Directed by: Michael Bay
Written by: Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, Ken Nolan, Akiva Goldsman
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel
IMDb Link
The Transformers movies have been bad since the second film, and dipped in to truly terrible territory with the fourth installment, but The Last Knight is so bad that it's hard to come up with a word that describes it. Cancerous works, and I mean that literally too; I got myself checked after watching the movie, you can see my positive cancer test results here. Seriously though, this film drives the series down to new depths of bad filmmaking.
*Warning: Potential Spoilers Ahead*
The whole Transformers timeline gets retconned again, adding in a new story about how they were there to help King Arthur create civilisation, and that Merlin's magic came from a staff of the Transformers. In present day, the Transformers have been made illegal again, and are being hunted down by soldiers again. Mark Wahlberg's Cade Yeager (awful as these movies may be, that's still the coolest character name ever) is aiding and abetting the Autobots who have gone in to hiding. Megatron's back, the whole 'Galvatron' thing from the last movie completely dropped. Optimus Prime has returned to his home planet of Cybertron, only to be immediately corrupted by his apparent creator, Quintessa. There's also about a half dozen other plot points in this movie that don't have any real bearing on the outcome of the story, yet for some reason were included in the film.
As you may have guessed from my description, the film is incredibly bloated and disjointed. So little of what happens in this movie matters to the "plot" of this movie, and there's such a staggering amount of filler content that you could take out an hour of this two and a half hour waste of space and you wouldn't lose any actual story, let alone story that matters. A young girl is introduced in to the film at an early stage, and she does literally nothing for the whole story, only there to sass Mark Wahlberg a couple of times and then sit around waiting for the movie to finish. She has no actual point to her existence, and the only part of the movie where she's relevant is as meaningless to the plot as her inclusion in the movie at all. A British History Professor is included in the movie to act as Mark Wahlberg's love interest and suddenly become relevant when the plot demands her to, but the film devotes time to her family discussing her finding a man (or woman) and titters a bit over some mature women looking through Want Ads in a newspaper. The two and a half hour movie about alien robots fighting with two worlds at stake has time to indulge a few ladies (who again, have nothing to do with the plot) in discussions of finding someone in a Want Ad. That's just two examples of all the fluff and fat that blows up this movie's runtime, if I continued on about this stuff I'd be here all night. The point is the movie is pointless.
This goes for the actual plot, too. As I said before, the film retcons more in to the Transformers series' history, and in the process completely ignores the effect of everything that has happened in the previous movies while also acknowledging their existence. There's a very real cognitive dissonance that comes with trying to pretend that the writers of these movies care about the plot at all. Cybertron is coming to Earth to consume it, which triggers spikes to rise up around the Earth, which reveals that Earth is actually a Transformer known as Unicron. This is stupid enough as it is, but it's worse because the third film already dealt with Cybertron coming to Earth, and nothing about Unicron happened then. There's also plot points such as the return of John Turturro's character purely for the delivery of Anthony Hopkins' character. Turturro serves no other purpose in the movie, and the information he gives could've been retrieved in a much faster and simpler way, or even just been known by Anthony Hopkins to begin with, but for some reason the film needed to be padded with more time so they brought back John Turturro for one last paycheck. The plot could've been introduced, arisen, climaxed and resolved in about an hour, so I guess they just kept throwing ideas in until they forgot they were supposed to tell a story.
As for the direction, Michael Bay has become a caricature of himself. The best analogy I can come up with is that Michael Bay has a school for filmmakers where people learn to make films like Michael Bay, and their first practical assessment was to make this movie. The film is shaky, changes aspect ratios constantly, never focuses on anything for more than three seconds, and has no sense of tone. Give a monkey a camera, some cocaine and a few toys and he'd make a better Transformers film. Action setpieces fly by so quickly and are cut together so rapidly that you don't have time to register anything that happens as cool or interesting. Bay has become a slave to his own style here: the final point of a simple polo game can't be filmed for a few seconds from the side to establish a character's class and competitiveness, no, we have to see shots of horses legs from several different angles as they kick up dirt and grass, the ball getting hit has to be the most intense thing ever but only for a split second, everything has to look epic until epic means nothing. The film is so wrapped up in its personal idea of being epic that the film becomes the visual equivalent of white noise, just constant sprays of dirt and explosions so tiresome that it's difficult not to fall asleep. Bay seems to know this, too: there are moments of self-awareness in the film that suggests Bay is deliberately feeding his audience crap while being conscious of the fact that it's crap, similar to some of the undertones in Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014). This doesn't make it any better though, nor does it make it easier to watch: the movie is so futile and devoid of sense that all action and comedy blurs together in to one fat pile of mechanical mess.
The Verdict: Stay away from this abomination. Seriously, people need to stop giving money to these movies; there is no point to anything that happens in them, and what little value that can be gleaned from this film (a few lines from Anthony Hopkins, the achingly trite life lessons about humanity, heroism and protecting the world) can be seen in a thirty-second YouTube clip a few months from now when the whole film is online for free. Don't see this movie; it's the kind of movie that makes yo hate movies, and as of right now ties with Collateral Beauty as the worst movie I have seen in the cinema this year so far.
Rating: 2/10
Published June 22nd, 2017
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