Transformers: Age of Extinction Trailer

So they just put out the new Age of Extinction trailer and I gotta say I'm pretty excited. I'm sure there will be people hating on it, because it's Michael Bay or whatever but I think this actually looks pretty cool. It has a different tone then the other three in my opinion... somehow a bit darker. I mean the other Transformers movies had their darker moments, but this just looks heavier for some reason. Could be having Mark Wahlberg there making it feel different, which, while I enjoy Shia, Mark is overall a better actor.

Also we get to see a bit more of Grimlock, with him and Optimus fighting which looks awesome. There were rumors of Dinobots since before Revenge of the Fallen, so to see it now finally realized is pretty cool. I thought Transformers 3 was a good ending to a trilogy, but I am actually pretty stoked that it's continuing. I gotta wonder if this is the first of a new trilogy, or if the series is just going to end with a random number of installments.

hmmmmm, so basically they are going to go with "boy and his robot" theme of the first three films? Again for the fourth time........ this is why I again preach pacific rim as a master piece, first 3 minutes "here's what happen, now lets go punch munsters with giant robots"

Which is funny because I fucking HATED Pacific Rim... God I thought that movie was awful. But aside from that, I'm not really getting a boy and his robot vibe from this.

@liquidprince: hmmmm yeah, but that's how Bay views these films as. He thinks that's the "Core."...... he likes to think these films as the Iron Giant....... let that sink in for a while.

Well, I mean it's interesting how long the trailer goes into not being transformers and it's pretty underwhelming set up. Just thought pacific rim handled it's whole world building and establishing what's going on faster..... even if two people connected through the mind still need to yell commands to one another.

All I can say is thank fuck that kid from the first 3 seems to be gone.

The inclusion of Dinobots is pretty much exactly the level of stupid another Transformers movie needs. Still never going to watch it.

Also megatron's gun face.

i'm pretty excited. I'm going in with the expectation that it might suck but watching robots fight is always a good thing in my book.

The trailer does look cool, but those Transformers movies are really bad. I'm saying that as someone who doesn't have nostalgia for the old cartoons. I also think they take themselves far too seriously for a set of movies about good robots punching bad robots.

Do we get another Linkin Park single to go with it?

Well I'll watch it. It's got Grimlock (and was that Hun-Gurr? man would that be a random character) and that's enough for me.

God help me , but I'll watch it.

Someday I hope we'll actually get proper transformers movies that do the source material justice, but I'm more or less resigned to the fact that's likely never going to happen.

oh shit it's the man in black!

@daddycabinet:

Pretty sure that was actually Lockdown not Megatron.

In most Transformer continuities he's a Decepticon Bounty Hunter.

Galvatron is supposedly also in this movie, which may or may not be a reincarnated Megatron, (In many depicitions he is but always).

A lot of people say they want something that does justice to the source material but forget that the source material was equally as dumb. All the other movies that were old school franchises failed because they were't able to modernize the way Michael Bay modernized Transformers. I mean if he wasn't directing, we would have a flop on our hands just like GI Joe and Battleship. People under appreciate his efforts in making Transformers modern and relevant.

I LIKED pacific rim. I did not love it. It was a good movie but a masterpiece it is not. God every scene with charlie day is like nails on a chalkboard (and i normally like charlie day).

But yes, This will surely be another disaster. I mean ill watch it for free at some point, probably intoxicated with friends as we MST3K it.

I don't know the first thing about Transformers, but:

Is that giant thing supposed to be Unicron?

I think that's completely mistaken. The Transformers Movies success is the anomaly not the norm. Gi Joe wasn't very faithful to the source material (many of the characters were heavily reimagined and Wtf is up with Accelerator suits?), if it was it probably would have been more successful. And Battleship was a board game with basically no source material. Dragonball Evolution and Streetfighter : Legend of Chun Li also deviated a lot from the source material and they did terrible.

Lord of the Rings movies succeeded immensely in no small part because it was extremely faithful to the source material. The Marvel super hero movies clearly understand the stories and characters they are working with. Batman Begins is straight up adaption of a graphic novel Batman from the 80's. Mortal Kombat is basically the only video game movie ever do anything commercially, and it's also perhaps the only one that comes close to capturing the heart of the game (you could make an argument for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider I suppose).

All those movies were reasonably well written and commercially successful.

There is a reason these properties were successful in the first place, it's because they had stories and characters that people really liked. They may not be Shakespeare,but there usually is some quality to them that makes them attractive properties to movie producers in the first place. While I think most people realize you need to tweak some things to adapt those stories to a different medium, if you wholesale change what makes a property popular you are playing with fire. It's actually pretty amazing the Transformers movies succeeded given how much they changed.

