Transformers: The Last Knight does provide a creatives detour of sorts for this franchise in that this one leans far more heavily into outright tedium than its predecessors have. If past Transformers movies wrung plenty of incoherency out of dull action sequences, The Last Knight posits it can get just as much incoherency out of just endlessly lecturing its viewers. All of that lecturing comes nestled in the middle of a plotline so nonsensical I'm not sure I'll be able to recount it without sounding like an utter lunatic. But lemme give this a go.....so. Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), the protagonist of the fourth Transformers movie, is back to headline things this time around. He's hiding out a disparate group of Autobots in an automobile junkyard as a way to hide out from the government that wants to eliminate all Transformers.
He's not doing a very good job of hiding these robots because the government somehow knows exactly where Cade and the Autobots are hiding out in the middle of the movie. Anywho, after a pointless extended scuffle with Megatron (who shows up for a bit at the start of the movie before vanishing and then abruptly returning in the climax) and his forgettable minions, there's a mystical doo-dad that Cade obtains that gains the attention of Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) who is the member of a secret society entirely revolving around the Transformers. Cade must team up with an Oxford professor, Vivianne Wembley (Laura Haddock playing a character introduced as not being interested in a man before her primary character trait becomes wanting to bang Mark Wahlberg), a descendent of Merlin (Stanley Tucci), to save Earth from Cybertron, which a now evil Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) is bringing to wipe out our planet.
The premise of Transformers: The Last Knight is one lacking anything in the way of energy or fun. This isn't the fun kind of nonsense some summer blockbusters provide, this is just shoving whatever bit of Transformers mythos the writers found on the Transformers Wiki into the film and praying it all sticks together in the end. It does not. As weird as it may sound, 98% of the characters in this movie do nothing at all to advance the plot, it's basically just the Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock and Anthony Hopkins show. For instance, there's a young girl named Izabella (Isabela Moner), whose supposedly a bad-ass who can fend for herself until she abruptly becomes a damsel-in-distress for Wahlberg to save, that takes up a lot of screentime in the first half-hour that then vanishes until the massive battle climax where she and her overly-toyetic BB-8 rip-off robot Sqweeks (Reno Wilson) provide nothing of worth. Ditto for Jerrod Carmichael as an assistant to Wahlberg's character.
The various Transformers robots? Also useless. The only good thing these boring robots have provided with their presence in this movie is give legendary voice actors like Frank Welker, Joe DiMaggio and Tom Kenny the chance to appear in summer blockbusters. Otherwise, there's far too many of them with the barest amount of personalities attached to them (i.e. The Fat One, The French Stereotype, The Racist Japanese Stereotype, The Racist African-American Stereotype) and they all blend together in the action sequences. None of those facets are new to this series of course but it really becomes a pain to see potentially interesting robots doing nothing beyond spouting lame jokes and engaging in generic combat. Even the evil version of franchise mainstay Optimus Prime adds nothing of note to the plot, it's just yet another high-concept idea this wretched movie is tossing out and doing absolutely nothing with.
 |
| A moment of silence for five of the many characters that are entirely extraneous to the garbage fire that is Transformers: The Last Knight. |
Like I said, we're all accustomed to these Transformers movies creating a bunch of boring robot characters and overstuffing its cast. One new flaw (among many) The Last Knight brings to this franchise's table is that it's exceedingly boring. Bafflingly bad scenes like Sam Witwicky's Mom ingesting pot brownies or Optimus Prime threatening Grimlock's life to force him to be his soldier have been replaced with a second act almost entirely comprised of Anthony Hopkins delivering all this meaningless exposition on the extensive role the Transformers have played in human history. After only a few minutes, it began to feel like I was trapped in the most boring lecture ever and the fact that all of this information plays no real part in the third act only accentuates the awfulness of these monotonous sequences.
Even more anemic than that extensive backstory exploration is the fact that the camerawork, an aspect of Michael Bay's work that's a hallmark in the worst ways possible, becomes a true blue hindrance to this motion picture. Quick backstory; Michael Bay shot this movie in both IMAX and traditional cameras, with the IMAX cameras being the cameras used predominately. These differing cameras produce a radically different looking image in terms of aspect ration, with IMAX cameras producing a larger frame. For some reason, instead of doing the approach The Dark Knight sequels took where entire select sequences were shot in IMAX cameras, Bay and co. have chosen to alternate between the cameras from shot-to-shot. A normal camera shot of Anthony Hopkins walking down a sidewalk will immediately cut to an IMAX camera shot of Hopkins continuing his walk, a disorienting experience that occurs for the entire movie!
There's usually little in the way of rhyme or reason to explain why the aspect ratio is changing from shot-to-shot and it left me with a piercing headache as if experiencing this movie wasn't painful enough. If The Grand Budapest Hotel and It Comes At Night demonstrate the optimal way to use shifting aspect ratios, Transformers: The Last Knight is the nadir of such a visual technique. That's not the only place where Transformers: The Last Knight shows an incredible lack of craftsmanship in terms of its camerawork though as there's a bizarre lack of creativity in the way shots are framed and executed throughout the entire movie. Introductory shots, in particular, are super clumsy. Not only do these types of shot typically lack a sense of fun showmanship, they lack even coherency. Izabella gets introduced in an especially awfully composed frame that sets the stage for the hideous type of shot composition you see throughout this summer blockbuster with even the big destruction sequences in the third act lacking any sort of visual panache.
If even Michael Bay seems to be phoning in the way he shoots big-scale destruction sequences, you know this franchise has run its course and then some. You can also tell your watching a bad movie when Steve Buscemi is playing a scavenger Transformer and that potentially awesome character only shows up for one pointless scene. In case you couldn't tell, Transformers: The Last Knight is an awful and painful movie to watch, one that shoves characters, plotlines and exposition into the audiences face the way a sociopath would stuff a pillow over a sleeping man's mouth. Nothing in here even begins to approach fun and the way it clumsily handles its pervasively shifting aspect ratio and clunky camerawork mean this franchise has somehow reached a new low in its traditionally amateurish filmmaking. I still haven't talked about plenty of other noteworthy flaws (most notably, the abruptly introduced backstory that helps Viviane find important information in her Dad's study or the kiss Wahlberg and Haddock share that dethrones the Clark Kent/Lois Lane kiss in Man of Steel as the most inappropriately timed kiss in a blockbuster film ever) in the colossal misfire of a feature film that is Transformers: The Last Knight which ends up being the cinematic equivalent of eating an Arby's sandwich; it's terrible as you experience it and it leaves your body feeling pained and broken afterward.
No comments:
Post a Comment