And so we’ve finally made it. Michael Bay’s last Transformers movie.
After Age of Extinction made a billion dollars, Paramount asked Michael Bay and Akiva Goldsman to set up a writer’s room for cranking out a wider universe of Transformers media. As part of this plan, Bay agreed to come back for one last rodeo to kick off this new phase of Transformers media. So naturally, the movie underperformed and the studio pivoted away from the Bay series to develop a line of prequels instead. That’s a shame, because this movie goes to some absolutely crazy places, and I kinda wish we got a sixth movie to tease all of this nonsense out.
And once again, here’s a Transformers movie that I’ve already reviewed before. At the time, I recall this being a frustrating experience. Partly because, yes, this is another nonsensical Transformers movie with an asinine plot and no true reason for being, but also because it came so close to being genuinely entertaining trash. Seven years later? Not much has changed, though this time I can appreciate the craziness for what it is. Let’s review.
So the movie decides to take the absolute madman approach to storytelling and tell us in no uncertain terms that Transformers have been a part of human history for thousands of years. This is no surprise to anyone who remembers Revenge of the Fallen, but The Last Knight takes it a step further. The film opens in ‘The Dark Ages’ as King Arthur and his knights are fending off the Saxon horde and losing the battle. The wizard Merlin (Stanley Tucci!) brokers a deal with ancient Autobots for their help in winning the battle. They grant him a magic staff that serves no real purpose, because the Autobots just combine into a three-headed robot dragon and wipe out the Saxons easy peasy.
In the present day, super inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and his Autobot friends are hiding out in a desert junkyard as the government has once again declared Transformers a menace. Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) heads up the team with General Morshower (Glenn Morshower, who has now appeared in six Michael Bay movies, making him the stealth MVP of this whole debacle). Lennox and Morshower make a deal with Megatron, agreeing to tell him where the Autobots are hiding if he tells them the location of Merlin’s magic staff, assuming that he’s after it for some nefarious purpose and are smart enough to keep an eye on him about this kind of thing.
Meanwhile, because there’s always too much shit going on here, Cade winds up going on a wacky hero’s journey courtesy of Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins, having an absolute ball), who tells him he’s the last in a long line of knights tasked with protecting Merlin’s staff. Cade doesn’t believe any of this, but begrudgingly goes along with it and follows Dr. Wembley1 (Laura Haddock), a professor of ancient mythology and secretly the last living descendent of Merlin, on a quest to find the staff before Megatron does.
MEANWHILE! Optimus Prime’s quest to find and kill god2 is a hilarious failure. He winds up brainwashed by evil robot queen Quintessa, who tells him to go back to Earth, retrieve Merlin’s staff, and use it to activate Unicron, which is apparently also the Earth itself, while the dead planet Cybertron begins to assimilate itself into Earth’s atmosphere. In a NASA bunker, a scientist played by Tony Hale watches all of this unfold in utter disbelief, unable to fathom a solution to this ridiculous problem. It’s like a mini parody of Armageddon, it’s pretty good.
This is enough plot for four separate movies, but it seems like Michael Bay knew this was going to be his final at-bat with this series, so he really went for broke and threw everything his writers could come up with into one ridiculous, mind-numbing experience. I’m honestly kind of impressed because for as many off-the-wall plot developments as this thing has, absolutely none of them work together.
The only part of the movie that really works for me is the Anthony Hopkins plot. Hopkins is clearly enjoying himself, and turns every idiotic collection of words into a monologue worthy of the Globe Theater. Hearing him explain the history of the Order of the Witwiccans3 is hilarious, but you fucking believe every bit of it coming out of Anthony Hopkins’ mouth. Burton pals around with a pair of robots that are honestly some of the best Transformers of the entire series. There’s Cogman (voiced by Jim Carter), who’s like if C-3PO were a pissed off ninja, but also still a fussy British butler. There’s also Hot Rod (voiced by Omar Sy), who we’re told isn’t French, but speaks with a French accent anyway just because he likes it. The previous movie’s MVPs are still around, of course. Hound (John Goodman), Drift (Ken Watanabe) and Crosshairs (John “Bender Bending Rodriguez” DiMaggio) get to do their thing again, and I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I’m actually glad they brought back fun characters for this movie?
The Arthurian quest angle is a fun one for this series, which, to date, has done absolutely nothing outside of the “boy and his dog”/”alien war” crap for four movies straight. Part of me hates that this is how the Michael Bay series ended because you can tell he’s really enjoying playing around with this world, and if they’d gotten one more shot, I honestly believe Part 6 would have been a decent movie.
I realize I don’t have a whole lot to say about the movie this time around, partly because you can click back to my original review and read my honest reaction from when the movie first came out. That opinion really hasn’t changed all that much, but with a few years of distance, I think I actually appreciate Age of Extinction and The Last Knight more now than I do the Shia LeBeouf trilogy. Those movies were trying way too hard to tell a story and make us care about the human characters. Swapping in Mark Wahlberg for Shia LeBeouf was absolutely the right move, because Wahlberg already has this attitude like he’s completely over all of this shit, and that attitude carries through into the movies. It’s like the movies suddenly realized they didn’t have to try so hard to please everybody, and Bay could just settle in and do what interested him.
Or maybe I just really hated Sam Witwicky. Either way, I’m actually kinda sad this is the end of the line for Bay’s Transformers movies. The Last Knight pulled $603 million worldwide, which is a big drop from the highs of Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction‘s billion-plus hauls. That drop caused Paramount to switch gears for the next two movies. A standalone Bumblebee prequel set in the 1980s, directed by Laika Studios head Travis Knight, was already in the works, but the followup to that, 2023’s Rise of the Beasts, would be a sequel to Bumblebee rather than a continuation of the Bay series. Probably for the best, as it finally gave the series the chance to court younger audiences, who the movies arguably should’ve been for in the first place.
NEXT TIME: Michael Bay finally takes that Netflix payday.
- Assuming she’s somehow related to the scientist named Wembley from Age of Extinction, though like Stanley Tucci inexplicably appearing in both movies as unrelated characters, it could just be a huge coincidence.
↩︎ - I said it in my original review seven years ago and I still believe it: This movie fumbles the ending of Age of Extinction so badly. I feel stupid for even hoping Optimus Prime would actually find and kill God.
↩︎ - This is also where we get one final parting glimpse at Sam Witwicky’s fate, as Burton has Sam’s portrait displayed with all the other Witwiccans over the ages, including Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, a bunch of presidents, etc. But Sam looks absolutely deranged in his photo, and the fact that he’s been displayed like this heavily implies that at some point between Dark of the Moon and The Last Knight, Sam Witwicky was killed. I hope Cade Yeager killed him. ↩︎
Leave a comment