Transformers: The Last Knight Review

An attempt to see The Mummy turns into my first theatrical Transformers experience. How'd it go?

The fifth installment of the Transformers franchise features the acting talents of Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Anthony Hopkins, Isabela Moner, and Josh Duhamel as our lead humans.

As for their Autobot friends, there's Peter Cullen, Erik Aadahl, John Goodman, Ken Watanabe, Jim Carter, and John DiMaggio. The films two antagonists are voiced by Gemma Chan as Quintessa and Frank Welker as Megatron. Kinda sad they replaced Hugo Weaving with Frank Welker.

For parents of children under twelve that are wanting to see this film, I suggest checking out the Kids-In-Mind article for the film. While the gratuitous female shots are dialed down way back from previous installments, the violence is of course present as well as the profanity, which does include two unfinished f-words.

I'm not a huge fan of the Transformers series. I don't hate the franchise. It's just not something I have a huge interest in, but I gladly watch the films. I've seen the previous four films. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. This is probably in between. It has both moments of greatness and moments that are frustratingly bad.

Cade Yeager

First things first, Mark Wahlberg is a welcome change over Shia LaBeouf. With Age of Extinction and now The Last Knight, Mark Wahlberg continues to be a great new lead for this series. I'm not a huge fan of the actor and I haven't seen him in a lot of films, but this is a pretty good role for him.

That said, Mark Wahlberg, and almost everyone else, has no character development, no defining moment, nothing that makes their character interesting or deep. There's one, but I'll get to that individual momentarily. Although it's a Michael Bay movie, so what do I expect. Despite no real arch, Mark Wahlberg has a lot of great acting in this, which is surprising for a movie like this. For a lead, he was pretty entertaining and funny at points. I enjoyed his action sequences and Mark Wahlberg had a lot of skills that he displayed here. The relationship between him and Bumblebee was fun. It didn't have the same dynamic that the Autobot had with Shia LaBeouf's character, which is why I couldn't get invested in their relationship a whole lot.

His intern that he hired for help was just bad. I believe that his intention was to be the comedic relief, but Mark Wahlberg and some of the other Autobots were already doing that, so he had no purpose in this movie. More than that, I found nothing funny about him and he was a dead weight that was thankfully dropped a third of the way in.

Vivian Wembley

Now Laura Haddock as Vivian Wembley impressed me. Yeah, she had a few annoying moments along with terrible dialogue at times, but for a female lead in a Michael Bay movie, this is a real improvement from the previous female leads in this series. I'm glad Michael Bay turned down the gratuitous focus on how the female lead looked and actually gave the individual an arch. I understood what the character was trying to achieve and I ended up invested in the character. She may not compare to recent female leads like Wonder Woman, but the character was really solid.

There was great acting that came from Laura Haddock. I don't believe I've seen her in any major role, but I really enjoyed the character. Her character's history was a little convoluted and it felt like something obvious rather than something surprising. The romance between Cade and her was super forced. I could've done without it and I think that it would've been better if they had just remained two people working together rather than having a romantic relationship. Not every major male and female lead have to be in a romantic relationship. It was a drag on the film, but necessary it was not.

Izabella

Bringing child actors into these blockbuster films is always a risk. It all depends on the individual's acting quality and how well the director guides the actor. In the case of Isabella Moner as Izabella, boy did this not work out. Just like that trailer for this film, which she stared in, her whole role was like that, but worse. Her character's only purpose is to create problems for Cade and have her little robot destroy that obstacle so that the heroes can do so and so. That's it. She wasn't need other than that purpose. I didn't find her character necessary at all.

Sir Edmund Burton and Cogman

Anthony Hopkins is a well-respected actor. However, he's unfortunately brought into an unwinnable situation. Other than delivering exposition on many topics and trying to crack a few jokes, both the script and Michael Bay give Anthony Hopkins nothing to do. He has these expositional lines, yells at a few British leaders, and does a few action-y things. I never understood his purpose though. If you're gonna use Anthony Hopkins, you use him in a meaningful way. With the way his character was treated, any other actor could've done those scenes. It's all the filmmakers fault though. I didn't Anthony Hopkins brought anything to offer in this film. It just seemed like the film needed a respected actor so they chose him for the role and gave him nothing meaningful to do. Maybe a second viewing will help, but for now, his character wasn't fun to follow. I hate to say it, but I him boring.

Cogman on the other hand was awesome to follow. I loved his sense of humor along with his British accent. The actor who plays him, Jim Carter, is from Downton Abbey so I'm not surprised. It was a blast though to hear a British robot so that's part of why I loved this character. The other part was that he was so funny and meta. There were a few scenes where he'd interrupt his butler's expositional lines with either organ playing or hilarious jokes. I enjoyed him better than most of the other Autobots in the film.

