was able to attend the London premiere for Transformers: The Last Knight, meaning that we now have a full review for the movie! The spoilers are clearly marked out in the piece, and there is a buffer zone in this news write-up, but if you'd rather avoid them altogether, we have a separate discussion thread for non-spoiler movie discussion right
Also included below is a recording of the initial Michael Bay comments at the event, some images of the crowd, cast and set-up - in addition the ones already seen
- and at the very end, some spoilerrific listicles of likes, dislikes and WTF moments. Check it all out below, and let us now what you think once you've seen the movie for yourselves!
Well, that's (not) just Prime...
'Transformers: The Last Knight', then; Michael Bay's (really-this-time-honest) last hurrah, Mark Wahlberg's (self-professed) last instalment, possibly (please Primus, let it be) the last time we need to stage one of these interventions.
Yeah, this movie is 'that guy' - they 'am what they am', they're not afraid to make a song and dance about it, they simply will not be ignored and they're not changing (transforming?) for anyone. So every few years when they put on a big number, all of us long-term friends jump in and try to sort this guy out, calm 'em down a little...
Having started off with the best of intentions in 2007, two years later we're telling them to knock it off with the hyperactive humans whose contribution to plot forwarding is inversely proportional to their screen-time; we're also having to tell them to not say 'scrotum' in front of the children.
Another couple of years and once again, we're trying to get them to ease off on the vacuous humans taking up valuable minutes. We convince them to take their time with their next big production, have another year at it, 'work that rich thirty year old mythology, baby, yeah'! Oh. Underage sex references, transformium and Chinese product placement... Right. That's it. You're on your...
Oh. Okay. Big Imax 3D screen - great balls of fire over the Paramount logo. Dark Ages England. Indistinguishable from magic... Right, okay this isn't bad, this is... is that really Stanley Tucci?! I'm not sur.....HOLY FRIGGIN' NORA, IS THE CINEMA MOVING?! THIS IS INTENSE!! WOOOOOOH!!
And we're suck(er)ed in... again.
To be fair though, what TLK gets absolutely right is getting the Transformers on screen (at the same time as the core human cast) pretty much right from the get-go. Whilst clearly set in 'The Bayverse', the first 40 minutes or so kinda have the feel of an extended G1 cartoon episode... and I mean that in the best possible way.
While previous movies gave us a tease and then put most of the bots back in their playbox for half an hour or more, here we're quickly introduced to our 'character of the week', Isabela Moner's Izabella, and within minutes we see (and hear!) from all these new toys (er, 'important characters') including Sqweeks (who isn't annoying and if kids find him cute, fine), Barricade, Megatron, Steelbane (not name-checked), Drift and Hound. Oh and Bumblebee; yes, of course everyone's favourite peg-warmer is there...
And just like a G1 episode, Megatron's got a kerrrazy plan for some McGuffin or other, he's taking advantage of our human pals Morshower and Lennox (or is he? - *wink wink*) and... did... did you just see that? Did Megatron just do Suicide Squad? Is this film taking the proverbial? (The answer to that, given that one of Vivian Wembley's family is apparently played by the actress who brought Martha Wayne to life in another DCU 'classic', is yes. Yes it is!)
Like it or not, Bay's movies pretty much always have a 'humorous' element to them. It's a coping mechanism for the audience, I guess - a counterbalance to all the death and destruction and MORE ASPLOSIONS!! And we can all do the bitching and moaning thing or we can accept that, for better or worse, this is what you're gonna get in a Transformers movie. Except this time, it's ever so subtly different; your mileage may vary, but I genuinely found this movie to be quite self-deprecating!
The Suicide Squad 'thing' - you could write it off as a rip-off, or crap homage. But the Martha thing makes me think that someone's poking fun here. We all love Steve Jablonsky's incredible scores on these films, right? But haven't we heard 'Arrival To Earth' more than enough by now? Oh, not like this, we haven't! (Properly funny meta-gag!) There's so much tongue in cheek - Vivian shouting from inside Hot Rod 'at least tell me I've been abducted by one of the famous ones' (because who'd want to be kidnapped by Drench, amirite?)! Cogman doing... well, pretty much anything! You and I already know it - a 'British' accent (aka an erudite English form of Received Pronunciation) lets you get away with blue bloody murder...
