Transformers: The Last Knight
Don't let any review - including this one - lull you into a false sense of security on this one; it really is as bad as they say... I'd warn about major spoilers from the outset, but if I assume that you've seen the trailers and TV spots then there's little else to spoil (even worse than Dark of the Moon's trailer reveal of Prime's knuckleduster slamming through Shockwave's Decepti-kidneys. Worse.). Anyway, still: SPOILERZZZZZZZZZZ
So. Ten years deep into this franchise and what do we have to show for ourselves? At this point, nothing but a yawning abyss of madness. Truly, the touch of the Chaos-bringer is felt.
The plot (well, its trace fossil outline at least) reads thusly, as far as I can tell: Transformers have been coming to and from Earth for millennia, and are inextricably linked with all Human history. Why? (This question does get answered... in a way? I guess?) Following the end of the last film, Optimus Prime is floating in space in stand-by mode, and we catch up with him later. We open to the Arthurian battle from almost every trailer, where the Knights of Iacon aid the Knights of the round table by giving Merlin (a drunk who speaks in what might as well be RP) a powerful staff and combine into the three-headed Dragon we've seen featured so prominently. Crossing the tremendous bridge of Sixteen Hundred Years to the present day, we once again find ruined urban environments and the Transformers declared illegal on Earth, systematically hunting down and capturing all Cybertronians they can find. We see Prime crash land on the space-bound ruins of Cybertron, shattered after 4 billion years of Autobot/Decepticon war and that disastrous Space Bridge incident at the end of Dark of the Moon. He meets Quintessa, who claims to be the creator of Cybertron and the Transformers, and, after some 'gentle persuasion', convinces him that the only way to revive Cybertron is to return to Earth, which houses the awakening Unicron (Yes! Who'd have seen that coming???), whose "awakening" has caused 6 gigantic metal horns to pop up all over the globe. Not forgetting our chum Cade Yeager (the Yeagermeister himself), who finds a dying Knight of Iacon (Iacon, once the jewel of Autobot cities) in a crashed ship after the second major action scene. The Knight's last act before his tragic death is to try to hand over a talisman that links with the staff given to Merlin - Cade refuses, naturally, but the talisman grows legs and follows him, attaching to his arm (initially, at least), which leads to the sociopathic robo-butler Cogman to find him, kicking off the next part of the plot. Cade is the titular Last Knight now. (What? So if Megs got his hands on the talisman it'd be him?)
Let's take a little breather there, shall we? This is quite tiring. This is the film's first major problem - there's too much going on. By the time anything starts building some momentum, we hard cut to something else... and if we cut back to the immediate previous setting, whatever story was happening is gone and we start all over again. Bah. Onwards!
There's a cut to Oxford at some point and we meet our latest and greatest female lead in a Michael Bay film (that kid with Skweeks doesn't count, get out), Doctor Professor Viviane Wembly. Not content with knocking over bicycles in front of the 'Rad Cam' and skittering across the cobbles in heels like a young unicorn, she goes on to give a """lecture""" in front of copies of paintings with Transformers rudely inserted into them to a bunch of stereotypes given human child form. She spends the most part of the film wearing tight, cleavage-showing dresses, or a white shirt just in time for the water-based part of the finale, but then interestingly a jumpsuit for the final push. Even women in Michael bay Films have to bow to practical pressure sometimes, I guess.
Cogman takes us to the eccentric Sir Edmund Burton, custodian of the ancient society of Witwiccans, the alleged descendants of Merlin. This is standard Illuminati territory, so whatever secret society I don't really care. Anthony Hopkins is hands down the best part of this movie, watching him charge around making sure every last bit of the scenery has been chewed and then moving on to the next scene. His meeting with Bumblebee (hey hang on a minute, if he's supposed to be looking after the Autobots and Izabella, then how the hell did he get to England? He sure as hell didn't fit in the Flying Wing [also laugh out loud, how long will that flight have taken?]) triggers a flashback sequence to Bumblebee and Hot Rod(?) infiltrating and destroying a whole bunch o'Nazi's in WWII - this was filmed at the completely recognisable Blenheim Palace, which got people in uproar when the news broke during filming.
Megatron is back, inexplicably a real Transformer again, and sporting the same red stripe found ona can of lager "Nemesis" Prime's face to indicate he is under baddie-induced mind control. This is never discussed. Megatron is doing all the bad things we'd expect him to, so it's not as if we need to waste our precious cognition on this. He is bad, "duuuuuude".