There was one thing this film missed out on. He said he's an Autobot, but he didn't transform into anything and I was curious on what he could turn into. Even the little bot that Izabella had could turn into a motorized scooter, so I kept wondering on what made him a transformer. We've seen before that both Autobots and Deceptions can turn into things beyond their normal and vehicular forms so I think it was a missed opportunity not to see what Cogman could do in that department. He still had a lot of great action scenes.

Optimus/Nemesis Prime

In the real scene, Optimus is back to normal.

I don't understand something. Why is it that Optimus Prime, or Nemesis as the infected version calls himself, was so heavily featured in the trailers, yet all of his scenes are the same that's in the trailer. That's right, if you've seen the promotional material for this film, you've seen 95% of Optimus's screen time. There's a few bits and pieces missing though, but it's not enough. In fact, the other characters literally say many times in this film "Where's Optimus?" and I'm wondering the same thing. For two times now, Optimus has only had a few scenes in the film, but is missing for the rest of it. The first example being Revenge of the Fallen. Though I guess you can say that in that film, at least the filmmakers had a reason for him being MIA for most of it. This time, there's no reason for him to be missing. I could've done without the whole "find the mcguffin" storyline so that the plot can revolve around Optimus turning bad because of Quintessa.

As for the evil half of the whole, there's Nemesis for that one battle against Bumblebee and nothing else. There's that and the one scene that preceded the fight and of course Optimus is brought back using Hollywood cliche (pick a number). There's even scenes in the trailer with Nemesis that aren't even in the movie like image to the left. Since the character was treated so, I felt that it was a waste of time hyping the change in the trailers.

Action, Effects, and Score

There are three I things I want to see/hear when I watch a Transformers movie. Exciting action sequences, crisp visuals, and a well-done Steve Jablonsky score. Needless to say, I got all three.

Like any other Transformers movie there are adrenaline-fueled action scenes featuring human on bot, car against car, and transformer against transformer. There are all here and make for an exhilarating experience. Some of them are a bit overlong, like the film itself, and the cinematography during some of the sequences made it confusing and hard to follow. Being a Michael Bay film, The Last Knight has a ton of things going KABOOM! Luckily, his trademark explosions aren't used too much like previous installments.

As the picture on the right displays, the visuals are crystal clear. It makes the action scenes a lot clearer and the 3D visuals amplify that tenfold. Thanks to the effects work, a lot more detail can be seen in the locations and on the transformers themselves. There were one or two times where the effects were a little undercooked. Like they need a bit more in the rendering machine. Those times often happened when worlds started colliding with each other. Color is a main ingredient and because of the spectacular effects, the color is almost picture-like and that's something Michael Bay never seems to fail at.

He's not a John Williams, Hans Zimmer, or Michael Giacchino, but Steve Jablonsky has done some pretty decent scores, with the Transformers films being the most prominent. I would cite the original and Dark of the Moon scores as pretty noteworthy. I believe that The Last Knight is probably up there with those two scores as being memorable in their own way. The booming orchestra help create an epic feeling that can be felt many times throughout the film. When the action starts, the music's also there and it amplified my enjoyment of those scenes, because it's a well-composed score. I enjoyed it for what it turned out to be. Even though it was in the trailers, I enjoyed the concluding tracks the most because those were played during the moments where there was little-to-no speaking, and the sound effects didn't overshadow the score.

Grade: D

My main problems had to do with the misleading marketing, the unnecessary number of characters, and the fact that once again, the Transformers aren't the stars of their show. It's worked a few times before, but with this, the whole premise of the movie is about the Transformers and their past. So it's frustrating when they continue to focus on the human characters instead. If you're wondering why I didn't talk about, Bumblebee, Megatron, or the other Autobots and Deceptions, it's because they're barely in it and therefore, there's nothing to say about them.

If you're a Transformers fan, you've probably seen it already or you have plans to see it. For everybody else, it's a hard pass. I saw this in 3D. It's the best way to see this film, so if you're gonna see this in theaters, see it in 3D. Although, I'd give a word of caution. When I saw this film in 3D, the projection didn't fill up the whole screen, so I ended up watching this in a smaller aspect ratio, which made the constant switch between different types of ratios annoying. I don't if that was because of the projection or if that goes for all theaters that see it in 3D. That's why I'm giving the warning.

So that's my review of Transformers: The Last Knight. If you have seen the film, what did you think of my review and if you haven't seen this, do you plan too?