BurtonReviews Transformers 5 The Last Knight: I Charge You With Sensory Assault

(Image sourced from http://www.superherohype.com/news/379489-transformers-the-last-knight-poster-officially-released)

 

Here we are again. Another other year, another metallic CGI splodge hurtled at the screen from a screaming high velocity cannon that doesn’t care who or what is in its way, because its got too many explosions going on in its ears to hear anyone’s screams for mercy. Yes, of course I am talking about the Transformers franchise and its latest, and fifth sequel, The Last Knight. And if the word “Last” gives you hope that this will be the last Transformers film, sorry, a mid credits teaser makes that word all the more redundant. After a surprisingly well structured and genuinely exciting first outing for the Transformers, every sequel since has been met with much chagrin; with complaints of nonsensical plots, flat characters, unintelligible fight scenes, and lets be honest, a last act that even though you know its objectively bad, you cant help but let your inner child gawk at in primal glee.  So will The Last Knight be a carbon copy of this awful assembly of features, or a surprising revitalisation of the franchise after its future was given resuscitation in the form of a round table of writers, including Robert Kirkman, to try and take the Transformers in a more fan and critic friendly way. Sadly I went and found out.

(Video Sourced from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4nrFuJedyk)

 

The thin but oddly convoluted story of The Last Knight sees a world of Transformers hating humans being constantly bothered by the buggers, as these not-so in-disguise robots keep crashing down on our heads as we just try to make the daily commute to work. Now with a Anti-Transformers task force in full effect, and being buddies with the walking-talking automobiles being basically illegal, it ain’t looking good for our fallen heroes. But don’t worry, Mark Walberg is here to save them, returning as inventor Cade Yeager. But when a on-life support Cybertron comes barrelling for Earth, a long forgotten prophecy of the end of days seems to be coming to fruition, and an evil Optimus Prime is leading the metallic apocalypse charge, we must once again rely on the beings we have been hunting down for so long. Seriously, after four movies don’t humans get that the robots who have stuck around and haven’t tried to level a city are the good ones. Sheesh.

As I mentioned in the synopsis, the plot for The Last Knight is oddly thin, being a race to find an object that can stop the on-coming metallic apocalypse, but at the same time convoluted, with random up-until now unknown in-universe facts being thrown out left right and centre, and the way to the mystical object being way too padded out with unneeded twists and turns, that if taken out could have made a much more cohesive and streamlined experience.

And these new nonsensical facts don’t even line up with the already established continuity of this franchise. Sure, paintings of a dragon, and that actually being a Transformer, but propaganda of a Transformer being involved in WWII, and a fully, decked out Transformer being depicted helping a boat come into harbour make the shocked and surprised reception to Optimus and his crew in the first Transformers make no sense. People of this universe would have definitely seen, or at least heard murmurings of these ever-morphing beings, so why the utter cluelessness of the first film? Once again, padding where it just simply did not need to be.

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And that padding is painfully dreary I would say for 1 hour and 50 minutes of the 2 hour and 29 minute runtime of the movie. Michael Bay does have an eye for explosive action, and I will get onto how he takes full advantage of his abilities later, but for every single fight scene placed in the middle of this movie, I was left bored and not really sure what I was looking at. From start to finish this movie is just noise, constantly screaming at you to think it looks cool, but not only did the fights feel unnecessary at most points, but every single one lacked punch. After you’ve experienced 50 explosions at once within the span of 60 seconds, the next explosion feels less weighty, and so does the next and next, until these ‘epic’ explosions feel more like farts I the wind that come as fast as they dissipate with no feeling put into them, or effect coming out of them.

But, there were a few times that the explosions were as cool as they were made to be, 40 minutes of them were pretty damn good in-fact. The decidedly different and oddly interesting opening for the film, taking place in the era of King Arthur’s reign, was a great start for the movie and actually got me really interested in what may happen next. The new setting for the franchise and melding of old-timey warfare with giant mechanical robots was unabashedly cool, and I wanted to spend more time in this era and see how the round table would be effected by the presence of these mechanical knights. But then we were yanked from that interesting set up and thrown into the monotony of the current Transformers timeline.

But that current timeline did get freakin’ cool in the movie’s final set piece. With two planets head-butting each other as the background for the conflict, huge swaying structures for fighter pilots to glide their way through, and a beaches of Normandy-like battleground sprint to the McGuffin of the movie, I’m not going to lie, my heart was pounding. Not only for the first time could I make out what was happening, recognise characters that I actually kinda cared about, and fully understood what said characters were barging towards for the first time, but Bay’s talent for capturing immense and catastrophic destruction shined bright and screamed through this scene very loudly, but for the first time I was in the trenches with these cannon armed robots, so I didn’t mind because I was screaming right along with them.

