Transformers: Age of Extinction is a sloppy mish mash of subplots and scenes from other films that make it feel very different from the original trilogy. I really wanted to love this film, but I couldn't. I left the theater thinking it was just alright. The trailers promise a darker and grittier look at the Transformers universe and it delivers just that; but then it gets ruined with an overdose of comic relief and some situational humor that gets stale and feels like only Shia LeBouf could pull off and still remain funny. The robots themselves get more screen time than past entries, but the human characters are still the focus of it. Mark Whalberg gives a terrific and believable performance as Cade Yaeger while his daughter Tessa played by Nicola Peltz and her boyfriend Shane (Jack Raynor) play useless victims with idiotic dialogue... At least Sam's girlfriends had the guts to help him in his fights. Every other human character is written well and share equal energy and passion for the film they were making.
Optimus is shown in a different light as he struggles making moral decisions on whether or not to leave the humans alone or killing the humans who have hunted down his Autobot comrades. You see him upset and that leads into quite an entertaining segment. The story however suffers the same as The Amazing Spider-Man 2's did, containing too many villains and subplots in order to set up for future installments, instead of focusing on this movie. All that exposition brings the movie to clock in at 2 hours and 46 minutes which when being watched, feels a whole lot longer than that due to pacing issues. The action is alright, but not as spectacular as the original trilogy. Dark of the Moon really raised the bar and unfortunately Age of Extinction could not come anywhere close to it.
The trailer for the film was misleading on the amount of screen time the Dinobots would have, in the trailer they appeared to be pretty important to the story... Nope. They're lucky if they had 15 minutes in the whole thing, but when they come on screen, they're glorious!
If you're going to see this in 3D, I beg of you, see it in IMAX 3D. You're eyes will be thanking you later because you'll be spared a headache from the muddy and blurry colors of the so-so regular 3D. Sometimes the CGI looks so good that it looks realistic... Then sometimes it looks campy and unrealistic (I'm not going to spoil who, but you'll agree with me once you see it.)
All in all, this is definitely a departure from the formula of the original trilogy and will need some serious tweaking before a fifth film should be started. I love Transformers, don't get me wrong, in fact, it was the first Michael Bay Transformers movie back in 2007 that got me into the robots in disguise (which I know some of you Transformers G1 purists probably just took a spit-take upon reading that,) but because of that movie, I watched the original cartoons and read the comic books. They just need to fix some major things before the next installment
That's why I'm giving TRANSFORMERS: Age of Extinction a 7/10