...which Anthony Hopkins and Jim 'Downton Abbey' Carter do. Apparently part-scripted, part-improv, these two are just nuts. They can deliver all these ridiculous lines and still give it 'the Shakespeare' bit and make it sound like the end of days is upon us, all hope is lost but by jingo we're going to have a jolly good time while we stiff upper lip it out, what what! Cogman is the standout new character in this film - loyal servant and sociopathic crazybot in equal measure, he's as much of a split personality as TLK is itself.
And that's the rub - when it's being silly, TLK is good fun. When it (finally!) embraces the deep mythos of Transformers and attempts to induct all these 'popcorn-blockbuster-watchers' ever deeper into the world of Cybertron and all that, things become little more than perfunctory. Full disclosure - I love Peter Cullen as Optimus, even as Bayverse Optimus, but Dark of The Moon remains the only Transformers movie where he's been around for the whole thing (faked death aside - ooh, hashtag spoilers from 2011 there), and annoyingly he's not had any 'decent' dialogue since the first half of DOTM - most of AOE was expositional or 'out of character' (a debate for another time) and despite being in SOOO many trailers, he really doesn't figure until the last half, maybe third, of TLK.
Frank Welker gets possibly the better deal - Megatron gets to swan around being a nasty piece of work, the 'Izy rescuing Sqweeks' scene from the trailers shows his disdain for 'lower' forms of life, we even get a 'Decepticons, retreat!' for the fanboys. But his time playing off against Cullen's Prime is limited again, sadly. That said, there's one interaction between the pair that's hugely reminiscent of TF:TM (1986)... but no, not what you're thinking. It's a nice nod and if you're anything like me, you'll be cursing (even more of) the choices made by the writers of AOE. What could / should have been...
So by now you're thinking 'I've read a thousand words and I can't tell if you really liked it or not, lad'! To be brutally honest, I'm not sure either... no, that's not quite fair. As an 'Imax 3D experience', this was f-bomb-ing epic. Say what you want about Michael Bay and some of his choices, edits (there was a lot filmed and then cut for this film apparently) and sense of humour, but (ready the stock phrase for launch) his action sequences are absolutely phenomenal.
And as has generally been the case with each film, the scope of the effects have gotten bigger each time but Bay's also learned / chosen to reign the camerawork in as time's gone on - there's less crazy-breakneck panning and swivelling, there's some really nice occasional use of slo-mo to let you really see everything in all that glorious ultra high definition glory - it's why I can't quite remember all the nerdy bits you want to know (even though I wouldn't tell you all of them even if I could), you're just too busy taking in the spectacle. Is that style over substance? I guess, but if you can do style over substance in the best possible way, this 'film' does. Did I say film? Meh... I suppose it is, just about. It's really a thrill ride with some substance.
The 'substance' that is there is presented in time honoured fashion - Event brings McGuffin to Earth, heroes and villains battle for McGuffin leading to further McGuffin leading to final showdown. So far, so formulaic. Now for the science part - pay attention... and here we be getting spoilery a bit, so brace yourselves...
BIGGER SPOILERS FROM HERE
...right, you with me?
Transformers: Prime then. You watched it didn't you? Whaddaya mean, no?! It's the best TF series there's been (TF:A and BW fans can save that row for another day). Anyway, if you're not familiar with it, this'll all be new to you. If you are a Prime aficionado, and particularly if you're enough of an 'Aligned' continuity fan to have a copy of 'The Covenant of Primus' book / bible / massive insignia thing, then some of what's glimpsed in TLK will make sense. I say some, because to quote Optimus from G1's 'The Rebirth', 'every answer lead to a bigger question'.
We meet Quintessa, who I'm almost certain (three days time might prove me a liar here) refers to herself as 'the Prime of Life'. Now, that chimes very much with what we know of Quintus, one of the fabled Thirteen Primes, the first Transformers directly descended from Primus. The Thirteen were always meant to be 'omniversal' in TF fiction so that raises questions when Quintessa claims to be 'Optimus' creator'. I mean, you can interpret that in a few ways - literally (she might be, if Optimus isn't a 'Thirteen' Prime here), metaphorically (as the 'life-giving' portion of Primus, perhaps Quintus is responsible for all the Primes coming into being), or in a 'Hey, the writers just smacked out any old tosh' way again.
