(Spoilers ahead)
It’s nonstop angry people in this film.
The Autobots are angry. The military is angry. Science people are angry. Every main human character is angry. The Decepticons are, of course, angry. Even a new polite-butler robot character has a split personality – the other half is angry. It’s like being around a perpetually angry person, it’ll put you in a sour mood.
I am a huge Transformers fan. I’m not a purist either, I like a lot of the alternative shows and comic books. I still have all my childhood G1 toys. One of my favorite sites to visit daily for news about the franchise is TFW2005.com. I’m a fan.
I am no fan of Transformers The Last Knight. Which I’ll refer to as TTLK from here on out.
Story:
First off, the entire plot was a weak attempt at adapting the 1986 Transformers The Movie ( the animated one). So, I have to make parallels between the two.
Everyone is angry in TTLK, as I said. There was no break from that. In comparison, The 1986 film begins with a huge amount of violence, followed by a lengthy scene of an Autobot and a human boy calmly fishing and talking. This would have been the welcome break TTLK needed. The 1986 film’s pacing was just about perfect, in comparison. They tried to take most of the plot, why not the pacing too? (I will admit, the dancing scene in the 1986 film was lame. But, not as lame as most of the humor in TTLK!)
Characters are added just because they need characters, and the naming conventions seemed last second. One angry robot had a Mohawk, they call him Mohawk. Another, Volleybot was angry he couldn’t get to the beach to play volleyball.
The rest of the cast is filled with a bunch of made up’ characters, what they thought were cool looking bots, and of course the cannon fodder no-name robots and people. They have an already established collection of characters from the history of Transformers to work with, and they do this.
A key character from the 1986 film, Hot Rod, is used… but only as comic relief. I don’t suspect this Hot Rod will become the new leader of the Autobots.
In the film Optimus Prime is the evil version of himself, Nemesis Prime. That was a good use of the fringe character. However, Optimus Prime is crazy, not only in terms of the plot but just in general. He speaks in a grandiose way, making no impact. Doesn’t lead. Has almost zero importance versus the human characters. I know why this is… it’s cheaper to film the humans do anything. In retrospect, Optimus Prime is insane in the complete Michael Bay Transformers series for all those same reasons.
TTLK also served as an attempt at making an interconnected storyline between all the Michael Bay Transformers films. To so this they introduce new characters with huge backstories related to the Transformers, then destroy everything about them at the end of the film. I find that to be a pretty limp mechanism to push the story forward.
Comic relief:
All comic relief, besides the cliché confused rambling and flirting, bordered on inappropriate. Did they not learn from the earlier films?
Military usage:
The military depicted in the film are angry hot-heads who are completely useless. They fail at every turn. The so-called “seal team” in the film hold their guns wrong. They endlessly shoot regular M16s at space robots knowing it has no effect. They did a zero amount of anything, then wing-suit out of frame at the end of the film.
Let’s talk about science in the film:
The human hero characters Cade Yeager and Izabella do some repairs on some Autobots, that’s ok. Later talking tech, they refer to parts as the thingy and doohickey. I know it was a joke. It was also the end of anything technical from them.
The so-called science in the film was dumbed down to the point of not being able to explaining anything. One “science guy” was angrily explaining science using the technical description “Jiffy Pop bag goes boom.” As a person of science, I was offended.
At one point magic is referred to as "science that one cannot understand." At multiple points that “science guy,” mentioned above, keeps saying “I believe in science, not magic!” Later science guy’s science fails, suggesting we should believe in magic, not science. But they said magic is actually science. I was excited about believing in something, not sure what exactly.
Ending:
The action packed ending was simply not thrilling. A predictable bore. If you are not sleeping by this point in the film… you’re missing out on some good sleep!
I have to stop. I don’t want to think about this TTLK anymore! These films need to end. It's like the Fox X-Men films; they were serviceable enough until Marvel came along and gave us original comic book storyaccurate superheros. There needs to be a Transformers reboot to the original story.
The film was a chore to watch. I was glad when it was over. And to be honest, writing this review was a chore too.
My Rating: 1.60 out of 5.00 TTLK is just plain lackluster.
They only received points for Peter Cullen and Frank Welker reprising their rolls as Optimus Prime and Megatron, respectively.