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MOVIE REVIEW: FTN reviews Transformers: The Last Knight

June 22nd, 2017 by Andrew 1 Comment

Transformers: The Last Knight
Director: Michael Bay
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins & Josh Duhamel
Running time: 2hrs 29mins

Humans and Transformers are at war, Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of Transformers on Earth.

So, fifth Transformers movie (not counting the original animated one) and fifth time around with Michael Bay at the helm and I guess we’ll get the main question most of you will be wondering out of the way – has he learned anything? Well… not really, no.

Bay continues to pulverise the audience with an onslaught of cheesy one liners, loud explosive-riddled action micro-edited to within an inch of its life and characters we care little or nothing about. Only this time, because over 80 per cent of the movie was filmed with Imax 3D cameras, it’s bigger. Sorry Michael… it’s BIGGER!

Admittedly, on the plus side this has to be the least leary of the five movies, with only Mark Wahlberg’s Cade Yeager, Josh Duhamel’s Lennox, and yes, you guessed it – John Turturro’s Simmons making their return (Stanley Tucci also makes a frankly bewildering appearance), so there’s a lack of female totty for Bay to ogle, even if there are a couple of new female roles. The casual racial stereotypes are also toned down incredibly, even if there is still some use of one character for stereotypical attempts at humour. I say attempts because… they aren’t hugely successful.

Then there’s Sir Anthony Hopkins playing a descendant of a secret order that has been keeping the history of the Transformers on Earth secret (apparently Bumblebee was helpful fighting the Nazis in world war two – we know this because we see it in a flashback presumably as a setup for the forthcoming Bumblebee spin-off movie, because it literally serves no other purpose in the movie), and now decides to get involved. Hopkins is clearly giving an ‘I’m so embarrased, but the pay cheque is so huge’ performance, but I guess you can’t blame him, Hopkins gotta eat.

Similar to the previous movies, The Last Knight rewrites its own history whilst rewriting ours in its first act, before then spending the majority of its second act on car chases and the usual pointless over the top action sequences (with the exception of Cuba, the world now treats ALL Transformers as illegal so the military now hunt the autobots too – Yay! More reason for pointless action that has zero bearing on the plot) and then building to a ridiculously CGI packed third act that could literally have been a whole extra movie – I guess we should be thankful that it’s not humongously longer than the previous movies at 149 minutes running time.

The Imax version for the majority (maybe about 80 per cent) is shown with a 1.85:1 ratio with the ratio changing throughout the movie to 2.35:1 for certain shots or sequences. It’s not known for sure, but the regular version is likely only be shown in 2.35:1 as with most movies filmed with the expanded Imax format. Also, if anyone is still interested in further movies, there is also a mid-credit sequence which references a BIG setup mentioned throughout the movie for the next one…

I would give this 1.5/5 because the effects are at least up to scratch and do look great in the Imax format, but at FTN we only give full nerd ratings, so it gets bumped up to 2 out of 5 nerds, but just barely.

2 out of 5 Nerds

Co-host of the Monday Movie Show, Andrew is a huge movie fan who is into all sorts of things movie related, as well as a fan of all things nerd. In his spare time he likes to work at script writing, that is when he's not spending it on something movie or nerd related! www.followingthenerd.com