There's lots of other unanswered questions too - how and why did the Knights end up stuck on Earth? Sure, when you know what you know at film's end, you can start trying to hypothesise myriad reasons for the scenario we find our bots in, but it's not fully explained. Given how much expositional dialogue there is and how it (as per usual) starts to feel far too quickly rattled off by the end, that's not a great thing for those of trying to reconcile this series into something approaching a salient narrative - to be fair, if this writers’ room really is trying as hard as I think they are (but they don't want to overload and already bat-shit mental mainstream blockbuster), I think these spin-off movies and animated prequels and what not could actually be a lot of fun. But that doesn't help us in the here and now...
And where do the Dinobots disappear to again? And what's the point of Jerrod Carmichael's Jimmy? I mean, he's not terrible by any means, he's just kinda there, you wouldn't really miss him if he wasn't. Same can almost be said for Izzy, but she at least gives Mark Wahlberg the surrogate dad thing to do and they can both riff on the 'no sacrifice, no victory' thing that is very much back front and centre here.
Whilst I'm talking about fleshlings, I'd say this core cast is probably the tightest and most entertaining we've had in the series - Wahlberg, Haddock, Hopkins and Carter are all very good, Moner is perfectly cute in her scenes without going full Wesley Crusher to give the young'uns in the crowd their one to root for, Lennox and Morshower getting the best of the supporting roles, even if it's mostly exposition. For British TV fans, there's cameos from the likes of Rebecca Front (The Thick of it, Lewis) and IMDB swears Mrs Doyle from Father Ted was in there (one for the 2D re-watch or Bluray there) but Tony Hale (Arrested Development, Veep, Chuck) was hugely irritating as the NASA JPL guy - the (thankfully) brief scenes there are really quite irritating when they pop up and are pretty pointless in the grand scheme of things.
John Turturro is there as Seymour Simmons again too. On a payphone. From Cuba. Because. Because... John Turturro. I think. I mean, it's kinda cute that they recognise that Simmons had this all semi-sussed (somehow) from right back in the day... equally, I think they just wanted him to say scrotum again. Twice. Don't worry, it's not Devastator's. Or his. No, I think in a film that graphically destroys the star harvester pyramid from ROTF, crunches the ark from DOTM and describes the remains of Chicago and wherever else got trashed by the Decepticons as a 'no go area', it's a less than subtle suggestion that for the most part, the writers room want to wipe the slate clean, say 'bollocks' to much of what has gone before and go on to tell new stories off the back of this one. Yes, it unequivocally sets up a sequel. Yes, it's pretty obvious what they're going to have to deal with. And oh yes, there is a mid-credits sequence, so don't move too soon...
That's a lot of not a lot there isn't it? My 'review'. The film too, if you're being harsh. To be honest, this is the film AOE should have been - if you could somehow have had Cade save Optimus at the end of DOTM instead of taking a whole film over it, Lockdown appear and disappear at the start of this one with Optimus immediately setting off to find his creator, we wouldn't be missing much really.
The performances by the majority of the on-screen and voice over casts lift this to a higher level than the other sequels - if you concede that they all do pretty much the same thing in terms of story construction, this one (world-building issues and foibles notwithstanding) probably does it with the most style and panache. You know Bay makes **** blow up good, the car chases are fun, the scenery’s beautiful, the final set pieces are stupidly grand as they have to be.
The one possibly controversial conceit at the heart of this story, concerning Optimus... I enjoyed the pay off. For my money, it was a(nother) nice G1 Season 3 nod. Equally, knowing how some have bitched about a certain element of these movies for ten years now, I can understand if more than a few people really don't care for it - you'll know when you see it. For my money, it was preferable to (yet another) McGuffin.
Summary
In summary then, for those of you who perhaps wisely just scrolled down here and ignored all the ramblings - for better or worse, it's a Michael Bay Transformers movie, what the frigg were you expecting?! It is perhaps the best since the original. It is certainly the most spectacular to look at and the IMAX 3D thing certainly is not just marketing bollocks (there's that scrotum again), it really was astonishing. It is NOT (on its own) a jump forward in storytelling and mythology for this series - it DOES lay some massive groundwork but that NEEDS to built upon for this to have been truly worth all the hullaballoo. Harsh but fair, I'd have liked a bit more to love but there's less to hate than in previous outings. Go see it and don't think about it too hard til you've had time to rest your weary senses!
"Decepticons! Transform and Rise Up!" 
