is also a mess, and the money does not change that.
Trailer, via Transformers.
Cade Yeager and the Manhunt
The plot picks up sixty-five million years ago, when an alien race called the “Creators” used devices called Seeds to cover Earth with a metallic alloy called “Transformium,” supposedly wiping out the dinosaurs. In the present day, geologist Darcy Tirrel excavates that alloy for K.S.I. Industries, which uses it to build Transformer drones.
Five years after the Battle of Chicago, humans see Transformers as hostile. They end all joint operations with them, including NEST. The public believes the Autobots were granted sanctuary. They were not. A rogue CIA black ops division called Cemetery Wind hunts them down, led by Harold Attinger, who believes all Transformers are dangerous and must be destroyed.
Lockdown, a Cybertronian assassin and bounty hunter working for the Creators, is tasked with finding Optimus Prime. In exchange, he gives Attinger a Seed if the division captures Optimus. Lockdown kills Ratchet when Ratchet refuses to give up Optimus’s location.
Optimus, badly damaged in Mexico City, hides in Texas. Cade Yeager, a financially struggling inventor and single father, finds him. His teenage daughter Tessa and his business partner Lucas Flannery push him to hand Optimus over. Cade fixes him instead.
That choice drives everything. Lucas alerts the authorities hoping to collect an advertised reward. James Savoy, Attinger’s field commanding operative, attacks the Yeager farm. Optimus and Tessa’s secret boyfriend, Irish rally car driver Shane Dyson, rescue the family. Lucas is killed by one of Lockdown’s grenades. Optimus then summons the surviving Autobots: Bumblebee, Hound, Drift and Crosshairs.
A New Human Cast, Contracted for Three Films
The film does not feature the original human cast from the previous three films. It introduces a new one, plus new Transformers, including the Dinobots.
Mark Wahlberg was cast in November 2012. That same month, The Hollywood Reporter reported casting had begun for two additional leads: the daughter to Wahlberg’s character and her boyfriend, a race car driver. Isabelle Cornish, Nicola Peltz, Gabriella Wilde and Margaret Qualley were considered for the daughter. Luke Grimes, Landon Liboiron, Brenton Thwaites, Jack Reynor and Hunter Parrish were considered for the boyfriend. The leads are contracted for three films.
Reynor was cast as the boyfriend in January 2013. Peltz was cast as Wahlberg’s daughter in March 2013. Peter Cullen reprises his role as the voice of Optimus Prime.
Glenn Morshower said in September 2012 he would appear in the next two films as General Morshower. In May 2013 he said a scheduling conflict kept him out. Stanley Tucci joined in April 2013. Kelsey Grammer was cast as the lead human villain, Harold Attinger, on May 1, 2013. Sophia Myles came aboard on May 6. Chinese actress Bingbing Li and comedian T. J. Miller joined that same month. Bay announced Han Geng on July 14, 2013. Titus Welliver joined that July too.
Ahead of release in May 2014, the voice cast was announced:
- John Goodman as Hound
- Ken Watanabe as Drift
- Robert Foxworth returning as Ratchet
- Reno Wilson returning as Brains
- Frank Welker as Galvatron, a role he reprises from The Transformers television series, previously voiced by Leonard Nimoy
What the Runtime Does to the Story
165 minutes is the number that matters most here, and it is not a compliment.
The film has a plot. It has several. A dinosaur extinction, a black ops manhunt, a grieving inventor, a secret boyfriend, a corporate drone program, a bounty hunter working for absent gods, and a reward-driven betrayal all compete for the same screen. None of them gets the room to land.
Kruger’s script keeps introducing machinery instead of consequence. Cade discovers K.S.I.’s involvement with Cemetery Wind using a stolen CIA drone. That should be the turn. It plays as another errand.
Bay’s direction has the same problem in reverse. He is a genuinely gifted maker of images, and the film’s scale is real. But scale is not pacing, and Age of Extinction mistakes the two constantly. The Battle of Chicago is now backstory, and the movie treats that as license to keep escalating without ever stopping.
The tagline is “This is not war, it’s extinction.” It is a good line. The film never earns it.
The Dinobots and the Cast That Works
The new Transformers are the best idea in the movie, and the Dinobots are the clearest example. They arrive late. They are memorable anyway, which tells you something about how thin the rest of the film’s inventions are.
Wahlberg is a real improvement over the previous human leads. He plays Cade as a working father with debts and a daughter, and the film is briefly about something when it lets him be that. Tucci, as Joshua Joyce, is the only performer who seems to know what kind of movie he is in, and he is fun for it. Grammer plays Attinger straight, which is the right call and also a waste of a good villain.
Then there is the rest. Tessa exists to be protected. Shane exists to drive fast and be Irish. Darcy Tirrel excavates Transformium and then has almost nothing to do. Li Bingbing’s Su Yueming is a major role with no interior.
The film’s treatment of its women is not a small flaw. It is a structural one. Peltz is given a character defined by who wants her. Myles is given a scientist defined by her job title. Li is given a businesswoman defined by her company. None of them get a scene that belongs to them.
A Billion Dollars and a 32 on Metacritic
The reviews were negative. Critics hit the pacing, the runtime, the direction, the plot and the dialogue. Metacritic sits at 32 out of 100. That is not a close call. That is a consensus.
And it made $1.105 billion. It was the highest-grossing film of 2014, the only film that year to pass $1 billion, and the tenth-highest-grossing film of all time at the time of its release. A sequel, Transformers: The Last Knight, followed in 2017.
Those two facts sit next to each other, and the honest read is that the box office number is not evidence the film works. It is evidence the brand works. A franchise built on a toy line can sell a ticket on recognition alone, and Age of Extinction is the clearest proof of that in the series.
What is worth watching here is the machinery, not the movie. The Seed, the Creators, Lockdown, the Dinobots, the K.S.I. drones — these are pieces of a larger story the franchise kept promising and never delivered. Age of Extinction spends 165 minutes setting up a mythology and forgets to tell a story inside it.
The first hour has a real movie in it: a broke inventor in Texas, a damaged giant in his barn, a daughter who wants out. Then the film leaves Texas and never finds anything as good. The Dinobots are the last honest thrill. Everything after them is noise.
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