The new teaser trailer for 'Transformers: Age of Extinction' trailer is bad. "How bad is it?" the crowd asks in response. It's so bad, our eyes jumped out of our head and kicked us in the crotch for watching it.

Seriously, how hard is it to get the Transformers right? What do you need? Well, you need giant, laser-gun-wielding robots. Those robots need to change into cars and tanks and whatnot. Then they fight each other. It's pretty simple.

Maybe you throw in a couple of humans nipping at the robots' heels to make the story relatable. Throw all of that into the standard paint-by-the-numbers plot setup, and you should be able to knock it out of the park. So how does Michael Bay keep screwing up a sure thing?

We imagine his directing style involves saying something along the lines of "No, that's too real. What we're going for is an emotionless husk of a person." And Marky Mark might respond by saying something like, "But I'm playing a single father struggling to support his family. Shouldn't I show some genuine emotion?"

"Nope," responds the director of such cinematic disasters as 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Armageddon.' "I don't want to distract people from the giant robots."

The first Transformers movie was about as decent as one could expect from a two-plus-hour-long movie about toys from the '80s. Sadly, the feature film franchise peaked as soon as it appeared. The plot for the second Transformers movie, 'Revenge of the Fallen,' made about as much sense as watching every David Lynch movie simultaneously, except less entertaining. And for some reason, it was three hours long.

The newest entry in the million-dollar waste of a franchise does have two things going for it: The Dinobots do look pretty badass. And there's no Shia "I'm Not Famous Anymore" Labeouf. Maybe this is the first step to ensuring the plagiarizing Labeouf's wish of ditching stardom comes true.

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