Review of Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) by John M — 28 Sep 2017

My brain is so numb to these movies now. So did you know that the only reason that the Knights of the Round Table were so successful was because they had transformers on their side? Well, that's just the way that it was back in the day, but the point is that our heroes of today are going to need some relics of the past if they want to stop Earth from combining with Cybertron.

.. or something. I don't know. At this point if you're expecting me to be able to seriously explain plot points of this story, you've come to the wrong blog. I just went back and reread my review of Age of Extinction, and I was actually surprised about how much I forgot about a movie that I saw only three years ago.

All of the storylines from the different movies start to blur together as the time passes, so can The Last Knight turn a corner and make itself memorable? No. No it cannot. If there is one thing that you do walk away remembering about this, it is just how stupid it gets.

I can deal with Wonder Woman helping out in World War I, but you know what I can't get past? A transforming car helping to kill Nazis, never mind a mechanical dragon assisting Merlin and King Arthur's court in battle.

The story is just lazy and inane, and it always feels like the lackadaisical writing is an insult to your intelligence. It eclipses any positives about this movie, and believe it or not, I do have a couple of nice things to say about this.

I like the girl that they promoted heavily in the trailers, Isabela Moner. I think she's a talented little actress, but they completely mislead you into thinking that she is going to play a bigger role here.

There's a giant chunk of this in the middle where she is just M.I.A., and the same could be said about a big reason that most fans are coming in to watch this: Optimus Prime. The other positive I have to say about this is that I do feel that the action is shot significantly better, and that's me speaking about the series as a whole.

For the first time ever, I could actually tell what was happening instead of a furious blur of car crash metal. That said, I still didn't care about any of the characters or what was going to happen to anybody, so it ends up being a moot point.

This is the first movie not to expand in run time length, which I am all but positive was a studio decision, (I believe the original plan was for this to be three hours long). Please believe that I appreciate that, but it is still bloated as can be at two and a half hours.

The story never makes any fluent sense at any point, and this movie makes traveling by map look like something that Indiana Jones would only do in case of an emergency. They are all over the world in a moment's notice, from Cuba to England, and from the Badlands of South Dakota to Stonehenge, they are navigating the globe like an A.

D.D. afflicted Superman. The one thing I take solace in is that people are finally starting to wise up about these movies, because this didn't make anywhere near what the studios expected it to, both domestically and internationally.

Sequelitis is in full effect, and I am happy to see audiences finally speaking with their wallets. None of the jokes hit, and I don't like any of the characters, human or otherwise. Anthony Hopkins is pretty bad in this, and it really seems like he just accidentally wandered off the Westworld set and thought he was in the right place just because there were robots.

I hated the comic relief British sidekick robot, and he is just a small notch above Skids and Mudflap from the second movie. When it started rewriting history, that's when I abandoned all hope, and the small positives are drowned in an ocean of problems.