Judging by the Trailer: "Transformers: Age of Extinction"

By Rev. Adam McKinney on June 26, 2014

All right, enough, everybody. Just, enough! I don't know who to blame for the Transformers franchise, but surely there's some dark puppet master somewhere in the center of the earth that's pulling the strings for this ongoing series of car wrecks. I'm inclined to blame BuzzFeed, for their unending tour of millennial nostalgia, but I have the distinct impression that BuzzFeed only scratches the sinister surface.

We've somehow made it to the fourth Transformers film, which does have a pretentious subtitle, but I refuse to give it the dignity of typing it out - because, honestly, if this thing isn't called Trans4mers, I don't even know what we're doing anymore.

If we're in the business of doling out compliments for the Transformers franchise - which, I assure you, we are not - then that compliment shall come in the form of finally ridding known plagiarist (and suspected sociopath) Shia LaBeouf from the proceedings. In his stead is Mark Wahlberg, who hilariously makes a reference to being from Texas, even though his voice can only be believable when saying something about parking his car in Harvard Yard.

From then on, it's a parade of Michael Bay-isms - non-stop Dutch angles, obnoxious filters and ominous intonations about the fate of Transformers, as if they weren't just stupid toys. I don't know if you need special eyes to follow the action of a Transformers movie, but that would explain why I can't see these robots as anything other than what would happen if a junkyard somehow got food poisoning.

Should we somehow find ourselves in a dystopian world where we've reached the 10th Transformers movie - years after Michael Bay has used his weather machine to coerce the planet into giving him our every resource - please let me be long dead. Barring that, let me be the man to take on a Valkyrie-esque mission to bring Michael Bay's reign of terror to an end.