‘Last Knight’ transforms nothing of interest
“Transformers: The Last Knight” is two and a half hours long and consists mostly of machines fighting.
Often the machines are fighting other machines. At other times, the machines are fighting people. These fights go on and on as the sound track blares, soars and thunders, and there’s also clanking, grunting and the occasional explosion.
It’s all about as exciting as watching two drawings fight each other on a computer monitor.
As directed by Michael Bay and written by a handful of creative geniuses, it’s often impossible to tell which machine is good and which is bad, but sometimes there’s a dead giveaway. For example, on occasion one machine will indicate, in a roundabout of sort of way, that he opposes the continuation of human life on earth; whereupon the other machine will come back with a pithy retort. And from that we can glean our preferred side in the contest. This helps sometimes to engender something approaching a rooting interest, but not much.
“Transformers: TLK” takes place in a near future where things are even worse than they are right now. Entire areas of the planet have become pretty damaged, and more Transformers are landing on earth every day, and we don’t know why. Do you hear me? We don’t know why! But they keep coming! Oh, no! What can it mean?
Well, I’ll tell you. Apparently, there is another planet out there that is dying, but these robots have a plan to revive their world. Brace yourself, it’s a plan we’re not going to like, not one bit: They want to suck all the life, juice and energy out of the earth, through a process which would, of course, result in the death and destruction of every living thing.
That’s either the worst idea for a sci-fi movie, ever, or it’s a metaphor. If it’s a metaphor it can still be bad, but at least if it’s a metaphor, we can try to figure out what the metaphor is referencing. If it’s not a metaphor, then the movie has no excuse.
“Transformers: The Last Knight” is narrated by Anthony Hopkins and actually begins with a pre-credits sequence set during the Dark Ages, with a battle between King Arthur and some rival power. Bay films ancient combat as though it were World War II — things actually blow up, which is a neat trick. But the Arthurian connection to the present struggle is revealed only later.
Mark Wahlberg is back as Cade, a drifter who understands the machines and gets along with some of them. In Chicago, he makes friends with a group of kids, including a 14-year-old girl named Izabella, played by a talented young actress, Isabela Moner, whose emotions are close to the surface. But soon, there are machine attacks and nonstop battles.
The Chicago section of the film goes on forever, until the grim suspicion grows that the intention here was to make a two and a half hour movie at any cost, even with only 90 minutes worth of material.
Things improve, however. Cade goes to England where he and we meet the English earl played by Hopkins. He’s a fun character, an eccentric who seems to be talking nonsense part of the time. But he also has a way of slowing down and becoming dead serious in that very Anthony Hopkins sort of way, a manner that lets you know he knows and don’t even think of doubting him.
The movie also gets a lift from Laura Haddock as a British historian specializing in the Dark Ages. She joins Cade on his adventures, but as soon as those adventures intensify, “Transformers: The Last Knight” goes back to being a lot of noise and nonsense.
Give credit to Bay for one thing, though: He knows something I didn’t know, and something even most directors don’t know. His insight can be expressed in a simple rhetorical question: Why give an audience one plane crash when you can give them five?
You would think that an audience might notice that five is a little on the monotonous-excessive side. But Bay is gambling they won’t, and he’s been winning bets like that for years now.
One more small point, only because it’s interesting. In one scene, Hopkins sneaks into 10 Downing Street and forces a meeting with the Prime Minister, who is played by Mark Dexter, an actor who’s a dead ringer for David Cameron. It just a reminder that our movies are still a year behind the times. They have no idea what’s been going on.