Transformers: The Last Knight Summary & Review
For the last ten years, director Michael Bay has been the filmmaker behind the Transformers franchise, based on the Hasbro toy line of the same name. While critics have never taken the series lightly, it is the 11th highest-grossing film series of all time, generating a profit of around $3.7 billion. I don’t support him in any way, but I do know that Bay knows how to make the movies that people love: completely brainless action films with lots of visuals and little story. Now, he’s returned to the series with Transformers: The Last Knight.
In the fifth installment of this long-running franchise, we rejoin Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), from Age of Extinction, as he spends his days protecting Transformers from the TRF (Transformers Reaction Force). When a ship crash-lands in the ruins of Chicago, Yeager is given a mysterious talisman from a dying Transformer, and picks up young orphan Izabella (Isabela Moner). Suddenly, Megatron and his fellow Decepticons target them, and Yeager is forced into an adventure that will reveal the history of the Transformers, and why they keep coming back to Earth.
Is it possible for a movie to give you a headache? That is exactly what this one did to me. Transformers: The Last Knight is one of the saddest excuses for a movie I have seen. First off, there is no story at all. The description I wrote above was really hard to do without spoiling anything. There are elements of a story, but it all got lost in the vomit inducing visuals that plagued this movie.
Speaking of the visuals, that’s really all this movie was. It was two-and-a-half hours of non-stop explosions and action sequences. I’m not kidding when I say that when a Transformer was hit with a regular bullet, there was a massive explosion. The visuals were realistic-looking, nonetheless, but there were so many moments where I couldn’t look at the screen. If everything is going to explode at some point, at least have a reason for why that’s happening.
As much as I love Mark Wahlberg, he gave one of the worst performances of his career. Throughout this movie, he really looks like he doesn’t want to be there. He looks like he only agreed to be in this movie because of a check. He didn’t once try to act like a real human being in this movie. He just stood there, reacting badly to all the explosions that were going on around him.
I blame this headache inducing film on two things: the editors and Michael Bay. I am not joking when I say that this movie had the most incompetent editors to ever work in the film industry. One of the most hilarious continuity errors in this film was the changing aspect ratio. There were parts where the movie would switch between full-screen and widescreen. That was probably the most entertaining thing about the movie.
I know what people say about Michael Bay, but he is, hands down, the worst mainstream director working today. He has absolutely no idea how to make a movie. His films lack good stories and compelling characters. The only thing he knows how to do is how to blow something up in the most ridiculous way possible. I know a lot of people who say he’s one of the greatest filmmakers of today, but you have to have zero expectations on what a good movie is to like any of his films.
I went into Transformers: The Last Knight with no expectations, and I was still disappointed. I had a small sliver of hope that it could have been fun, but those hopes were shattered the second the movie started. There were so many loud noises that I had to sit in the car for a minute and take in some silence to appease the headache this movie gave me. This is the worst film of 2017 (yes, worst than Baywatch and The Mummy), and if it stays that way, it will be the second year in a row that Michael Bay ended up at the bottom of my list.
I’m coining a new term: I’ve been Michael Bay-ed.
