2017’s “Transformers: The Last Knight”, directed by Michael
Bay.
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Anthony Hopkins, Josh
Duhamel, Isabela Moner, Jerrod Carmichael, Gemma Chan, Peter Cullen, Frank
Welker, Jim Carter, John Goodman.
What is it about?
“TLK” brings back Mark Wahlberg, estranged from his daughter
as he lives in isolation protecting Transformers from an oppressive human
society. Here, Transformers are largely outlawed and living on the run, or
already in prison for crimes past committed. It’s learned that a talisman and a
staff that have been around since the Knights of the Round Table could defeat
the threat of Quintessa, the creator of the Transformers who plans on sucking
earth’s energy to revive the dying planet of Cybertron. Optimus Prime, who is
initially seen floating through space, is having some identity issues,
and humanity isn’t supporting the robots to succeed in defending their planet
for them. Will the robots in disguise and military powers be able to save the
planet from evil robot doers?
Why is it worth seeing?
For the past decade, audiences have been treated to Michael
Bay’s vision of movies based off of children’s toys from the 1980’s. Spanning 5
movies, Bay has (unusually) made all of them up to this point, imprinting his
now standard music video ambience combined with spinning and swooping action
set pieces. After a lot of vertigo inducing scenes, Bay has gone on record to
say that this is the last Transformers that he will ever do.
The narrative introduced here (by 7 writers) is Merlin (a
spectacularly miscast Stanley Tucci) was a drunk, and stumbled onto
Transformers that could help the overmatched Knights of the Round Table defeat
their foes, setting up the premise that Transformers throughout time have
served as guardians of the planet, such as helping defeat Hitler in WWII, and
now their ancient technology can help the Transformers prevent their creator
from destroying the earth/Unicron. Aided by a loony Knight (a hammy Anthony Hopkins) who has a robot
butler, and a Oxford Professor, Megan Fox Laura Haddock, Wahlberg and a
homeless youth, Isabela Moner, flail about with the military and CGI friends for
2.5 hours to save the planet.
Comprising almost 13 hours of footage over 5 films, if
there’s one thing I do respect about the series, it’s how Bay and company
refuse to follow the 1986 film or cartoon TV series and comic books, and
instead haphazardly go out of their way to alter the franchise’ s characters
and arcs. (Somewhat) iconic characters are blithely turned into toasters who
rap, or Lamborghini’s who are pretending to have a french accent, or planets
that have small man issues. However, this irreverence goes nowhere, with the
draw of the 1986’s children’s cartoon being it’s coherence, arc, and logic in a
fantastic world where cars can fly and dinosaurs are ideal robots.
As commented on before,
Bay’s action scenes are incoherent here, too. Regularly, it is difficult to see
whom is fighting, against what, for which purpose. Bay introduces a great deal
of characters and reintroduces a number of more, but because of his preference
for energetic movement over narrative or logic, it is not clear whom is in the
film in terms of characters who keep showing up to muck up the works. Robot or
human alike, they blather about, change alliances on a whim, and sometimes get slashed
or blasted to smithereens, or just dropped out of the film altogether. Not
always though! Sometimes they stay in the film for the entire time and we don’t
get to know them whatsoever!
One of the problems with Bay’s direction (and the production
of Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Tom DeSanto, Don Murphy, and Ian Bryce), is that they
don’t seem to care about the human characters, but also seem to disregard the
Transformers- an issue since that’s what this series is based on. The scale of
the various robots doesn’t make sense (how large are they in relation to their
surroundings?), and the humour falls flat as the increasingly irritating jabber
jots muck about in essentially a blurry metallic haze of CGI whoopie cushions.
With Bay taking his skill set elsewhere, the Transformers franchise has the
opportunity to hire somebody else, who gives a damn about their movie’s characters,
and wants to give us sentient machines whom are worth watching. For the first 5
movies, the Metacritic aggregate
40% score proves critics are wishing for more effort. But at nearly 4.5
billion combined worldwide gross (so far), will Paramount care?
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