The final act of this huge mess opens with the revelation that yet another random vehicle, the Submarine HMS Alliance, is actually a Transformer (Seriously?) - On that point how little transforming is done in this film? The immensely detailed articulated figures that have come out of characters like Bumblebee and Prime make more and more sense with the lack of shape changing done here. Anyway, remember that duel between Prime and Bumblebee in the trailers? Yeah? Bar a few linking shots, the entire fight is in the trailers. Not kidding. Also, while Prime's turn to evil has a kind of Michael Bay Film internal logic, the return to his senses is straight out of DCEU's "Martha" playbook with the sudden and completely incongruous appearance of Bee's original voice... which presumably contradicts the fact they replaced his vocal module about halfway through the film? I just... I don't know any more. I can't even.
Unlike Age of Extinction (and even DotM) which makes good on its standard "2 act set up/3rd act CGI noise battle" form, this is just all over the place. As I said earlier, plot threads are raised and dropped and barely if ever mentioned again - Cogman being a "Headmaster" is something swept under the carpet, namedrop complete I suppose? The Monstructor-esque Infernocus is seen combining and separating a few times, which is neat, but viewers could be forgiven for not hearing Frank Welker's growling out of the name over the general din of the last sequence. His death is also one of the brilliant shots spoiled in trailers - I suppose it might have been okay if the circular beheading slow motion shot could have come at the end of a pitched battle, but like the Bee/Prime fight, the major beats are shown in trailers and only a few seconds are missing overall.
All but three of the Decepticreeps survive long enough for the final battle, and while we see one of them get their head blown off (hint: the toy version can lose its head too), the other two get wrekt but leave no visible corpse after their defeat - no prizes for guessing which two though, I'm afraid.
I always feel like I'm on the verge of "and another thing" writing this, and maybe that's how this film worked out? Oooh yeah, Prime's in space but the Earth-bound Autobots live in a junkyard oh wait yeah there's a crashed ship with an ancient knight after a generic one-note Autobot gets killed by the FAKE MILITARY uh oh yeah Drift does meditational balancing on his sword point but hang on what about Prime and oh man it is Cybertron and who's Quintessa woah look at that weird demon thing how does that work oh yeah back to Grimlock eating a car (actually serious note of "another thing" - why are the Dinobots reduced to comic relief? It was bad enough in The Transformers The Movie, what with all that "Me Grimlock" nonsense, but after AoE kind of lightly set them up as legendary figures with designs in line with the Knights, giving Slug all of about 5 seconds on screen and... Grimlock lives in a hole in the ground? At least he gets a confirmed kill.)
This is supposed to really truly finally actually absolutely be Michael Bay's last Transformers film. Can it be? I mean, where does it leave us? A the end of the film, the Energy Transfer chamber that Quintessa lived in is destroyed, but Cybertron has enough energy to reform slightly and move out of Earth's atmosphere. The Knights fly off as their combined Dragon form, and the rest(?) of the Autobots fly in the Knight Ship (also from AoE but mysteriously reappears in this film at a convenient moment with no explanation) to repair Cybertron. Still, the moon is destroyed, huge gouges have bee taken out of the Earth's crust, and the core has been slightly cooled (perhaps that last thing will recover though?). All previous film continuity seems to have gone straight out of the window, reducing the Ark getting crushed on the moon and the blown-out top of a pyramid to easter egg-style references to the previous films. Hell, this is supposed to be the mid-point of a new trilogy! I despair.
At long last, we reach the final curtain. This film is just a huge waste of potential. Even Age of Extinction had some clear plot and character beats, you know, bad guys are bad, good guys are good but are tired of being vilified but end up coming back to defeat the bad guys anyway, blah blah Optimus Prime is part of the legendary Knights of Cybertron/Iacon as well as being the last descendant of the ancient Primes - stuff that could conceivably mesh with new material going forward... But no. No no no no no. All that talk of secret history is a continuity nightmare - Ironhide and Starscream are in clearly in their GMC Topkick and F-35 Lightning II bodies respectively... Even though these images are a faked Vermeer painting and a photoshopped newspaper from WWI, completely contradicting the viral marketing campaign for the first film and its surrounding comic fiction. Oh well. I'm definitely thinking too hard about this. According to Bay's headline statements, 98% of the film was filmed on IMAX 3D cameras, such is his commitment to pushing the medium of film, the CGI is incredible and the location shooting is excellent. Burton's castle is probably a composite of at least 3 different buildings but the set dressing itself is meticulous. So much detail stuffed into this madcap challenge to character building and indeed, logic itself. Good luck to whomever dares pick up the reigns of this one, or most likely, Michael Bay himself.
