Transformers: The Last Knight
变形金刚5：最后的骑士
Directed by:
Michael BayCinematography:
Jonathan SelaComposer:
Steve JablonskyCast:
Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Laura Haddock, Isabela Merced, Santiago Cabrera, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, Peter Cullen, Jean Dujardin (more)VOD (4)
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Transformers: The Last Knight is the fifth instalment in the film series based on the 1980s cartoons. With the battle between the human race and the Transformers raging on, mechanic and single parent Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) forms an alliance with English Lord Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) in an attempt to figure out why the Transformers keep returning to Earth. Meanwhile, Autobots leader Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen) learns he was responsible for the death of his home world Cybertron. Desperate to make amends, he returns to Earth in search of a mysterious artefact which could bring Cybertron back to life and will seemingly do anything to achieve his goal. The cast also includes Laura Haddock, Stanley Tucci, Isabela Moner and Tyrese Gibson. (Paramount Home Entertainment)
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Michael Bay has finally eradicated even the last remnants of his greatest enemy: logic. He serves us a divine 151 minutes of eclectic spewing of unspoken / discontinuous motifs. This is finally an abstraction that was only in its infancy in the previous half-timing hypnagogic installation. A spectacular ADHD attack that begins at the end and then progresses to an admitted self-parody. At the same time, it contains the mutated bacteria of several films, which the director's feverishly working mind will never allow to overcome the embryonic stage and moves on. Bay's ability to move in the narrative chaos and find a robotic order in it is liberating to surreal. Finally! The first film that gives the impression that it was created by a combination of a random generator of trending motifs and a wonderfully ill human mind. It may seem like a recession on my part, but I mean it. Compared to Transformers 5, other blockbusters feel like a careful game of certainty. I couldn't tear myself away from this eruption of confusing, yet strictly arranged shapes; I wasn't bored for even a second. The best, most detached and strangest Bay film. I urge anyone who gives it five stars to call me on the secret line. I will pass them on silently to Witwicky. They are the people of the future. Or the people of a world that will never happen. Robots write human history and chat with John Turturro on Cuban beaches. All the power to imagination and Optimus!
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Digital Bayfest. Each shot could make great wallpaper. Tony Hopkins in cool slow motion strides toward Stonehenge to destroy Megatron, a metal dragon spewing fire, Bumblebee slaughtering Nazis, Optimus chopping off heads etc. a visual feast from start to finish. It’s just that it’s so exhausting to watch. No solid ground to grip on to, the storyline is confusing. It jumps from character to character. Actors roll off their lines, but say nothing to the viewer. The finale is probably the biggest caning ever in Transformers, but it’s so damn difficult to reach it. Even the TV cartoons thirty years ago made more sense. Jablonsky’s music however is awesome. He gave it his best.
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Maybe it’s a bit more moderate and not as soul-destroying as the fourth film, but it’s still the worst film of the series, and of Bay's entire production line. Everything that ever made his films bad is multiplied here to monstrous proportions. The appearance is as polished as a Mercedes prototype and as voluptuous as the curves of Oxford doctor Laura Haddock. Every (and I mean every, as I realized after an hour) shot is over-stylized kitsch, which is also subordinated to the fact that if the protagonists are supposed to stand in the counter-shot of the falling sun, the sunset will last the whole day (check your watch during the finale). And somewhere beneath the surface of this twisted fetish is a plot that makes not a drop of sense. The series has never been brimming with deep intelligence, but it has always balanced it with a certain amount of craziness and lowbrow fun (Devastator's balls). Here, the plot goes nowhere for the first hour, and with the move to England, it loses the last vestiges of normal creative progression about building, development, continuity, and at least a drop of logic. Everything is absent, and even though Anthony Hopkins feels this is one big creative misstep, he nevertheless enjoys it with sloppy elegance. And that's it. Michael Bay is the last knight of cinematic ridiculousness.
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“I don’t know what you’re smoking in that pipe, man.” That's exactly what I missed in Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur – a three-headed robodragon! Michael Bay has never known moderation, nor has he ever had any reverence for narrative logic or respect for the limits of good taste, but he ostentatiously mocks them only in The Last Knight. However, he only rarely attempts to mask the imbecility of his ideas with self-parodic exaggeration and a knowing wink at the viewer. It is not enough to show him a drunken medieval wizard. He has to make him say something along the lines of like “I’m drunk” and turn up the bottle. One of the few hints of self-awareness is Cade’s remark about the striptease outfit worn by Viviane Wembly (a name straight out of a Moore-era Bond film), a holder of three academic degrees with perfect body proportions, who is dressed and photographed through most of the film so that we notice her legs, ass and breasts (expensive sports cars are traditionally also the objects of similar fetishisation). ___ The screenplay was apparently based on a recording of a conversation among a group of teenagers about everything that they would like to see in their dream movie. An update of the Arthurian myth with robot knights? Sure. The watch that killed Hitler? Why not? Dinobots breathing fire and vomiting police cars? You got ’em. Anthony Hopkins acting like an adolescent? Of course. This literary jumble was subsequently entrusted to a hyperactive child named Michael Bay, who has enough trouble sustaining an idea and maintaining causality between individual scenes, let alone across a two-and-a-half-hour narrative. Even though I conscientiously took notes throughout the film and paid maximum attention to what the characters were saying and doing, I cannot reconstruct the plot a mere hour (let alone a day) after the screening so that there aren’t numerous gaps in logic and a number of unanswered questions such as “how did character X get from point A to point B?”, “what role did characters Y and Z play in the narrative?”, "what made anyone assume that anyone else would act that way?” I really don’t know what John Turturro and a teenage girl with a robot conspicuously reminiscent of WALL-E were doing in the film, or why a Transformer named Hot Rod attempted to speak with a funny French accent (if we ignore the fact that Bay apparently finds national, ethnic and gender stereotypes funny). I suppose the filmmakers didn’t know either, assuming that the target audience (kids up to the age of 15) would not ask similar questions. ___ At the same time, however, I spent the whole time wondering if perhaps Michael Bay was ahead of his time and made an avant-garde masterpiece, the most technically sophisticated bit of Dadaist art ever, which viewers will admire in a few decades just as much as we admire Man with a Movie Camera today. If The Last Knight can evoke anything other than a feeling of apathy and intellectual defeat (because you have failed in your attempt to find any meaning or order in it), it is amazement at how it looks from start to finish (at least in 3D and IMAX). It remains true that few people are able to direct such epic, uncluttered and breathtaking 3D action scenes like Michael Bay, who can no longer be bothered to take the story into consideration. And why should he? Story is dead, long live the cinema of (purely non-intellectual) attractions! It was astonishing and I was royally entertained, but if I had to watch it again, my head would explode. 60%
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The fifth outing of the Transformers is more spectacular, more over-the-top, more daring and more bombastic than ever before. Screenwriting-wise, it's again a solid piece of crap, but for once it's taken it up another level and pulls the Knights of the Round Table, Merlin and Stonehenge into the Transformers mythology, making it feel at times like a rip-off of The Da Vinci Code, National Treasure and their ilk. I was amused by a couple of scenes with the immortal butler, whereas with Anthony Hopkins I wondered all along if he even needed a similar role. The minor role of the returning John Turturro was mostly unnecessary. Overall, it was an audiovisual orgy with no soul that too often wallowed in opacity. Besides, by the end I was sick of the repetitive "I am Optimus Prime!" and all the other delicious lines that abounded throughout the film. I also resented the rather untapped potential of Quintessa.
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