So I watched Age of Extinction today and it was kind of a bad movie. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those guys who expects the film to be the next Citizen Kane, I’m a fan of the big blockbuster Transformer movies. I liked the first one, thought the second one was okay, and the third one was a bit ehh in my book.

This movie was a bloated mess. It was too long, and had too many things going on at the same time. For a series which was long criticized for being too simple, this movie was a too complex. Typically in a movie you’ll have a main plotline and a sideplot. In Transformers media, maybe you’d even have two main plotlines which weave the human element and the Transformer elements. In this movie, there are so many plotlines, that I don’t know what counts as a sideplot anymore because characters always rise and fall from significance according to the moment.

For example, a character who we’re supposed to care about, the boyfriend of Yeager’s daughter, is left on a roof alone during a car crash. The camera focuses on Stanley Tucci’s character, and while we do care for him, the movie led us to also care about the boyfriend who receives no attention at all. There are also no real character arcs except for Optimus’ and Tucci’s. It’s kind of a waste to have a main character (Wahlberg, and the fact that I have to specify this is kind of the point) who doesn’t have an arc.

These arcs are also heavily underdeveloped, as the movie jumps around from character to character- allowing for scenes of action and relationship building. The problem is these relationships don’t really change the people in them, which is what makes movies interesting. Only Optimus Prime and Tucci’s character change, and their arcs aren’t focused on.

The movie also does the reverse of a lot of other movies, and doesn’t really hold your hand. While this could be viewed as a positive, it made my viewing experience worse. There was only really one true exposition moment, and it wasn’t enough. There were so many things in play, and so many newly introduced things into this new Transformers mythology, that I wouldn’t have minded being guided through them. There are new concepts that you’re bombarded with, and it’s so strange to just rush through them.

If you’re going to do blatant sequel baiting (which I don’t really mind), do it right! You can’t just introduce things without sufficient backup or so little payoff. The film sets up all these grand ideas of what direction the franchise can go in, but fails to really capture the audience. While the audience is cheering for fighting robots, they aren’t really interested in the next movements in the storyline.

There are new things afoot in the Transformers franchise, and its obvious that Bay wants to set things up, and he tries admirably so. What happened was the opposite of Iron Man 2, in this movie there is little worldbuilding, so sudden sequel hooks that draw upon the mythology don’t actually hook you in.

Transformers: Age of Extinction could’ve been a great movie, and I have no doubt about that. It just got so lost within itself that it assumed we all knew where it was going as well. I think that the problem isn’t Bay going bigger with each movie, it’s that he should be going smaller. A film that’s big in scope but focused in character development is very possible, and I hope that’s what Transformers 5 will be. (probably won’t be why am I hoping)