Have you ever wanted to see the last 5 years of major blockbuster films amalgamated into one solo movie, but done as mediocre as possible?
Then you chose the right place to go with Transformers: The Last Knight!
This piece of scrap that doesn’t even deserve to be called a film will take you on the most boring, trivial, and explosion filled roller coaster ride that you’ve seen 20 times before; you only keep going because the children with you haven’t yet seen the gears past the magic.
The plot, which there is, is about another mcguffin of absolute power that could destroy earth is there from the 1000’s of years previously that it was first discovered, landed, or given. The flavor of mcguffin for this movie is the staff of Merlin, which was given to him by transformers to help King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table destroy the Saxon threat in the early middle ages. Yes, we just added more fictional characters to fictional history.
The opening starts with a battle between the Saxons and English and is probably a better King Arthur movie than others. Then again, it’s not hard to make a movie better than that when your director was set to make a King Arthur movie before. Despite the era not really having any explosions and gunpowder and other things weren’t discovered till much later, Micheal Bay somehow finds a way to include explosions all during the opening.
Before we get into the band things of the movie, we’ll start with the good. The movie is extremely colorful. Michael Bay is known for a particular type of movie, and the previous films have favored extremely gritty and dark shadows cast over most of the movie. The villains are a boring gray, that doesn’t allow you to really know who is who in the battlefield. The Last Knight does not suffer this. Even though the action was mediocre at worst and decent at best, I could always tell who was a good guy and who was a bad guy.
Then you get to the rest of the movie. The plot is a plodding course of patience, with bad jokes dispersed between the major “story” beats. The whole back story of “The Last Knight”, the history of Cybertron to Earth, and all of the transformers histories on the planet is relegated to a single info dump given by Anthony Hopkins character who is apparently part of the family of people who are connected to the Transformers. It seems strange though, as they retcon the whole idea of the transformers appearing in 2007, which is what the FIRST MOVIE SAID.
If anyone else has seen other movie series like Fast and Furious, it seems like the latter half of the series just switches from its previous themes, almost like a soft reboot of the franchise. If you take this in lieu of the changed canon to how the transformers came to being on earth, and the expanded “Knights” theme that the movies have taken on, the story sits at this strange uncanny area outside of the series’ norms. Whatever those are.
Transformers the Last Knight is not worth the money that was spent to see it. I don’t even think it’s worth your time to watch. Finishing at 2 hours and 30 minutes, the movie isn’t the longest of the films, but it still drags (The last half of the movie feels like another whole hour, and it’s only 50 minutes). Characters are inconsistent, the story is not really up to snuff for any need to view it in theaters, and the action is decent at points, but will never really get to the same level of gross fun destruction of the FIRST film.
Side Note: If you’re still thinking of seeing this movie because Optimus is “evil” I’ll spoil that for you and tell you it’s not for long. He’s out of the movie for most of the plot, and then shows up near the end, fights Bumblebee and the way they explain his heal turn back to good can only be described as the “Martha” moment from Batman vs. Superman. In fact, arguably Batman vs. Superman had a better overall fight between two good characters than this movie did, and that movie was the king of disappointing big fights.
Final verdict: Don’t pay to see this movie. Don’t even look in the room that’s showing the movie. Don’t even pay to go into a theater that’s showing the film. It’s so bad that it would ruin any other good film that is showing there. Go see Wonder Woman again.
juhwann 