Directed by:
Michael BayCinematography:
Jonathan SelaComposer:
Steve JablonskyCast:
Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Laura Haddock, Isabela Merced, Santiago Cabrera, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, Peter Cullen, Jean Dujardin (more)VOD (4)
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The Last Knight shatters the core myths of the Transformers franchise, and redefines what it means to be a hero. Humans and Transformers are at war, Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of Transformers on Earth. Saving our world falls upon the shoulders of an unlikely alliance: Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg); Bumblebee; an English Lord (Sir Anthony Hopkins); and an Oxford Professor (Laura Haddock). There comes a moment in everyone's life when we are called upon to make a difference. In Transformers: The Last Knight, the hunted will become heroes. Heroes will become villains. Only one world will survive: theirs, or ours. (Paramount Pictures)
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Reviews (13)
151 minutes. Of that, some 60 minutes could go immediately. And cut the rest. And just leave the finale. And throw that out, too... The Fifth Transformers were a pain to watch. Michael Bay more or less does what you expect him to do, but otherwise it's a schizophrenic spectacle. At one point it feels like a kids' movie. then we get some big military sci-fi, followed by a teen comedy featuring Anthony Hopkins instead of Stiffler, and then there's some robot carnage for a while. Bayhem works properly. If it entertained you before, it will entertain you this time. Unfortunately Transformers loses on all other fronts. The characters fail to engage, the humour is hammy, the plot moves in weird jumps so that most of the time I had no idea what was happening on screen or whether Mark Wahlberg and Josh Duhamel were already buddies or still adversaries. And I really can't say that I remember anything positive from those two and a half hours. So, in the end, I was most impressed with the opening hour, which doesn't even try to pretend to have any purpose other than to introduce as many cute little robots as possible taking a toy store by storm. This cynical and pragmatic approach deserves respect.
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Under Michael Bay’s direction, Transformers has gradually crystallised into a supremely atypical contribution to the current line of franchise blockbusters. All of the other films based on comic books or toys take heed to offer adult fans a spectacle that, though childish at its core, is supposed to give the impression of being grown-up and serious in its overall execution (from the screenplays and casting to the style of promotion). Conversely, Bay serves up the exact opposite – ultra-unserious, openly irreverent and ridiculously overblown spectacles packed with affectation and kitsch. Even though this is indeed largely due to his bombastic, egomaniacal and macho nature, this is not some sort of desecration of the original franchise’s original form, but rather a faithful return to its roots and a reminder of what those who were weaned on the original series no longer want to admit. While the comic-book producers are rewriting history with new reboots that erase all of the inadequate aspects of the earlier incarnations, Bay’s Transformers seems to make a point of accentuating all of the haphazardness, degeneracy and problematic aspects of the 1980s that the nerds have already blissfully erased from their memory. But that’s actually how Transformers used to be. Only the question remains of whether Bay’s grasp of the franchise, which accentuates all of those residual ills, represents continuity with conscious subversiveness or whether Bay simply and fundamentally personifies them by coincidence. ____ There has been much discussion about how unfortunate acting icons and prominent character actors, like Sir Anthony Hopkins in this case, are forced to demean themselves (in return for a generous payday) in Transformers movies by cartoonishly making faces and delivering absurd monologues. That fits beautifully into the image of Bay as a desecrator of all values, but again, we can also see this as part of the franchise’s heritage. Eric Idle, Leonard Nimoy and Orson Welles took turns at the microphone for the first animated feature, while giant robots danced to Weird Al Yankovic’s “Dare to Be Stupid” and