Green Goblin Reviews Transformers: The Last Knight
Ok, Transformers franchise rundown time. I’ve loved the transformers since I was a kid. Primarily grew up in and around the Beast Wars era, but I watched all of G1, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, Robots in Disguise, part of the Unicron trilogy, about half of Prime and even now, have to fight compulsions to buy their masterpiece action figures. If I were to ever get a tattoo, it’d probably be of BW Megatron with a speech bubbles that just says “YES!”. I love the Transformers. I should be the target audience to enjoy these films. So it feels doubly bad to have to condemn the film series as the lowest continuity in the series. First film was mediocre, followed by the all-time low point of Revenge of the Fallen (written and made in the middle of the LA writers’ strike and it shows). Dark of the Moon was a movie you could keep down, but still not something I would even call “ok”; more “interesting concepts” than “successful execution”. Age of Extinction is the first Transformers film (since the 1986 one) that I will says is pretty solid. New interesting characters, a change in threat and setup, less of a military jerking session and an upgrade by nixing Shia LaBeouf in favor of Bay’s new Pain and Gain bestie, Mark Wahlberg. There were some concepts that sadly went nowhere (Transformium should have made Megatron into a T-1000 level threat…), there was enough established in the fourth film to lead into a fifth: the “Creators” are gunning for Optimus and he needs to confront them. How’d it pan out? Well, it’s not the worst thing they’ve made. So they got that going for them…..
Our movie starts out with a flashback to the days of King Arthur and Merlin. Merlin, this time re-imagined as a drunkard who just so happened to have accidentallitydiscovered a crashed autobot ship, uses Cybertronian “magic” to help sway the tide of battle for England and secure Arthur’s Kingdom. Fast forward 1600 years (we’ll get back to that, trust me), and the movie is busy with the reestablishment of where earth’s stance with Transformers are: With Optimus gone, the allegiance litmus test is difficult so most of the planet has taken on the mentality of “shoot first, ask questions at the scrapyard”. The sole exception being Cuba, because filmmakers are gonna want to film stuff there while they still have the chance. Our previous film’s human hero Cade Yaeger (Wahlberg) is venturing into the No Man’s Land section of Chicago (left in ruins after the 3rd film), to look for a fallen protoform. When there, he comes across a little orphaned girl named Izabella (Isabela Moner) who’s made the rubble her home as well as a magical MacGuffin for this film in the form of a metallic talisman. Due to the events of the last film, Yeager is classified as a terrorist and is actively being hunted by the Transformers Reaction Force: a global anti-bot tactical squad, who’s members now include a protesting William Lennox (Josh Duhamel). While chasing Yeager and his new daughter surrogate, are stopped and outflanked by a mysterious Headmaster named Cogman (Jim Carter) who informs Yeager that the talisman has chosen him to serve a greater purpose and that he needs to venture with him to England to further elaborate on what is about to transpire. Meanwhile, at NASA, scientists have found a planetoid that’s moving towards earth at near lightspeed and are preparing for what could be seen as a global-killer (“I DON’T WANNA CLOSE MY EYES!!! I DON’T WANNA FALL ASLEEP!!!”). With the TRF (and Megatron, for some reason) in fast pursuit, Cade and company collude with Cogman’s master, Sir Edmond Burton (Anthony Hopkins) on how to go about stopping this inevitable impact.
Now, there’s a lot left out of that synopsis, but there’s also a lot that this movie plays very fast and loose with. What happened to Optimus? If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen what happens to him. He finds his maker (Quintessa, playing the role of the entire Quintesson race, I’m guessing), she captures him, corrupts him and unleashes him on his one-time allies. It’s a 3-minute long scene showing his capture and corruption, a 2-minute long scene of her laying out her motivation (They’re going the “Prime” route for Unicron, which is disappointing) and 4 minutes of Prime fighting his allies, only to be cleansed by the power of love (no, I’m not bullshitting). What is Megatron doing? Helping Quintessa, I guess. His motivation is skirted over very quickly and there’s no real defined threat for our heroes for the majority of the film, apart from the looming doom from the approaching death-planet. Why are the TRF still trying to pursue Yeager when there’s some clear apocalyptic events in play? Because of bad screenwriting. Why does the 1600 year time jump insinuate that the Transformers films take place some 50+ years into the future? Because Fuck you, continuity!! The overall plot and setup here is genuinely bad. Like, to a degree that I haven’t seen in a long time. And that’s a shame because despite all that, I found myself actually giving a shit about the main characters. Wahlberg on screen is always a delight, Hopkins is clearly having fun with how ludicrous of a setup the Transformers world is, the Autobots from the previous film all come back and are just as enjoyable as they were then, Hot Rod is surprisingly less annoying with a French Accent (I know; weird, right?) and Cogsman has some pretty funny scenes during Hopkin’s exposition on what the hell’s going on. There are also some setups that genuinely had my inner kid screaming with glee; like these giant spikes erupting randomly around the planet getting a payoff that, while making no scientific sense, is still really fucking cool. The other thing that makes this surprisingly watchable is that some of the bad scenes and setups are watchable in that “so bad, it’s good” kind of way. At one point, Megatron has a prisoner exchange with the US government and it’s played up as if these liberated Decepticons are about to join up with the Suicide Squad; nearly 30 minutes into the film and they’re busting out character cards and pop music. I was just waiting for Slipknot to be introduced with a single sentence and then immediately killed off.
It’s hard to come up with a score for this film. Because it is bad, make no mistakes. But it’s bad in a watchable way, if that makes any sense. You’re not really going to get bored in this film and I never found myself hating the characters. But the plot is all over the place, with branches that either go on too long or don’t go anywhere in particular. I think you absolutely shouldn’t bother if you’ve never actually sat and watched any of these films. But if you’ve seen them all already……ehhh….it could be worse, I suppose
4.5/10 Maybe catch it on syndication a year from now. Just don’t go in, expecting it to make any kind of sense