Movie Reaction: Transformers: The Last Knight

Formula: Transformers - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Transformers: Age of Extinction

Directors don't normally stay with a franchise this long. In most cases, a director maybe returns for a sequel or plans a trilogy. After a while, he'/she wants out. It only took two Avengers movies to wear Joss Whedon out. Three Pirates movies almost broke Gore Verbinski. Peter Jackson made Lord of the Rings like one giant movie, then he was backed into doing the Hobbit movies when no other proven director wanted the job. Same with George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels. With the possible exception of Peter Jackson, no one I could think of has made five consecutive installments of a movie franchise, and in most of the cases that come close, there's a noticeable drop off in the quality of each film. It makes sense why. Being a director is a tough job. Almost no one works on a film as long as a director, who sees the project through from start to finish. On a $100+ million production, there's a crazy amount of managing of resources. To make even one film on the scale of Transformers, it's easy to understand why anyone would've had enough. Michael Bay has made 5 films with an average cost of almost $200 million. That is insane.

I'm not going to pretend that Michael Bay is some sort of auteur. He's not, nor do I think he aims to be. However, I am a Michael Bay apologist. Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon are all very entertaining, stupid action movies that audiences enjoy. Pearl Harbor aimed a little higher than Bay could pull off. Still, it's entertaining. Pain & Gain was little seen, but I liked it. The first Transformers is a good movie and I will die on that hill if I must. Transformers balanced everything Bay does just right. Good lead character, strong supporting cast, plenty of big action sequences with enough humor to relieve it, and the right amount of cheesiness to know no one was taking it too seriously. The series took a steep, WGA strike-impacted decline with Revenge of the Fallen, but bounced back OK with Dark of the Moon. By Age of Extinction though, there was no denying that the franchise had no idea what it was. The Last Knight compounds that and confirms that there is no reason for these movies to continue unless something major changes.

I want to explain the story of The Last Knight, but I can't. It's not that the story doesn't matter, I just couldn't follow it. It's something about the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron coming to overtake Earth. Before that, more Transformers keep arriving on Earth, creating a District 9 situation now that humans have learned how to fight back. Oh, and apparently the Transformers were responsible for the King Arthur legends. There's a dragon Transformer and a bunch of round table Transformer knights that defend this all-powerful staff, but there's also a knight that Mark Wahlberg discovers who makes Wahlberg "the chosen one". Hold on, there's two chosen ones: Wahlberg and this smokin' hot Oxford professor (Laura Haddock) who has an impressive lineage. I'm forgetting some things. Sorry, this movie is really long, or it felt really long. A team of writers was assembled to plan out this and the next few Transformers movies, much like a TV writers room. I actually like that idea. It's a more transparent way of doing what studios already do with scripts, and it's worth a try. So, they tried it, and they failed. The Transformers movies have always had a touch of National Treasure or The Da Vinci Code, but this is too much. Too complex and convoluted.

I get the feeling that the casting of the Transformers movies at this point involves sending out a bunch of offers to a large group of actors and anyone who accepts is written into the movie, regardless of the fit. Mark Wahlberg returns as the hero. Nicola Peltz must've declined to play his daughter again, so she's replaced with a scrappy orphan engineering prodigy played by Isabela Moner. Since TJ Miller was killed in the last movie, Jerrod Carmichael gets the wacky sidekick role. Josh Duhamel is still lurking around. I'm never really sure what side he's on. Anthony Hopkins is the British lord who happens to know whatever long-hidden secrets need to be revealed to move the story forward. John Tuturro and Stanley Tucci return for a couple unneeded scenes. Tony Hale has a bafflingly pointless role as a NASA scientist with no connection to any major character, who just shows up in TV interviews and NSA meetings to say that science, not magic should be used to stop the Decepticon threat. A bunch of Transformers are there too. I remember Optimus Prime (suspiciously absent for most of the film), Bumblebee, and Megatron. I couldn't tell you if the rest of the Transformers were new or introduced previously. Perhaps Transformers super-fans would know. No one in the cast was used well. I know I blame bad material rather than the actors a lot for poor performances (i.e. No actor could make this script work). It's especially true in this. The characters are thin. The development is minimal or unearned. The witty banter isn't witty. The serious moments are the bad kind of laughable. I realize that almost all of this could be said about every Transformers movie. Think of it like this: If it gets 30% worse with each movie, by part 5, that makes The Last Knight 24% the movie that the 2007 movie was*.

*Btw, I just made that number up, but if you compare the 57% to 15% RottenTomatoes scores (when I looked it up), that checks out.

What most bothered me is the lack of action sequences and the poor quality of the few that there are. The movie begins with a Medieval battle that is missing any context for the audience to care about it. The middle 2 hours have a couple quick, close calls: a car chase, a couple skirmishes, and some business with submarines. Then, the end has a huge battle involving an airbourne assault that's a cross between the climactic fights in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I legitimately couldn't follow what was happening during that. They were jumping from different platforms in the sky. The moon was destroyed. A few world monuments and surely millions of lives were lost. A character has to hold onto a staff in the ground while the Transformers fight their God (?). Mark Wahlberg gets a sword that let's him fight a Transformer. Perhaps it wasn't hard to follow, and I simply didn't care anymore. Is one really any better than the other?

I don't know if putting someone new in the director's chair for the franchise would make Transformers any better. I do know that it's clear that it's gone as far as it can with Michael Bay. Paramount has almost nothing else going for it*, so they are going to run the series into the ground to make every last dollar they can. This is the last of these movies I'll be seeing in theaters barring a Fast and Furious-level turnaround. Even the 8th graders in the row in front of me didn't seem impressed by the movie. This is the most dire installment yet and I cannot find a single positive thing to say about it.

*Transformers, Star Trek, and Mission Impossible are their only bankable brands right now. They lost Iron Man after the second film and Dreamworks distribution moved to Fox in 2013. They have a couple Viacom tie-in brands in Spongebob Squarepants and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that can make some money. The Paranormal Activity and Terminator franchises are effectively dead after their latest flops. Jack Reacher and John Ryan have limited ceilings. One of these days, I want to do a studio check in. I can say now that it's a race to the bottom between Paramount and Sony. 

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend