Now five films deep, it’s hard to call the Transformers series anything more than
“barely narrative.” Sure, there are recurring motifs and a familiar ensemble of
returning characters, but any sense of a coherent story or mythology capable of
being grokked stopped in the end credits of the first – and best – installment.
With Transformers: The Last Knight,
director Michael Bay seems more than ever invested in the movie only insofar as
it allows and affords him the ability to stage whatever kind of bombastic set
piece he wants. This is franchise filmmaking as a bajillion-dollar playground
where he can build, play with, and blow up anything: a submarine, a castle, a
small town, Stonehenge. Why not? He can get away with this because he’s such a
great imagemaker. There’s nothing like seeing his brand of spectacle – the
grade-A Bayhem – carted on screen by the metric ton. Frame by frame this movie
sparkles with sunsets and vast vistas and impressive effects and awestruck hero
shots. But, of course, it’s also in service of a series that’s long since
passed into irretrievably convoluted gobbledygook. This iteration doesn’t reach
the heights of its predecessors, but it doesn’t scrape the barrel’s bottom like
their lows, either. A middle of the road Transformers
it is then.
At least the screenplay cobbled together by four writers
recognizes that the Transformer destruction playing out over the last four
films would leave the world rattled. We join the story in progress, with the
world terrorized by all the gigantic alien shapeshifting automotive robots who
have landed and continue to arrive on a seemingly unstoppable basis. With
Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) missing, the Autobots just roam the planet doing
whatever, getting into scrapes with Decepticons who still have their leader,
Megatron (Frank Welker). That Transformers are sufficiently mindless to need
their strong leaders to give them purpose is certainly strange, and makes them
dangerous. Humans have decreed them illegal, and deputized an international
paramilitary force to hunt them and anyone helping them. The conflict is that,
once again, there’s a world-ending calamity coming, provoked by bad ‘bots, and
the humans must allow the Transformers to fight it out for the fate of the
planet. Tagging along with the junkpiles gurgling crass one-liners in the
voices of beloved character actors (John Goodman, Ken Watanabe, Steve Buscemi,
Jim Carter) are the token humans: last movie’s hero (Mark Wahlberg’s
hilariously named Cade Yeager), the military liaison from the first three
movies (Josh Duhamel), and new characters like a scrappy orphan teen (Isabela
Moner), a scatterbrained Englishman (Anthony Hopkins), and a supermodel, in good looks and frequent inexplicable wardrobe changes,
historian (Laura Haddock). Bay needs these human-sized caricatures to sell the
plot’s stakes and scale.
There’s no need to recap the nonsense except to say it
hurtles through frantic globe-trotting (Chicago! South Dakota! England! Cuba!
Africa!) and alternative history digressions (Bay squeezes in a lengthy King
Arthur prologue and a World War II
flashback) on its way to the expected oversized explosive finale with alien
floating weapons and enormous energy pulses and endlessly complicated competing
schemes to destroy and/or save the planet. It’s cut together with manic editing
and an eardrum-quaking sound design. Get Bill Hader’s Stefon to describe it.
This Transformers has everything:
fire-breathing baby dino-bots, a potty-mouthed steampunk robo-butler, a
floating alien tech witch, comic relief characters played by funny guys (like
Jarrod Carmichael and Tony Hale) for whom no one wrote jokes, the United States
freeing evil robots on a Dirty Dozen work program, bean-bag-shooting drones, a
three-headed dragon built from a dozen interlocking mechanical Knights of the
Round Table, John Turturro. Any movie
that starts with Stanley Tucci playing Merlin (and yet he’s not an ancestor of
the character Tucci played in the last movie?) and gets to Mark Wahlberg
sword-fighting a Transformer (and that’s before Stonehenge blows up as the
nexus of ancient robot evil) is certainly following its own bizarre id. The
movie is all hollering and hurtling, cleavage and calamities, in between Bay’s
usual aggressive humor and loud exposition and leering camera ramping up even
small dialogue scenes as concussive clattering exertions.
By the end I stumbled out dazed, deafened, and defeated by
the volume (in noise and dimension) of the experience. But it was not entirely
unenjoyable to sit back and allow the pummeling. Bay’s genius, and it is genius,
is as one of the only modern blockbuster filmmakers who has figured out how to
make digital and physical effects work together to create a sense of weight and
scale. (Just look at any given Marvel movie, which will be competently handled,
and maybe even a better coherent story most of the time, but will have all the
tangible qualities of a CG laser light show.) Bay places figures – or spinning
bodies, clouds of debris, blasts of fire, and so on – in frames arranged to
provide contrasts, to accentuate size and scope, to emphasize motion and speed.
Then he sets out sealing the deal with stomach-churning heights and dips,
awe-filled low-angle shots of towering monstrosities, precision chaos. He makes
the IMAX screen a massive mural tribute to action cinema. A car chase is filmed
from as low to the pavement as possible, feeling the grit of the roadway as a
character hangs out the door while Bumblebee shoots an evil cop car. A squadron
of drones are placed just so to allow a character to leap from one to another,
saving himself after getting thrown out the glass back panel of an elevator. A
massive structure rising from the ocean drips waterfalls human figures must
dodge as they, soaked, run to the aid of their robotic allies. Though not as
memorable as the series’ high-water marks, these are sights you might find worth
seeing and feeling, but only if you’ve already committed to sitting through the
whole jumbled pandemonium anyway.
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