AoE was - like most Bay films - entertaining at best, visually exhausting at worst. Overall, I liked the idea. I’m content with a lot of the concepts implemented (aside from the creepy overly-human faces, ick) and it was overall the joyride I went in expecting. But something about this one just didn’t work as well for me as the films that preceded it. I mean, if I had to choose between “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”, ‘course I give a thumbs up, but it would not be a very enthusiastic one. I couldn’t figure out what was missing and eventually I forgot about it until I just started musing on it during a long drive home today.

There was a lot of silly things in the mix this time around, but most I can look past. I can forgive how crazy long the film seemed. I can forgive the icky human faces. I can almost forgive that by T4 the entire original gang’s been killed off save for Bee and Prime. I can forgive Drift and Crosshairs which were kind of pointless and didn’t add much to the team dynamic aside from being oddly-placed cultural stereotypes. And I can just pretend it didn’t bother me that the father and daughter looked like they were the same age…

But here’s the one thing that wasn’t present in the movie and I think that’s why Age of Extinction just didn’t work for me. (You’ll probably laugh when I say it.) It’s the lack of Sam and Bee interaction. Basically that’s all it was. Something about the friendship between these two is the one thing that fascinated me and probably one of the things that kept me coming back. Their journey and relationship was unique and kept me emotionally invested in the films. When this new lot of humans took over in T4, I didn’t feel like I knew them, so I couldn’t root for them. And they didn’t really seem bonded to any of the Autobots anyway, so why should I care? There was that one moment with Cade and Optimus having some one-on-one on the ship but…meh. It seemed forced and empty.

I know it’s silly but character relationships and interactions are really freaking important to me. If that’s not there - or in this case, it was there and you take it away from me which is worse - I’m just not going to be that emotionally invested in this story and therefore won’t feel like it’s all that good.

And that is an extremely long-winded explanation as to why I figured out why AoE was “just…okay”. Ha. If you’re still reading this, cookies for you!