Nerds That Geek Movie Review - 'Transformers: The Last Knight'

Written by Mike Cervantes

THIS IS THE EMERGENCY SPOILER ALERT SYSTEM...YOU ARE ADVISED TO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK...

It’s hard to get into this series without feeling at least a bit like your poor, disenfranchised former creative writing teacher: you know these movies not only exist, but are very popular, and as much as you would just love to hop onto the bandwagon and experience the sheer joy that many people receive from these films, you just can’t see past all the spelling errors. There isn’t a moment in the whole of this 149 minute film, that you fail to see an actor careen across the screen, arms up in the air like they’ve been set on fire, screaming at the top of their lungs the kind of dialogue you’d expect in a thirteen year-old’s fanfiction (in the film’s more generous moments).
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Even Anthony Hopkins, the immortal actor who at one point played Hannibal Lecter, is not immune to this treatment, as he is inserted into the Bayniverse as the fabled secret society of Witwickys that exists…purely for the purposes of plot convenience, playing second fiddle to a steampunk-styled Transformer named Cogman (Voice of Jim Carter) that alternates between acting like an English butler and randomly cold-cocking Mark Wahlberg for comic relief.

Heeehhhhhhh…Let me start at the very beginning.

Wahlberg makes his second appearance as garage mechanic and German beer-namesake Cade Yaeger, who has become a fugitive of the law after his participation in the previous film, made him the caretakers of the renegade Autobots Bumblebee, Drift (Voice of Ken Watanabe), Hound (Voice of John Goodman), and Crosshairs (Voice of John DiMaggio). While scavenging the remains of Chicago after the climactic battle, again from the previous film, he rescues scrappy street kid Izabella (Isabela Moner), though he is a bit too late to prevent the execution of fellow autobot Canopy from the military.

This is the part of the movie that you’ve seen in every trailer leading up to this film, suggesting, perhaps, that this is an epic Transformers fallout film set in the giant robotic post apocalypse. But as soon as you get that impression, the film immediately yanks you away to jolly old England where pessimistic English Lit professor Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock), is revealed by the above-mentioned mystic Hopkins that she is, in fact, the current descendent of the bloodline of Merlin, and therefore the only one who can excavate an ancient staff once belonging to him which possesses Transformers technology.

See, in 484 A.D. it is revealed that Merlin (Stanley Tucci) was a drunkard and a charlatan, who performed that which was once construed as magic by allying himself with a medieval 12-pack of Transformers capable of combining into the three-headed Dragonstorm. A prophecy keeps these Transformers in hiding until it becomes time for them to defend against a modern-day apocalypse, wherein Optimus Prime (Voice of Peter Cullen) and the entire planet of Cybertron is seduced by the villainous entity Quintessa (Voice of Gemma Chan) and descends upon Earth to suck all of its geothermal energy up like a battery. 

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Did you get all that? Because that’s the entire plot and I did a slightly better job describing it than the movie did.
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When you watch the actual film, you’ll find that you barely have a moment to breathe before you are yanked from one expensive-looking, partially CG set piece to another, as it pushes Wahlberg and Haddock into a love story with the same velocity as Megatron’s after-burners, leaving them barely enough time to make infantile jokes about Haddock’s tight clothing and inexplicable need to be married, before they find themselves transported underwater, partially into space, and towards the film’s final battle, in the sky amid several of Cybertron’s Earth-sucking tendrils.

Did I happen to say something about Megatron? Yeah he’s still around, obviously fed up with the fact he was being called Galvatron, and voiced by Frank Welker. He brings along Decepticons Nitro Zeus and Onslaught (Voice of John DiMaggio), Barricade (Voice of Jess Harnell) Dreadbot and Berzerker (Voice of Steven Barr). They’re rather inconsequential to the plot, as Quintessa and the possessed Optimus make out to be far better villains. They only exist as extra robots to eventually get trashed by the final battle.

The people who were looking forward to this film being Michael Bay-standard are in for the biggest treat, as, not only has he turned every single member of his main cast into barely audible Shia Labeouf stand-ins, but there is still ample space in the train wreck to include cast-regulars Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, and Tony Hale. The inconsequential flailing-scared black-guy sidekick role goes to Jerrod Carmichael, who…is an intern that answered a want-ad, that’s all you seem to need to know. Steve Buscemi is in here somewhere…am I missing anyone? Sorry, but it’s kinda hard to tell…

Needless to say the American military in this film goes from ritually hunting the good guys while supporting the villains at the beginning of the film, to becoming the only thing that stands between Earth and it’s annihilation at the end. Like a Michael Bay film tends to do.

The sheer longevity of the Transformers film series has led many of us would-be film critics to severly re-examine our understanding of films in general, as if we were somehow mistaken that these films weren’t….the decline of all western civilization. I personally remain somewhat optimistic, in the hopes that at one point the success of these films will lead to spin-offs, and those spin-offs will be as far away from the patchwork nightmare the Bayniverse has become. However, there’s still a largely unanswered question amidst this cinematic scrapyard: for all of its success, imminent sequels in the future, and its status as a cash cow for most big-named Hollywood scriptwriters, one has to wonder, who the hell is still watching this? 

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