(Image sourced from https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/06/transformers-the-last-knight-the-spoiler-faq/)

And in that final battle scene, the camera behaved relatively well, shaking this time for a reason, the HUGE FU*%ING EXPLOSIONS OF TWO PLANETS COLLIDING, instead of the seemingly arbitrary reason they were throughout the entirety of the movie. Scenes of simple dialogue are cut to shreds and each millisecond cut is nauseatingly exclamated by a camera that shakes like it just really, really needs to pee.

And all of these problems are before I even mention the constantly changing aspect ratio every scene was plagued by. With half the movie filmed with IMAX cameras and the other not, the movie within scenes the screen would be constantly flipping from one aspect ration to another, thicker black lines above and below the screen to a full screen experience. This visual incontinuity not only yanked me out of the movie at every possible moment, but also just felt and looked sloppy, like they made a mistake using two types of cameras for one scene and couldn't go back now.

This frantic spirit that seems to haunt every angle of this film only adds to the seemingly flat plot and character developments demonstrated in this movie. Like a fish trying to wrangle out of your hands, the emotional beats or story revelations of the film just never seemed to land. Not a fact or explanation is given the appropriate time to sink in for the audience because before any kind of mental process to try and unpack the shed load of information that has just been dropped on my head from a great height is allowed to happen, the movie has already catapulted you through three more scenes that just had three more expositional lectures that were filmed like the cameraman mistook the camera for his shake-weight.

(Image sourced from http://comicbook.com/category/transformers-5)

So, in a couple words, this movies pacing is frantic and unbearable. Speaking of bloody frantic, why does every character have to be movie all of the time, especially the CGI creations on screen. Just like the aesthetic style of the Transformers, with their cogs and bolts constantly rustling and turning visibly in their body, for some reason these same characters that already visually have a lot going on, can’t bloody stay still for a single scene. These unnecessary gestures, or tussles with team mates that has the impact of two paper-bags fighting, just makes every scene they are in look messy and feel like Bay thinks he has to have a character do something on screen that is extravagant or quirky every second of the film, otherwise the audience will check-out. We won’t, that is if the movie gives us a compelling plot or set of characters that make us want to stay. Think anyone can do that in these films, anyone?  

Because all we are getting right now are characters that have, once again, unnecessary quirks in their personality that if weren’t there, would make them feel like much more believable characters instead of gimmicks that jingle a set of keys in-front of the audiences face every five minutes. Take Cogman for example, a British robot that when we first meet him seems like a straight-laced butler. If he were to stay as this archetype, comedy would have come from his straight-laced view on these bombastic and out of this world events. Instead though, Cogman is made into a crazy, anger management case that sings opera from time to time. Why? The character has a cool, unconventional design for a Transformer, and his setup seemed like an actually great addition to this already overblown cast of 2 dimensional characters, but then the movie had to inject him with more arbitrary quirk, that instead of making him more compelling, just made him the class-clown that just isn't funny, a statement that can be said for all of the forced and attempted humour in this movie.

And with so many human and automobile capable characters in this film, it’s really a problem when I didn’t really care about any of them in the grand scheme of things. And that’s mostly because not only are they all fighting for screen time like pigeons over one crumb of bread, but in a high stakes situation, I can’t bloody tell where they are. Should I be excited by a badass move they are doing, or scared for their all-spark, frik if I know.

(Image sourced from http://thehypedgeek.com/check-new-hopefully-final-trailer-transformers-last-knight/)

To help combat this, this franchise should really cut down its cast iron-knuckled characters, and this fact painfully made obvious by a scene showed a million of times in the trailers. In the fight between Optimus and Bumblebee, it’s basically just those two, you know the characters relatively well, you know the conflict, you can tell what is happening in the fight, and being able to hone in on this small fight, well small for giant transforming robots, was great, I finally felt like I was being engrossed into the film. Then they had to go and ruin it the next second by having 12 or so similarly grey and bland Transformers rush in and make the scene another twirling CGI mess. Less really is more in this case, and I hope we get more of that in the future, instead of just trying to cram more and more scrap into this already over loaded skip.

So, nope, this is neither the last Transformers movie, or the first good Transformers movie. The problems that plagued the last iterations of the franchise are apparent here, as loud and proud as ever, with seemingly no sign of stopping. But in everyone of these movies there is always a stretch of time where things are strangely coming together and you can’t help but let your heart race with the beat of gunfire on screen and have your eyes widened by seeing two massive robots have a brutal rock’em sock’em match. But is that all we want from this franchise?

Transformers 5 The Last Knight = 4/10

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