Transformers: The Last Knight

Optimus Prime has gone to find his home world, Cybertron, and in the meantime, more Transformers have been arriving on Earth. While a faction in the army has been created to take down the Transformers, others are protecting them, including a teenage girl named Izabella (Isabela Moner) and single father-inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg). Yeager is forced to go on the run with a number of the Autobots when the army teams up with the Decepticons, and as if there weren’t already enough problems, Cybertron is approaching Earth.

Last month, we saw what medieval times would look like Guy Ritchie-style in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. With The Last Knight, we get to see a medieval setting Michael Bay-style and as such there’s plenty of fire, explosions, slowmo and dramatic dialogue in the film’s opening scene which establishes how the relationship between humans and Transformers goes back hundreds of years, when Merlin (a brief but amusing appearance from Stanley Tucci) called on the Autobots' ancestors, the Knights, to help King Arthur in battle. A dragon transformer arrives, because it’s cool and why the f*** not?

As has been the case for the last four Transformers movies now, the film opens with the human race mourning the fact that Optimus Prime is gone – in spite of the fact that every times he reappears, he is told he isn't needed and just makes things worse. Interestingly, with the plot of Transformers leaving Cybertron for Earth, you never know but in years to come, the film may be read as a commentary on the refugee crisis. One shudders to think that the Transformers movie could have some academic function in the future…

While Michael Bay probably doesn’t care too much for critics, otherwise he would have stopped making these movies a while ago, he does seem to have taken some of their key issues on board as objectifying shots such as presenting female characters through up-the-bum shots or dedicating entire sequences to slowmo running boobs-jumping action seem to have been done away with. But never fear, for ‘true’ fans of the franchise, the female romantic interest (Laura Haddock) is pretty much made up to look like a perfect cross between Megan Fox and Elizabeth Hurley. And it’s not totally objectification free either – we get to see Mark Wahlberg’s abs.

Other characters we have on hand include Izabella, the plucky, resourceful and caring teenager a la The Hunger Games. There’s also the mad scientist in Anthony Hopkins’ character – who the film tries to squeeze some comic relief from, but who is as funny as cut grass (not faulting Hopkins here, but the dire script). And there’s a Walle-esque robot named Sqweeks that the kids will want to buy miniature figures of after the movie.

Look, this is Transformers, and everyone knows the story is just there to facilitate all those excessive special effects and action set pieces from car chases and submarine escapes to battle sequences. Chunks of metal fly about the place and there’s some artificial effort to squeeze in emotion. The films continually push the boundary of the logic of the Transformers species. In this movie, baby dinobots appear which begs the rather ridiculous question of where do baby Auobots come from? There’s also a number of completely pointless scenes, such as one showing romantic interest Vivienne playing polo, which could have easily been cut out of the film’s superfluous 150 min running length. And there are a couple of shots of Trinity library which, while it’s cool to see Dublin in a Transformers movie, are really not necessary. But on the bright side, it’s not as terrible or convoluted as the last Transformers movie. Plus if nothing else, it’s so shameless in its absurdity as to be mildly amusing, at times.