Movie Review - Transformers 4 : Age Of Extinction (spoilers)

[kurdt_the_goat]

I don't see how having this happen at the end of the movie make it any more acceptable. The very final act of a story is the conclusion, which is supposed to logically tie in with the rest of the story (introduction>complication>climax>resolution); having any of these elements being disjointed is a sign of poor story telling. Imagine if, at the very last act in Return of the Jedi when we see Luke on Endor while the Rebels are celebrating their victory... after seeing the Force Ghosts of Yoda, Obiwan and Anakin, he then takes out his light sabre, holds it aloft... and uses the Force to FLY like Superman! Alright, it would look massively cool, but then it throws a massive monkey wrench into the entire story! Conclusions shouldn't do that! Conclusions can be very important, just look at The Sixth Sense.

The story of the movie is the Humans making Transformers and Lockdown hunting Prime. The conclusion is when Lockdown is killed and Galvatron retreats. The flight has basically nothing to do with it.. it's more like the start of TF5. Regardless, i think my suggestion that he swiped the parts from Lockdown is plausible, or that the sword/upgrade gave him the capability. I agree your Star Wars scenario is borderline ludicrious... but we're talking Transformers not humans. I also think showing Prime going off in space by himself creates a bit more intrigue about the next movie than if he took a space ship. It makes me wonder if they'll start to have some of the space fight scenes like the cartoon did.

Only in the pilot episodes of the G1 cartoon, after that only the Decepticons could fly in robot mode. They couldn't fly in other G1 media though, e.g. in the G1 comics, characters like Soundwave and Megatron had to transform to their mass-shrunken alt modes and "ride" inside the cockpit of a Seeker in jet mode in order to get about long distances. Also, they couldn't robo-fly into space! They needed to use a Space Bridge or space-faring vessels or space-faring moded TFs (e.g. Omega Supreme, Astrotrain etc.). Megatron didn't fly on his own from Cybertron to Autobot City on Earth in TFTM.

Also, unlike the G1 cartoon, the live action films are written for an older audience, have far more creative freedom (since the toys are based on the film and not vice versa, so the agenda isn't "to sell toys"), and the G1 episodes didn't have a US$165,000,000 budget! Also, the G1 cartoon was broadcast free-to-air, whereas viewing Age of Extinction requires the price of cinema admission. Okay, I personally did manage to see this movie twice for free, but still -- most people had to buy tickets!

I only mentioned G1 to suggest that you take the moment a little less seriously. When other elements are nicked from G1 it's usually seen as a good throwback. Who's to say some fans haven't been up in arms about the lack of flight to-date in the live action films? Maybe now those people are really happy! I don't want to get into specifics of G1 but since you did, surely you know in Japanese G1 heaps of them can fly!

AFAIK nothing in the film even remotely suggests this.
The beginning of the film didn't show the Creators creating the Dinobots or even the Transformers. It showed them Cyberforming Earth which wiped out the dinosaurs. We saw dinosaurs becoming cyber-petrified, like the cyber-petrified dinosaur that they found in the Arctic. They weren't Dinobots though.

And we don't know if Earth was specifically the planet where these Transformers were created from. The movie said that the Creators cyberformed thousands of worlds as they did with prehistoric Earth, in order to build their creations. So saying that they Cyberformed Earth to "make you," may not necessarily have been intended as a literal meaning, but rather saying that they transformed planets such as Earth to create beings such as the Transformers. But if it is literal, then that's just yet another AMAZING freakin' coincidence regarding Earth and the Transformers in this universe! First the Fallen just happens to wage a war against the Primes on Earth, then the AllSpark Cube just happens to crash there after drifting aimlessly through space, then the Ark just happens to crash on Earth's moon after also drifting aimlessly (probably would've crashed on Earth too if the moon hadn't gotten in the way), and now we learn that the Transformers' creators just happened to have chosen Earth for Cyberforming and perhaps Earth was the original birthplace for the Transformers all along??? What an amazing series of intergalactic flukes!

Transformers is so far-fetched in the first place that i think it's basically impossible to avoid the 'amazing freaking coincidence' scenario after being long running and going through so many essentially disparate stories.

Yup!

Plan A: Scan a new alt mode to initiate instant complete repair, then transform to robot mode and fly off to find surviving Autobots.
Plan B: Let this human try and fix some of you and continue hiding while your fellow Autobots continue to be hunted.

Shoulda gone with Plan A! (Kung Pow'd! )

Maybe Prime's scanning of the new truck was just superficial and he was in part still injured underneath. Ala Bumblebee in Movie 1, his scan of a brand new car doesn't fix his voice (which seems to be quite a long-standing issue now!) Then.... off screen the other Autobots could have repaired him as Prime suggested earlier. I'm pushing it here :P In the cinema, when i saw Prime scan i thought 'lol, oh well i guess that'll do it ...cool, he looks awesome now'

And you can have a movie that offers exciting and thrilling action, and attempts to tell a good story. No, it doesn't have to be a literary award winning script, but it just needs to make a reasonable effort. Look at the Avengers -- that film is quite limited in its story telling capacity because it's dealing with an ensemble cast of characters, but it still manages to tell what is a reasonably decent story considering. Each character has their own individual journey to go on, and these journeys help to drive the story. Each of them are also changed by their experience in the story, which is what makes them proper characters and not shallow caricatures, or worse, set pieces.

I'm not really disagreeing on what you're saying here but can you honestly see how they could possibly expand on every character within space of a single movie? I'd read your fan-flick if you can! There's just too many of them, and i think it's an inherent problem for Transformers; why it's better suited to cartoon or comic format. And that's not even including the multitude of humans they characterize as well!