Transformers: Age of Balloon Machines

​I was recently rewatching Age of Extinction, and besides the fact that the movie is mediocre at best, the CGI is terrible. It’s not just Grimlock moving like an agile raptor, even regular bots like Optimus and Bumblebee feel like hollow balloons instead of multi-ton machines.

​In the first movie, every single step had momentum, inertia, and cracked the asphalt beneath it. By the fourth installment, the bots are performing mid-air parkour and moving like lightweight martial artists. Because they move entirely too fast for their physical scale, the illusion of mass is completely destroyed.

​To make matters worse, the environment barely reacts to them. They slide over pavement without shattering it, and the "Transformium" pixel-dust transformations eliminate any sense of real mechanical engineering. Combined with the abysmal camera work, the visual weight is totally gone.

Godzilla Minus One did a fantastic job with its CGI. If anyone knows of another movie with excellent CGI that actually captures the weight of big mechs or monsters, please let me know.