But hey! At least the toys look good!
So. Ten years deep into this franchise and what do we have to show for ourselves? At this point, nothing but a yawning abyss of madness. Truly, the touch of the Chaos-bringer is felt.
The plot (well, its trace fossil outline at least) reads thusly, as far as I can tell: Transformers have been coming to and from Earth for millennia, and are inextricably linked with all Human history. Why? (This question does get answered... in a way? I guess?) Following the end of the last film, Optimus Prime is floating in space in stand-by mode, and we catch up with him later. We open to the Arthurian battle from almost every trailer, where the Knights of Iacon aid the Knights of the round table by giving Merlin (a drunk who speaks in what might as well be RP) a powerful staff and combine into the three-headed Dragon we've seen featured so prominently. Crossing the tremendous bridge of Sixteen Hundred Years to the present day, we once again find ruined urban environments and the Transformers declared illegal on Earth, systematically hunting down and capturing all Cybertronians they can find. We see Prime crash land on the space-bound ruins of Cybertron, shattered after 4 billion years of Autobot/Decepticon war and that disastrous Space Bridge incident at the end of Dark of the Moon. He meets Quintessa, who claims to be the creator of Cybertron and the Transformers, and, after some 'gentle persuasion', convinces him that the only way to revive Cybertron is to return to Earth, which houses the awakening Unicron (Yes! Who'd have seen that coming???), whose "awakening" has caused 6 gigantic metal horns to pop up all over the globe. Not forgetting our chum Cade Yeager (the Yeagermeister himself), who finds a dying Knight of Iacon (Iacon, once the jewel of Autobot cities) in a crashed ship after the second major action scene. The Knight's last act before his tragic death is to try to hand over a talisman that links with the staff given to Merlin - Cade refuses, naturally, but the talisman grows legs and follows him, attaching to his arm (initially, at least), which leads to the sociopathic robo-butler Cogman to find him, kicking off the next part of the plot. Cade is the titular Last Knight now. (What? So if Megs got his hands on the talisman it'd be him?)
Let's take a little breather there, shall we? This is quite tiring. This is the film's first major problem - there's too much going on. By the time anything starts building some momentum, we hard cut to something else... and if we cut back to the immediate previous setting, whatever story was happening is gone and we start all over again. Bah. Onwards!
There's a cut to Oxford at some point and we meet our latest and greatest female lead in a Michael Bay film (that kid with Skweeks doesn't count, get out), Doctor Professor Viviane Wembly. Not content with knocking over bicycles in front of the 'Rad Cam' and skittering across the cobbles in heels like a young unicorn, she goes on to give a """lecture""" in front of copies of paintings with Transformers rudely inserted into them to a bunch of stereotypes given human child form. She spends the most part of the film wearing tight, cleavage-showing dresses, or a white shirt just in time for the water-based part of the finale, but then interestingly a jumpsuit for the final push. Even women in Michael bay Films have to bow to practical pressure sometimes, I guess.
Cogman takes us to the eccentric Sir Edmund Burton, custodian of the ancient society of Witwiccans, the alleged descendants of Merlin. This is standard Illuminati territory, so whatever secret society I don't really care. Anthony Hopkins is hands down the best part of this movie, watching him charge around making sure every last bit of the scenery has been chewed and then moving on to the next scene. His meeting with Bumblebee (hey hang on a minute, if he's supposed to be looking after the Autobots and Izabella, then how the hell did he get to England? He sure as hell didn't fit in the Flying Wing [also laugh out loud, how long will that flight have taken?]) triggers a flashback sequence to Bumblebee and Hot Rod(?) infiltrating and destroying a whole bunch o'Nazi's in WWII - this was filmed at the completely recognisable Blenheim Palace, which got people in uproar when the news broke during filming.