the movie’s most epic moment was underscored by Stan Bush’s cheesy rocker “The Touch”. ___ Bay can be seen as both a mainstream John Waters and a Hollywood version of Czech trashmaker Zdeněk Troška – a perverted admirer of conventional vulgarity and consumerist gluttony, but also a self-proclaimed promoter of traditional values. As in Troška’s case, in Bay’s works the authorities and scientists take the form of hysterically incompetent jacks-in-the-box, while the arrogant earthy heroes seemingly save everything, but are also portrayed as equally ridiculous, aggressive and sociopathic characters who treat each other with disdain. We associate Bay’s films with rampant ridiculousness, but are executed with an almost obsessive degree of craftsmanship. It’s thus all the more surprising that the coarseness and vulgarity of the preceding films is not present this time, at least not in such an obvious form. This surely has something to do with the fact that, for the first time, the screenwriting has caught up with, or even surpassed, Bay himself. From one instalment to the next, the series goes more against the grain and becomes gaudier and more absurd. Previously, it was enough for Bay to employ his own whims – whether shots of the Transformer’s testicles, the appendage reaching around the car and hitting a soldier in the face, or the malevolent objectification of Megan Fox in the first film, which successfully degrades the only positively depicted and active character in the whole series simply by how she’s captured on camera and how the other characters react to her. This time, however, the screenplay finally cast off the shackles and comes up with a phantasmagorical alternate history of the Transformers that is so wonderfully boorish that not even Bay can vulgarise it any further. Thanks to the screenplay, the film breaks away from the run-of-the-mill globetrotting nature of blockbusters, where photogenic exotic locations are supposed to bring the desired wow factor to the action. Instead of moving through space, it goes against the flow of time and, what’s more, does so without the shackles of reality and causality. Whereas Avengers: Endgame used this technique to express sentimental reverence, Transformers sets out like Monty Python to disparage (Stanley Tucci as the overwrought Merlin is extremely reminiscent of John Cleese’s acting performances). Paradoxically – judging by the reactions – viewers are willing to celebrate Tarantino’s playing around with historical figures and periods and to have fun with alternate histories like Iron Sky and even Wonder Woman, but for some reason they unreasonably demand realism and seriousness from Bay and his movies about giant robots financed by a toy company. ___ Under Bay’s direction, the ultimate perverse power of the blockbuster emerges in a work that devours itself to the point of being execrable. Except that Bay’s fifth Transformers is no mushy turd, but rather a turd with flawless structure, density and shape. Yes, it’s overblown, bombastic, megalomaniacal and silly, but thanks to that and the extent of those essential qualities, it is also perfect and beautiful. As it explosively blasts through the boundaries of corporate product, the fifth Transformers is the most unrestrained and, at its core, the most original blockbuster of the new millennium. Though there is some truth in the notion that Michael Bay has only been making variations of the same model throughout his career, we see in the level of craftsmanship of the scenes here that he is still stratifying his experiences while outdoing himself with new challenges. Much has been said and written about Bay’s editing and camera compositions, but little is made of the fact that, despite the tremendous amount of CGI, he creates the bulk of the action on set, thanks to which his action scenes have such an amazing physical dimension and tremendous wow effect. ___ Michael Bay is actually the anti-Nolan. While the creator of Inception and Tenet offers viewers intellectual blockbusters in which the spectacle is both sensual and cerebral, Bay delivers an overwhelming, bombastic overload of polished and ambitiously executed stupidity, shallowness, kitsch and pathos. The fifth Transformers completely bypasses the viewers’ rationality and values and aims straight for the depths of the unconscious to absolutely satisfy their needs with maximum degeneracy and gluttony. Bay serves us pure blockbuster bacchanalia.
