A lot of action and spectacular special effects are the main elements of the Michael Bay films. He is a director who configures his thunderous products based on the thriller and the most effective action, unable to keep the camera still, with emphatic and very tasteful tone of the idle. But do you remember that ten years ago he took the caricatures of Transformers from the 80's and turned them into bright beings full of meaningless moving parts? Well, what Bay did with the 80s Transformers is what they just did with the franchise's fifth movie, The Last Knight.
The last knight is so overloaded with stories that he has so much useless information in every scene that there is no space for anything else. There is no space for character's development, logic, enthusiasm or even true emotion. But the Transformers films are not characterized by the power of their stories; They just want to be huge and meaningless action movies.
Attention spoiler, if you have not seen the movie, do not continue reading. The movie is something like this: In ancient England, the magician Merlin finds a Transformer ship and asks for his help to save his people. This discovery and the subsequent link with the Transformers, changes the course of history, which has been developed with the significant help of the giant robots. Meanwhile, Optimus Prime travels to its home planet, Cybertron, to find its creator, the evil Quintessa, who wants to revive her planet by sucking the life of Earth.
Did Bay forget something? In fact, yes and a lot. The description I just made of the basic plot does not even mention star of the movie, Cade Yeager (played by Mark Wahlberg), the young heroine (played by Isabela Moner), supporting actors like Anthony Hopkins ( As the leader of the Witwiccans), Jerrod Carmichael (Cade's assistant), John Turturro (retaking his role of the first three films), among many others. Nor have I mentioned most of the Decepticons from the previous films, other Autobots from the saga, new Autobots like Hot Rod, Sqweeks, a rare butler character named Cogman, or the new Decepticons, who are so quickly introduced and removed from the film that is almost as if they were not there.
There is also a love story, a parent-daughter subplot, a new anti-Transformers government agency, Dinobots, Baby Dinobots, Stonehenge monument, mysterious horns growing off the Earth, a cliffhanger that appears halfway through the final credits ... and the list goes on and on.
Somehow, all this and more is condensed into a movie that, with 2 hours and 26 minutes including credits, is the second shortest Transformers movie Bay has ever made.
It is unfortunate that award-winning actors like Turturro are completely forced in history and absolutely superfluous. Time and space, on the other hand, is largely unattended, as the characters go from Chicago to North Dakota in minutes and Cybertron crashes with the moon without any consequence. The characters sometimes disappear for hours. All this leaves huge holes in the plot, and there are also references to the previous films that will disconnect the brain a good time.
After two hours of headache trying to make sense of the story, it was really nice to turn off that part of my mental process and just enjoy the awesome final scene of action, which includes falling planets, zero gravity, parachuting, helicopters flying out of spaceships, lots of robot action against other robot, a dragon with three heads, and more.
Do not get confused, Transformers: The Last Knight is not a good movie. In fact, it is rather the equivalent of five bad movies grouped into one. If there is one good thing to say about the film is that its immense ambition, extension and epilogue are worthy of respect. I wish we had removed 60 or 90 minutes of the "story", so that the film would have felt more choreographed and digestible to take us to fully enjoy that incredible action-packed end.
This has been my small critical contribution to this movie, now I would like to know your opinion to expand the analysis.
Regards, Antonio.