Transformers is only commercially successful, undeniably so. There is no question Michael Bay is a talented producer at keeping big budget movies way under budget. He's really skilled at finding innovative ways to keep costs down. And deserves every bit of credit for doing that.

His movies just tend to have awful stories and poor characterization. Unfortunately the Transformers movies are no exception. And I don't think it's unfair to criticize him for dumbing down something that wasn't that deep in the first place.

@historyinrust: I surely hope that not unicron. unicron should be much larger.

You seem to be ignoring the part about Transformers being mega stupid in its original form. Lord of the Rings is a modern classic in the fantasy genre (even though I personally am not a huge fan) and a lot of the Marvel stuff or DC stuff has very strong writing behind it which can translate very well into successful movies. GI Joe and Battleship failed because they tried to modernize their respective franchises but failed at it. Michael Bay has a knack for making things look "cool." For a dumb franchise like Transformers which was originally created as a vehicle to sell toys, the Bay movies are the perfect re-imagining.

I thought one dinobot looked like Alduin. That's everything I ever "thought" about of the new Transformers movie.

Well I kind of liked the first one. But two and three are just terrible (and unentertaining) movies.

@slag: The original Mortal Kombat film is by far the best video game movie, but it is also a near complete rip-off of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon.

DAT GUN FACE

To be fair, the entire premise of the original Mortal Kombat game is a rip-off of Enter the Dragon, not including the mystical, four-armed, ninja-magic mumbo jumbo.

Every one of these movies is terrible. Not even Marky Mark can save this.

The flashing black screen every scene is really(!) annoying

Judging from the trailer, not interested.

Did Marky Mark actually just throw his hands up and say "I think we found a Transformer"? Michael Bay continues to prove his scriptwriting genius.

I get what you are saying, but I don't think that really matters as to my argument, about the value of being true to source material when adapting something.

A lot of popular works are heavily derived from pre-existing works. e.g. Lord of the Rings was heavily inspired by ancient Nordic Myths. Tolkien drew from the Volsunga Saga quite a bit. I don't think it lessens his work at all.

Sure it probably helps the Mortal Kombat movie that the original game borrows heavily from an existing movie, but that's one more reason the Mortal Kombat directors were smart not to mess with a winning formula much.

I thought the first movie was ok, not amazing, but good fun.

The second one though? Probably one of the worst movies I've seen. It's due to the second one that I never even bothered to go watch the third one.

I wonder if the T-rex robot has balls because HAHA THAT'S FUNNY.

I don't think Transformers was mega stupid at all. I do freely and already admitted it wasn't deep stuff (see above). As you mentioned it was originally conceived as a marketing vehicle to sell toys to young kids.

That doesn't mean it wasn't good at characterization. The G1 series may not have had good plots, but it was well voice acted for its' time. That was a necessity to help kids be able to tell the characters apart and ultimately help drive action figure sales.

That Characterization was a huge reason it became as popular as it did. Kids weren't buying the semi-truck, they were buying Optimus Prime. They weren't buying a Walther P37 replica, they were buying Megatron. Etc etc. These days Hasbro has recognized that and actually changed the toy strategy. Back in the day they used to crank out hordes of new characters every year, eventually they realized it's better to continually remake popular characters into new toys. When they killed Optimus Prime in the 1986 cartoon movie (along with around a dozen other major characters), they realized pretty quick they effed up and changed course. That movie nearly killed the franchise because of that miscalculation.

And over the years Transformers has built a large catalog of stories and new shows, many of which have much richer plots and storylines than the G1 series. Especially in the Marvel Comics series and it's successors. There's been material pumped out almost non stop now for thirty years. Bay is clearly aware of their existence since he pulled from many of the more obscure sources for characters like the Fallen and Sentinel Prime. Despite using them, He just didn't bother to develop them at all in his continuity.

Modernizing something is no excuse for bad writing. There's no question that reworking something into a modern setting so today's audience can appreciate it, is a smart idea. Popular stories get reinterpreted into new settings all the time. That's a long held human tradition. But there are human elements to a property that are largely timeless, whether it be interpersonal relationships, plots, characters etc that are the core reason why something is liked. That's what I mean by being true to the source material.

That's true even of the classics such as the Arthurian legends, which was heavily reworked over the Middle Ages. But each reimagining usually had more or less the same characters and their story roles remained more or less the same (Guinevere is Arthur's love, Sir Kay is Arthur's brother, Merlin is his advisor, Lancelot once he was added to the mythology was consistently his morally tortured romantic rival, etc etc). Even when the details change materially (e.g. who Guinevere really loves Lancelot or Arthur) about these characters, the changes are what makes the new adaptation interesting.

