Transformers: The Last Knight review
(Spoiler alert)
Upfront I’m going to say Transformers: The Last Knight isn’t the worst movie I’ve seen this year; that honor belongs to movies like The Mummy and The Book of Henry. Hating the Michael Bay Transformers is something of a signature pastime of movie critics nowadays. I can’t really disagree with anyone’s specific reasoning for doing that. After all, Michael Bay has essentially gotten away with selling the same terrible movie five times, and it’s made millions for him every time. That’s a feat any self-respecting con artist would blush at. But, confession time, I’ve never quite been able to bring myself to hate these movies with the same vitriol that other people do. Maybe it’s because I still haven’t seen the second one yet, maybe it’s because I’m still the target audience for this at heart, but I quite simply don’t want to spend hours upon hours of my life expressing a profound anger for this series that I simply don’t have. If anything, I’d rather try and examine the movies to find a couple nuggets of positivity. (And while we’re on the subject, if you’re more interested in analyzing these movies from an artistic perspective, I’d highly recommend Lindsey Ellis’s ongoing series The Whole Plate.) My point is, this series is now ten years old, and as tired as I am of it, I’m more tired of the idea of hating it.
But anyway, huge shock, this one is bad too. The funny thing about the Transformers movies is that they’ve basically never fixed ANY of the core things that make them not very good. They’re always at least 30 minutes too long, the plots are nonsensical mish-mashes, the pacing is always at a dogged run that never lets the audience process anything, the characters range from thin analogs of Bay himself to outright toxic and unlikeable people. While the spectacle of the action usually works, it’s often hindered by the filmmaking and doesn’t have the impact you want it to have. These are basically the five main pillars of terribleness in every Transformers movie. It’s not a question of “Will or won’t these be in the movie?” but more of a question of, “To what degree will each of these flaws manifest themselves this time around?”
So we might as well start with what kind of almost works in this movie: the characters.
I’m not sure if there ever has or ever will be a technically ‘good’ character in any of these movies; that would involve Michael Bay having to stop and take some time to develop multi-layered human beings, and that’s something he’s just not equipped to do. He’s an action filmmaker first and foremost, and he can only use characters that are established in broad strokes. But at least the broad strokes we’ve now settled on in The Last Knight are drastically more likable than anyone from the first three movies. I probably couldn’t tell you more than a handful of their names, and there’s so many of them on screen at once that it makes the Marvel movies seem less crowded by comparison, but they’re all generally likable and interesting.
Mark Wahlberg gets to play male Bay fantasy #15 again, Laura Haddock gets to play female Bay fantasy #6, Anthony Hopkins seems like he’s having a grand old time as the plot exposition-ary who occasionally gets to do crazy Michael Bay things, there’s a human-sized Transformer named Cogman who’s a literal sociopath, and even a scrappy little-girl mechanic. It’s all so cartoonish it’s almost charming. Heck, in a lot of scene’s there’s usually something almost close to chemistry between everyone. Also, the Transformers themselves feel more heavily involved in the film than they have before. They still often get relegated to just background characters who wander into scenes and aren’t usually the focal point of the action, (yeah it’s been ten years and five movies and Michael Bay still doesn’t seem to understand what the big deal is about the giant robots from space who can turn into cars and are literally dripping in space guns) but there’s an actual presence to them this time around. It doesn’t feel like there are two separate movies this time; one that involves the Transformers and one that doesn’t. It all feels like a connected movie.
It’s good that for once the Transformers movies have characters you can almost latch onto, because you’re gonna need that for the absolutely BONKERS plot this movie has put together. Remember how back in the early stages of pre-production for this movie they’d apparently assembled an absolutely gigantic writers room to generate story ideas for the ‘Transformers Cinematic Universe”? Well good news, they apparently went with ALL of the ideas! The sheer amount of ‘world-building,’ exposition, and new characters being thrown around in here is just absolutely insane! How insane is it? It’s established, as a minor plot-point mind you, that not only did the Autobots help fight against the Axis Powers in WWII, but that Hitler was killed by Watch Transformer that Anthony Hopkins casually keeps around his castle. This is ‘out-Dan Brown-ing’ Dan Brown! To its credit, the movie does introduce more interesting stuff in one movie than the rest of the series has done in four. It’s DELIRIOUSLY entertaining to watch this movie completely immerse itself in its own crazy mythology, and it’s about the most fun you’ll have in this movie. But much like similarly exposition heavy movies, it’s all at such a volume and such a rapid pace that it’s impossible for any of it to have any kind of meaning. It’s impossible for it not to feel like the movie is just spitballing ideas on the fly; no matter how pre-planned this may have been.
In fact the movie often gets so caught up with itself that it will introduce characters and situations into the plot for a few brief scenes, only to either forget them for a majority of the movie, or just drop them entirely. For example, the little girl character Izabella who’s been played up by the marketing as some big important character to the film ends up essentially disappearing completely for the second act. It’s a shame because she actually seems to be a really good little actress who could’ve given a lot of heart to the movie if she’d stayed longer. Even more disappointing is the second total waste of the Dinobots. Remember them? The guys who showed up in the ending fifteen minutes of Age of Extinction and who ended up being super useful with helping defeat bad guys? Well they basically show up for two scenes in the first act and then are completely and utterly forgotten for the rest of the movie, despite the fact it seems like they could’ve helped in the last fifteen minutes again.
What’s even weirder is that this movie has simultaneously fixed the structuring problems the series has always had, without fixing the pacing. What I mean is that the broad outline of the story actually works this time; as opposed to something like the structure of Dark of the Moon, where the first act was too short so the second and third acts all kinda blended together and it just became a giant soupy mess. The Last Knight actually feels like it has a far more coherent structure. Each act is basically the same length and you never get lost as to where you are in the story. However as a result, and also as a result of this movie being sixteen minutes shorter than Age of Extinction, Michael Bay’s signature frenetic pacing makes the movie feel like its zooming around on a monorail. There’s hardly ever any time for the audience to stop and catch their breath before the movie’s zooming along to the next action beat or exposition dump. And since, again, there’s about one-hundred percent more plot this time around, it becomes doubly exhausting.
Other than that it’s basically another Transformers movie from here-on out. The writing is typically snarky, childish, under-developed, and just overall not very good; but by my estimate it’s far less outright toxic than the first three movies have been. The action is a mixed bag. Whenever Bay actually pulls out and is forced to use wider shots to cover all the carnage and sheer scale, it’s actually really good. The big fight between Optimus Prime and Bumblebee that’s been played up by the marketing isn’t nearly as long or as impactful as you’ve been led to believe, but it kinda works because it’s actually covered more like a normal hand-to-hand fight scene, so that when the humans do enter into the fray you actually get more of a sense of scope than the other movies typically allow. It sadly just doesn’t last very long and most of the other action isn’t as satisfying, though it must be said that the actual scale of the big show-stopper finale is something to be admired, at least in concept. If you’re coming here just for the action, I’d honestly just recommend going back to Age of Extinction.
So, surprise, surprise, it’s another Transformers movie and it’s pretty bad. At least Michael Bay seems to be stepping down from the director’s chair for now, and after a full decade of consistently terrible blockbuster schlock, I think the best thing this franchise can hope for at this point is some new blood. The box-office predictions seem to be showing that this may be the first financial bomb of the series, so maybe we can hope that Paramount takes notice and we can dream for a better future for the Transformers movies. If you’re just looking for a dose of big summer action and spectacle, I’d honestly recommend renting Kong: Skull Island instead. But if, like me, you’re morbidly curious about where this franchise has decided to go, I can’t say you’ll be bored watching this.
The Media Fire gives this movie a 5/10
