Did I just see Optimus Prime riding a robot dragon?
As someone who has no knowledge of the toys or the cartoons from the ’80s, I have no idea what I’m looking at in most of the trailer for “Transformers: Age Of Extinction.”
It helps that there’s a bit of a shift happening in this film, as Michael Bay attempts to prove that the human stars are the least important part of this franchise. Now that Shia LaBeouf isn’t famous anymore and Megan Fox has developed a sudden taste for turtles, this new sequel focuses on a brand-new group of human characters.
Mark Wahlberg and Michael Bay working together is reason enough to see an action movie, but adding in the giant-scale lunacy of the “Transformers” movies so far seems like a recipe for… something. What? That remains to be seen.
What is clear from this very short tease is that the Transformers appear to be evolving. There are some new tricks on display here, not the least of which is the tandem team-work exhibited by Optimus Prime and whoever that is he’s riding. If there are Transformers that look like animals, are they also treated like animals in the hierarchy of this universe? We see Optimus riding this one, but is this a case of two equals working together, or is this some sort of big dangerous robo-pet for Optimus?
Considering I have no real point of reference here, all I can do is judge the reality of the world from film to film, and so far, this has got to be one of the goofiest, weirdest, most bizarre mega-franchises in film history. I’m not sure there’s any sense of internal logic to the way the robots work in these movies, but I am sure that it doesn’t really matter in the larger sense. These movies work as pure visceral outrageousness, and if nothing else, this spot promises plenty of that.
We’ll see what all of this adds up to when “Transformers: Age Of Extinction” arrives in theaters on June 27, 2014.