New ‘Transformers’ film a crazy ride
And probably the best of the bunch
(8) TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT. Directed by: Michael Bay. Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Anthony Hopkins, Isabela Moner, Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci. Showing at: Baywest, Boardwalk, Hemingways, Walmer Park. Reviewed by: Robbie Collin.
IT’S a shame that Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century theologian, didn’t live to see Transformers: The Last Knight, if only because he would have found out what actually happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.
For the climax of Michael Bay’s new film – or rather the last 45 minutes of it, because from the first shot of prologue onwards, the whole thing is nothing but climax – the director smashes two planets together, a catastrophe we’re told entails “casualties in the tens of millions” as entire cities are gouged from the earth’s surface with the nonchalance of a fingernail running across a bar of soap.
By definition, this is the largest action set-piece Bay will ever pull off – unless in his next film he just finds two bigger planets, or throws in a moon for good measure. But the sequence, in all its literally earth-shattering preposterousness, is a cinematic experience no other filmmaker could have concocted.
Fighter jets arc from background to foreground in lock-tight formation, planes of rock plough into each other at neck-craning angles, giant robots slug each other with swords and rockets as one surface tilts crazily into the next.
Critics aren’t supposed to get excited about Transformers films because they’re garish, pandering, chaotic, materialistic, hawkish and salacious – as if these are necessarily bad things.
Well, sorry: if you’re not staggered by the technique on display here – the stuff that sets Bay’s work miles above the Fast & Furious, X-Men: Apocalypse and Tom Cruise-chasing mummies of this world – you’re not paying attention.
Bay’s first live-action Transformers film was released in 2007.
The four films to date have made billions of dollars, regardless of what critics write about them.
Try engaging with them sincerely and people think you’ve lost your mind.
In this new one – probably the best of the bunch – we discover the Transformers took on the Third Reich and fought alongside King Arthur, with Stanley Tucci cameoing as a boozy Merlin in the Dark Ages-set prologue.
Meanwhile, in the present, Anthony Hopkins appears as the 12th Earl of Folgan, a noted Transformers buff whose robotic butler Cogman is voiced by Jim Carter, Downton Abbey’s Mr Carson.
Stand by also for the Bay version of a strong female character, as played by Laura Haddock: a young Oxford professor who’s described, both accurately and approvingly, as an “overeducated ivory tower princess in a stripper dress”.
Mark Wahlberg’s character is still called Cade Yeager.
Hopkins, a newcomer to the franchise, provides a manically odd comic turn. And when he descends into the gut of a submarine and starts waxing rhapsodic about “the sour-sweet musk of men at close quarters”, you’re either irrevocably on board, or on board the bus home. – The Telegraph