Megatron is back, inexplicably a real Transformer again, and sporting the same red stripe found on
The final act of this huge mess opens with the revelation that yet another random vehicle, the Submarine HMS Alliance, is actually a Transformer (Seriously?) - On that point how little transforming is done in this film? The immensely detailed articulated figures that have come out of characters like Bumblebee and Prime make more and more sense with the lack of shape changing done here. Anyway, remember that duel between Prime and Bumblebee in the trailers? Yeah? Bar a few linking shots, the entire fight is in the trailers. Not kidding. Also, while Prime's turn to evil has a kind of Michael Bay Film internal logic, the return to his senses is straight out of DCEU's "Martha" playbook with the sudden and completely incongruous appearance of Bee's original voice... which presumably contradicts the fact they replaced his vocal module about halfway through the film? I just... I don't know any more. I can't even.
Unlike Age of Extinction (and even DotM) which makes good on its standard "2 act set up/3rd act CGI noise battle" form, this is just all over the place. As I said earlier, plot threads are raised and dropped and barely if ever mentioned again - Cogman being a "Headmaster" is something swept under the carpet, namedrop complete I suppose? The Monstructor-esque Infernocus is seen combining and separating a few times, which is neat, but viewers could be forgiven for not hearing Frank Welker's growling out of the name over the general din of the last sequence. His death is also one of the brilliant shots spoiled in trailers - I suppose it might have been okay if the circular beheading slow motion shot could have come at the end of a pitched battle, but like the Bee/Prime fight, the major beats are shown in trailers and only a few seconds are missing overall.
All but three of the Decepticreeps survive long enough for the final battle, and while we see one of them get their head blown off (hint: the toy version can lose its head too), the other two get wrekt but leave no visible corpse after their defeat - no prizes for guessing which two though, I'm afraid.
I always feel like I'm on the verge of "and another thing" writing this, and maybe that's how this film worked out? Oooh yeah, Prime's in space but the Earth-bound Autobots live in a junkyard oh wait yeah there's a crashed ship with an ancient knight after a generic one-note Autobot gets killed by the FAKE MILITARY uh oh yeah Drift does meditational balancing on his sword point but hang on what about Prime and oh man it is Cybertron and who's Quintessa woah look at that weird demon thing how does that work oh yeah back to Grimlock eating a car (actually serious note of "another thing" - why are the Dinobots reduced to comic relief? It was bad enough in The Transformers The Movie, what with all that "Me Grimlock" nonsense, but after AoE kind of lightly set them up as legendary figures with designs in line with the Knights, giving Slug all of about 5 seconds on screen and... Grimlock lives in a hole in the ground? At least he gets a confirmed kill.)
This is supposed to really truly finally actually absolutely be Michael Bay's last Transformers film. Can it be? I mean, where does it leave us? A the end of the film, the Energy Transfer chamber that Quintessa lived in is destroyed, but Cybertron has enough energy to reform slightly and move out of Earth's atmosphere. The Knights fly off as their combined Dragon form, and the rest(?) of the Autobots fly in the Knight Ship (also from AoE but mysteriously reappears in this film at a convenient moment with no explanation) to repair Cybertron. Still, the moon is destroyed, huge gouges have bee taken out of the Earth's crust, and the core has been slightly cooled (perhaps that last thing will recover though?). All previous film continuity seems to have gone straight out of the window, reducing the Ark getting crushed on the moon and the blown-out top of a pyramid to easter egg-style references to the previous films. Hell, this is supposed to be the mid-point of a new trilogy! I despair.
At long last, we reach the final curtain. This film is just a huge waste of potential. Even Age of Extinction had some clear plot and character beats, you know, bad guys are bad, good guys are good but are tired of being vilified but end up coming back to defeat the bad guys anyway, blah blah Optimus Prime is part of the legendary Knights of Cybertron/Iacon as well as being the last descendant of the ancient Primes - stuff that could conceivably mesh with new material going forward... But no. No no no no no. All that talk of secret history is a continuity nightmare - Ironhide and Starscream are in clearly in their GMC Topkick and F-35 Lightning II bodies respectively... Even though these images are a faked Vermeer painting and a photoshopped newspaper from WWI, completely contradicting the viral marketing campaign for the first film and its surrounding comic fiction. Oh well. I'm definitely thinking too hard about this. According to Bay's headline statements, 98% of the film was filmed on IMAX 3D cameras, such is his commitment to pushing the medium of film, the CGI is incredible and the location shooting is excellent. Burton's castle is probably a composite of at least 3 different buildings but the set dressing itself is meticulous. So much detail stuffed into this madcap challenge to character building and indeed, logic itself. Good luck to whomever dares pick up the reigns of this one, or most likely, Michael Bay himself.
But hey! At least the toys look good!
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