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“I don’t know what you’re smoking in that pipe, man.” That's exactly what I missed in Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur – a three-headed robodragon! Michael Bay has never known moderation, nor has he ever had any reverence for narrative logic or respect for the limits of good taste, but he ostentatiously mocks them only in The Last Knight. However, he only rarely attempts to mask the imbecility of his ideas with self-parodic exaggeration and a knowing wink at the viewer. It is not enough to show him a drunken medieval wizard. He has to make him say something along the lines of like “I’m drunk” and turn up the bottle. One of the few hints of self-awareness is Cade’s remark about the striptease outfit worn by Viviane Wembly (a name straight out of a Moore-era Bond film), a holder of three academic degrees with perfect body proportions, who is dressed and photographed through most of the film so that we notice her legs, ass and breasts (expensive sports cars are traditionally also the objects of similar fetishisation). ___ The screenplay was apparently based on a recording of a conversation among a group of teenagers about everything that they would like to see in their dream movie. An update of the Arthurian myth with robot knights? Sure. The watch that killed Hitler? Why not? Dinobots breathing fire and vomiting police cars? You got ’em. Anthony Hopkins acting like an adolescent? Of course. This literary jumble was subsequently entrusted to a hyperactive child named Michael Bay, who has enough trouble sustaining an idea and maintaining causality between individual scenes, let alone across a two-and-a-half-hour narrative. Even though I conscientiously took notes throughout the film and paid maximum attention to what the characters were saying and doing, I cannot reconstruct the plot a mere hour (let alone a day) after the screening so that there aren’t numerous gaps in logic and a number of unanswered questions such as “how did character X get from point A to point B?”, “what role did characters Y and Z play in the narrative?”, "what made anyone assume that anyone else would act that way?” I really don’t know what John Turturro and a teenage girl with a robot conspicuously reminiscent of WALL-E were doing in the film, or why a Transformer named Hot Rod attempted to speak with a funny French accent (if we ignore the fact that Bay apparently finds national, ethnic and gender stereotypes funny). I suppose the filmmakers didn’t know either, assuming that the target audience (kids up to the age of 15) would not ask similar questions. ___ At the same time, however, I spent the whole time wondering if perhaps Michael Bay was ahead of his time and made an avant-garde masterpiece, the most technically sophisticated bit of Dadaist art ever, which viewers will admire in a few decades just as much as we admire Man with a Movie Camera today. If The Last Knight can evoke anything other than a feeling of apathy and intellectual defeat (because you have failed in your attempt to find any meaning or order in it), it is amazement at how it looks from start to finish (at least in 3D and IMAX). It remains true that few people are able to direct such epic, uncluttered and breathtaking 3D action scenes like Michael Bay, who can no longer be bothered to take the story into consideration. And why should he? Story is dead, long live the cinema of (purely non-intellectual) attractions! It was astonishing and I was royally entertained, but if I had to watch it again, my head would explode. 60%
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Maybe it’s a bit more moderate and not as soul-destroying as the fourth film, but it’s still the worst film of the series, and of Bay's entire production line. Everything that ever made his films bad is multiplied here to monstrous proportions. The appearance is as polished as a Mercedes prototype and as voluptuous as the curves of Oxford doctor Laura Haddock. Every (and I mean every, as I realized after an hour) shot is over-stylized kitsch, which is also subordinated to the fact that if the protagonists are supposed to stand in the counter-shot of the falling sun, the sunset will last the whole day (check your watch during the finale). And somewhere beneath the surface of this twisted fetish is a plot that makes not a drop of sense. The series has never been brimming with deep intelligence, but it has always balanced it with a certain amount of craziness and lowbrow fun (Devastator's balls). Here, the plot goes nowhere for the first hour, and with the move to England, it loses the last vestiges of normal creative progression about building, development, continuity, and at least a drop of logic. Everything is absent, and even though Anthony Hopkins feels this is one big creative misstep, he nevertheless enjoys it with sloppy elegance. And that's it. Michael Bay is the last knight of cinematic ridiculousness.
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Michael Bay goes on and on and on, and this fifth episode might give you the impression that you are watching the fourth or the third. The originality is gone, so is the scriptwriting inventiveness and, unfortunately, the initial charm and idea too. Wahlberg does his thing, and every episode has a hot chick in the mix – it's almost like a Bond tradition. One can't deny the visually pompous finale and the intended self-parody, but the intertwining of the story with the Knights of the Round Table, well, that was a bit too much, even by Hollywood standards. On top of that, the ending hints at one or two more episodes. God help us all.
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Gallery (141)
Photo © Paramount Pictures
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