Film of the Week: Transformers – The last Knight

I’m not going to waste my time attempting to come up with some analogy, I’m going to be frank. The first 2 hours are terrible, but the last half an hour does pick up slightly. Full of nonsense one-liners that are trying to be funny, but just aren’t, annoyingly strategic camera angles so you can’t make out any details when the Autobots and Decepticons transform, and it only gets worse from there, and of course, the obligatory absence of any fleshed out plot.

The film picks up from where the fourth left off, when Optimus Prime is on a mission to find his creator and tell it to stay away from Earth. When he does find his creator, she turns him evil in an attempt to bring Cybertron, the Transformers home planet back to full strength. It’s a new angle, it’s something that the previous films haven’t done, so it was something to look forward to. Except Optimus was under the creator’s spell for about five minutes. One small battle with Bumblebee and he was back to his normal-self… well that was a wasted storyline.

Another plot point was six spikes are mysteriously popping out of the ground around the globe. No one can explain what they are, except for the creator who tells Optimus exactly what they are, or should I say, who they belong to: Unicron. I had to question what I just heard: “Are they implying Earth is Unicron?” That’s the point in the film where I legitimately sighed with disappointment. Unicron is the absolute rival of Cybertron. In the comics, he’s an extremely powerful transformer, a planet eater, a being that has been around since the beginning of the universe. The comics have written Unicron to be nearly unbeatable. The TV shows have stayed loyal to the comics, and Transformers: The Movie, complete with the booming deep voice of Orson Welles, Unicron was brought to life like nothing before could. Now, in the live-action film series, whilst not officially confirming it, but just implying that the Earth is Unicron is totally and utterly wrong and therefore unforgivable.

Since 2007, the live-action Transformers series has become somewhat a guilty pleasure for some. They know it’s bad, with nothing but fighting, but at the same time, we enjoy it. For some reason, we’re drawn to it, and therefore I can only acknowledge it as a guilty pleasure. The Last Knight has tipped the series over the edge for me, sunk as low as it could possibly go before the sixth one eventually comes out. Even implying Unicron is Earth butchers that of the everything the comics have built, everything the TV shows have loyally represented.

I am angry. I don’t care if I’m coming across as a fan-boy yelling at a live-action film series about a set of toys, I am angry that they would even consider the idea of Earth being Unicron, let alone actually implant it as part of the continuity, suggesting that Earth has been Unicron since the very beginning of the film-series way back in 2007. I understand it’s an adaptation, and so changes must be made to accommodate that otherwise it wouldn’t be original enough, but the previous four films have done that – not as well as I would’ve liked, but compared to this film, they are good adaptations – and so all this film needed to do was follow the previous four film’s examples, not scrap the very bottom of the barrel. I can only imagine how disastrous the sixth film will be after this considering it probably will pick up straight after the events of this film. It just wouldn’t make any sense if Earth actually transformed into the gigantic robot that is Unicron, because if that’s where they’re going with this, it just wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever, surely?

Can I say one good thing about this film? Well, the final battle was alright. The CGI wasn’t that bad. The shot where we saw Cybertron come in contact with the moon from Earth was an epic sight to see. That’s pretty much it – that’s all the good points I can squeeze from this disaster of a film.

I personally consider the live-action reboot of Power Rangers to be better than this, and all that film did was spend the first hour doing absolutely nothing, with a poor episode of Power Rangers afterwards for the last half hour. I felt bored watching that film, yet I consider it much better than Transformers: The Last Knight. The only reason why I didn’t do Power Rangers as the main film this week was because I have to ventilate my anger somewhere.

Sorry for the angry rant

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)