Review of Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) by Kiwijinxter — 01 Jul 2017

OK I'll admit it. I've NEVER watched Transformers (or any movies with good CGI or action) for some amazingly gripping story in the vein of Lord of the Rings. I'm happy with a simplistic story, as long as the CGI and action is fantastic. This is why I've totally enjoyed (and defended) Transformers 1-3. Transformers 4 was starting to get a bit unwieldy but it still pretty much "did it" for me.

Enter Transformers 5. I'm absolutely familiar with Michael Bay's style now, and yet, with Transformers 5, despite fantastic CGI and action scenes, I felt that this is the worst Transformers (and it hurts me to say this, as I'm such a huge Transformers geek - I have my full DVD set of G1, I have fanboy toys like the Transformers Masterpiece MP-10 Optimus Prime and Ultimate Bumblebee, etc.) for the following reasons:

1) The story this time was so terribly broken and scattered that it actually interfered in my enjoyment of the movie. It jumped all over the place, and each scene felt like they were from different movies! Suddenly we're in the medieval age, then we're in Nazi Germany in WW2, then we're in the modern day with very little rhyme or reason.

2) For the first time, I no longer felt much connection with most characters - robots or human. When Optimus Prime and Bumblebee appeared in the first Transformers movie, I always felt a connection e.g. I felt proud of Optimus Prime and I loved Bumblebee. In Transformers 5, the robots were all reduced to an afterthought... Anthony Hopkins should've added huge gravitas to the movie, but the plot was so poorly done that even Anthony couldn't do nothing to breath life into the story. The young girl was a great actress, but unfortunately was hardly used in the movie.

3) I expected Unicron. I didn't get Unicron. Nuff said. Even Cybertron was such a poor lifeless, soul-less planet as it approached earth. It just felt like a planet-sized meteoroid crashing into earth.

4) There's no real (or formidable) villain as such in the movie, so there was no strong opposition. Just a silly little Contessa - looked menacing but had little brains or power.

It's not all doom and gloom. Cogman the sociopath robot butler to Anthony Hopkins certainly injected some character into a rather bland set of robots. And the female lead is less dumb than those from the previous 4 movies. Fantastic action and CGI, naturally. I'm not willing to rate it lower than 5 because it is Transformers, and Transformers is close to my heart. However, for me to rate a Transformers movie a 5 speaks volumes as to how disappointed I was with how a terribly badly scripted story actually interfered with everything else. Sad, but I hope Transformers 6 (which I presume will feature Unicron) will actually redeem the series (just like Pirates of the Caribbean 5 did). Michael Bay, you should try and do just a little better - we don't need you to add more to the story, you have all the strands - you just need to tie the strands up a bit better.