The first is the eye-watering album length – nobody wants to listen to this sort of thing for 78 minutes. Having said that, there are three significant drawbacks here which must counterbalance the positives.
#LOCKDOWN TRANSFORMERS SOUNDTRACK MOVIE#
There’s no point going into it expecting anything spectacular nor groundbreaking, just as there’s no point going into the movie expecting any kind of intellectual stimulation take that attitude and it’s really not all bad. It’s enthusiastic, very slick, there are actually a couple of clever ideas. So, I’m sitting listening to this and being drawn in by it. The electronica in “Transformium” is done really well, very listenable. A different kind of vocal in “Hacking the Drone” is good too – original, effective, impressive.
That’s followed by “His Name is Shane and he Drives”, which is not only an important piece of information to be given, it’s also an entertaining piece of music. Some of the action cues are perfectly solid modern pieces of action music – it’s ruined a bit by the obnoxious electronics but “Cemetery Wind” has some interesting ideas and the brass actually sounds like brass. Second track “Best Thing that Ever Happened” has a very nice vocal that’s perfect for Bay’s filmmaking and there’s no qualifier required here – it’s a very nice piece. The opening “Decision” includes a generic but nice new anthem-type theme (more Media Ventures 1994 than Remote Control 2014) – though admittedly it does then descend into Man of Steel-style drumming hell. It is in that context that I found myself listening to Transformers: Age of Extinction and chewing on those morsels with no small amount of satisfaction. The likes of Ramin Djawadi, Henry Jackman and Jablonsky himself have dug so low that things which just a few years ago seemed absolutely appalling no longer have any capacity to shock – a new normal has been reached and even a miserable old git like me has been so conditioned to accept it that tiny morsels of entertainment now feel like they’ve come from a Michelin starred restaurant. About The Island I wrote that it was “one of the most offensively, relentlessly inane and banal musical concoctions ever to have featured in a motion picture… this is barrel-scraping stuff and the sooner film music manages to escape from this sort of thing, the better… This is an absolute stinker, as depressing and disheartening an album as a fan of film music could ever find.” A couple of years later I wrote about Transformers “It goes without saying that it’s intellectually-bereft… that it is so utterly without heart or feeling… truly hideous film music – lazy, derivative, utterly soulless, pretty much as bad as it gets.” So, in preparation for writing this review, I gave it another spin (probably the first time I listened to it since writing those words in 2007) and thought… hmm, this isn’t that bad. It’s interesting to think about how much film music has changed since then. Returning for the ride is composer Steve Jablonsky, scoring his sixth Michael Bay film in a row (a sequence that started with 2005’s The Island). The series’ longevity is extraordinary, really, since it was originally fairly obviously conceived mainly as a marketing tool for the line of toys – well, it worked. The Michael Bay machine marches ever onwards in Transformers: Age of Extinction, the latest off his production line that critics hate but audiences flock to.
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