Transformers movies aren't bad because they are modern, they are bad because they are very poorly written even by Transformer standards. The characters suck, most are barely cameos and have zero development. But it's got pretty awesome robot fights that Michael Bay managed to shoot cost effectively, so it turned a massive profit on dumb one liners, impressive visuals and brand recognition. Kudos to him for pulling that off, doesn't mean he couldn't have done far better job if he wanted to. But given his track record with his other movies, I don't think story telling is something he values much.

As I mentioned you can have it both ways (modernize and , and from what I can tell it's a more surefire strategy to succeed commercially.

I actually typed that on a cellphone, so I didn't feel like elaborating. Yes, I feel like the first movie is honest-to-God decent fun. It's not extremely memorable fun, it's not really fun that I want to experience over and over, but enjoyable as a stupid movie about robots fighting each other over some kinda all-powerful cube with humans throw in the mix for good measure? Yeah, that's fine, and the Michael Bay-isms aren't so overt and so obnoxious that I'm completely turned off. I still don't want to classify it as "good", just "entertaining" for one or two views.

Those latter two movies are, indeed, downright horrible. I made it through the second one, which has some genuinely cool action moments. I couldn't even make it through the third one. I really did want to see Michael Bay use Transformers to destroy half a city, because that's what he should be good at, but I just never made it through the first half or so and never bothered to put it back in and start it when the carnage starts. That movie made me go from merely disliking Shia Labeouf to outright hating him, and I don't usually do that.

Fuck the haters give me more! In a perfect world this movie ends with a teaser of Galvatron and a teaser of a teaser of Unicron to cap off a second trilogy.

The only way it could possibly be worse than the second movie is if it included Adam Sandler.

I thought the second was the weaker of the trilogy in terms of story, but it was no where near the train wreck that people made it out to be. However the third one was easily the best of the three and if people removed their Bay hating glasses, and then their nostalgia glasses, they might enjoy them as well. There's a reason they are so popular... these Transformers are the Transformers of this generation for kids, except that they are good popcorn flicks for older folks as well.

I didn't like the latter two Transformers movies because they were chock full of inane dialogue, terrible plot points, annoying characters, and robot genitalia. I did not dislike the movies because they had "ruined my childhood" (I have little memory or nostalgia for Transformers) and I did not dislike them because I hate Michael Bay (Bad Boys 2 is still entertaining, you guys).

The first movie has those issues to some degree, but it's not to such a huge extent that it gets in the way of what I like about the movie.

These movies are "so popular" because they're advertised to death and most people will at least check out things that are advertised to death to see if it's something worth watching, and they continue to be popular because they're the very definition of "lowest common denominator." Sorry if you don't like that term, but here it's a perfect descriptor for the movies.

Agreed. I think Michael Bay is a subpar director BECAUSE of these movies. I didn't go into them with any bone to pick against him. You can do big dumb action in a smart way but these never did. None of the characters felt like they had any importance and, worst offense of all in a movie about giant robots, none of the fights felt like they had any weight. Everything felt like "CGI man punches other CGI man" rather than something like Pacific Rim's "CGI man takes fucking ocean liner, uses it as bat against CGI alien man, who then flies him into space and gets cut up by sword."

Pacific Rim was fucking RAD, is what I'm trying to say.

I wholeheartedly believe that Pacific Rim was the hottest of garbage. Hating TF is one thing, sure, but people who loved that movie confound me. It was not any more intelligent then any of the Transformers movies and it's action was down right boring.

The inclusion of robot testicles and the most lazy of racism in Transformers 2 basically puts that film in the Grown Ups tier of quality for me. One of the few movies I've hated enough to walk out of.

Man, I remember halfway through the movie my friend actually told me that he was thinking about walking out. He didn't, but it's the first and only time I've ever heard him say that.

Seriously though, Transformers 2 was a TERRIBLE movie. Taking aside all of the juvenile humor and racist shit, the story was weak as hell, and it was also freaking dumb. Furthermore, the whole desert battle was a colossal mess - I honestly had no idea what was going on half the time. Plus, the desert is such an unimaginative place to have the final battle. The city battle in the first one was a LOT more exciting, due to the fact that there were a lot fewer robots to keep track of, and due to the fact that the environment was a lot more fun to watch.

I've never seen Pacific Rim, but considering it probably lacks a lot of the things that made Transformers 2 a god awful mess of a movie, I can see why people would enjoy it.