Certainly not to women, who are on screen mainly to be ogled, shamed and rescued. The few action-type things that the female characters are allowed to do — throw a punch, drive a car, fasten a cable to a big piece of metal — feel like grudging concessions to changing norms. The mysterious alien force that designed the Transformers made them all dudes.

But even though these robots with the power to change into vehicles started out as children’s playthings, the movies are a little too vulgar, violent and nasty to have been made expressly for the youngest viewers. They’re also a little too dumb for the adolescent or adult genre geeks. The mythology seems to have been cobbled together at corporate strategy sessions out of notions ripped off from elsewhere. The battle between the human-allied Autobots and the treacherous Decepticons recalls the intramutant struggles of the X-Men universe. The sentient robots from a distant time who speak in catchphrases and smash buildings have some kinship with the Terminator. The elaborate, thematically overloaded martial back story carries echoes of Tolkien and “Star Wars.” Lasting 166 minutes — though it feels much longer — “Age of Extinction” makes clear what has always been true of the Transformers movies: Although they may look like soulless corporate studio product, they are really examples of personal cinema, expressions of the will and imagination of their director, Michael Bay. The narrative incoherence is a feature, not a bug. (The screenplay is by Ehren Kruger.) Mr. Bay’s strongest films (with the partial exception of “Pain and Gain”) are those in which the battle between sense and sensation ends in a rout. If you spend any time thinking about why the C.I.A. and an Apple-like technology corporation would be in cahoots with an intergalactic bounty hunter in an anti-Autobot pogrom you are missing the point.