Transformers: The Last Knight as dumb as expected

Optimus Prime in Transformers: The Last Knight. Image courtesy Paramount.

To begin with, the title for Transformers: The Last Knight is incorrect. There are several knights to be found in this movie, all of whom interact with other knights throughout the movie. There is nary a final knight to be found in this movie, making the title the warning sign for a wretched movie that sucks the energy right out of its audience.

Watching The Last Knight is a dire experience. It has so little going for it that the asinine madness Sir Anthony Hopkins inserts out of his general lack of interest in the material is the best thing the movie has going for it. Everything else is garbage, detritus spawned by barely earned nostalgia and producers sucking those happy thoughts for all the money they are worth. And that's how movies like this come to be, prepackaged as big budget experiences targeted at people who care little for the value of their entertainment. The old fashioned way of describing them are rubes, making director Michael Bay, producer Steven Spielberg, and everyone else involved in creating this rubbish high-priced grifters.

None of this really matters though. The Last Knight will make hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly more than a billion dollars, at the box office in the coming weeks. People will watch this despite protestations from many, many people over its lack of quality. This is the dark side of nihilism that doesn't reveal the optimism of nothingness once the absence of importance is accepted. What's being accepted here is bad cinema with too much regard devoted to viewers who take pride in their anti-intellectualism.

To be fair, movies don't need to be smart to have value; the Furious series is pretty great despite how legitimately dumb those films are. Yet they possess both passion and insanity, a desire to entertain their viewers and provide satisfaction for the money spent. The Last Knight does not entertain. A movie supposedly about giant robots fighting one another somehow cannot provide entertainment, even on the fun side of the puerile level. This movie very much lingers on the dark side of juvenile, with a few bits of casual racism and Marky Mark Wahlberg comparing his female co-star Laura Haddock to a prostitute added in to serve as jokes. That it sexualizes pretty much all of its female characters, including a 14-year-old (played by Isabela Moner), is disturbing but expected for this series. Still, none of it actually provides an iota of entertainment. Nothing keeps viewers interested in the characters on screen or the fact that, sometimes, giant robots fight one another to the death.

It's about right that The Last Knight only shows its giant, morphing robots fight on just a few occasions, holding franchise stalwart Optimus Prime in the background until the final act. Bay and company instead toss in some elements that, if one squints hard enough, begin to resemble a story and allow Wahlberg and Haddock to serve as the centers of attention instead of the giant fighting robots. It would have helped if the screenwriters actually tried to keep their narrative logical and create contradicting plot points, or if the haphazard editing had stuck with a logical timeline. There's also some awful, hacky, and terribly worded expositional dialog to move things forward, because this movie doesn't feel the need to show what's happening or allow the actions to guide story.

The selling point for The Last Knight is the action sequences, or at least they would be if viewers could actually follow along with the poorly framed battles. At this point in the series it's tough to find a way to inject interest in seeing the same giant robots fight one another to the death. Bay and crew have effectively run out of ideas on how to make these sequences look cool, which is an odd thing to say considering this is a franchise about giant robots with guns, explosives and swords going at one another. Bay, for all his faults as a filmmaker, used to create singular, well orchestrated action sequences that at least came close to making what are otherwise bad movies at least a little fun. Five films into the Transformers franchise and the thrill is gone for Bay.

Without any redeeming value aside from the scenery Hopkins consumes, The Last Knight is a slog. It leaves them drained from boredom and confusion over the preposterous state this film exists in, and the two-and-a-half hours of it to sift through. But, again, none of this really matters. A ton of people will watch this movie, more than enough to fund two more movies in the near future. Critics will rip them apart to as Bay, Spielberg and Paramount executives sleep comfortably in the piles of money they've conned out of audiences everywhere.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 149 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Folks who've been roped in to the last few entries.

Take the whole family?: This isn't particularly great for the younger kids, with the heavy doses of violence and bad editing creating a less than comforting viewing experience.

Theater or Netflix?: Just don't bother with it.

How good is the cast?: Of a higher quality than expected, although none of them seem to care. It remains strange how many good actors sign up for these movies. Sir Anthony Hopkins, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Ken Watanabe, and Tony Hale are the highlights for film five. Add them to alumni like Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Alan Tudyk, and many, many others and there's the making for a really good movie. Even American hero Buzz Aldrin has shown up for one of these movies.

Watch this instead?: Best bet is to find a copy of the animated Transformers movie from the '80s – it has a surprisingly stellar cast, including Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack and Judd Nelson – or watch the original animated series. That, or just find your old toys and make up a way cooler story.

BFG an empty beauty

Ruby Barnhill stars in The BFG. Image courtesy Disney.

There used to be a time when Steven Spielberg inspired dreams both fantastic and nightmarish. It really wasn’t that long ago in relative time, but just far enough away to settle into nostalgia, with the fears and joys of movies like E. T. and Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark resonating within memories. It only makes sense for Spielberg to take on a project featuring a literal dream maker and taking place through the lens of a precocious, lonely girl, and it’s doubly disappointing a man like Spielberg can miss as wildly and beautifully as he does with The BFG.

Roald Dahl’s seminal childhood tale is a marvelous book with fantastical elements anchored by a friendship between two very unlikely beings – the eponymous giant and whip smart orphan Sophie – making for a brilliant playground for a good filmmaker, let alone a legendary one like Spielberg. Except Spielberg and writer Melissa Mathison shift their focus away from the elements that make the book so great and get lost in the aesthetic wonderment instead. They stripped away the film's heart to make the body look prettier, resulting in an often gorgeous but ultimately empty and rather cowardly picture.

There are a few notable issues that ultimately sink the film, yet the one that ties them together is the filmmakers trying too hard to appease to the youth demographic the book was already written for.

The logic makes a sort of sense, especially given how the book places its protagonist (played by Ruby Barnhill in the film) into constant peril when she's surrounded by creatures bent on eating her. It's a wicked dark premise in the book, a gaggle of giants waltzing around the world nabbing children from their homes to gobble them up (except for people from Greece), with only one decent soul (Mark Rylance is motion captured to play the friendly giant) around to protect her. The BFG is a nightmare inducing book with the scariness of the world deepening the bond between the lonely giant and the lonely and miserable little girl.

Spielberg and Mathison ditch the fright though, referencing the other giants' ferocity in passing and skimping over the book's darker bits and general nastiness. So much of the horror is stripped away and sanitized the film is far too safe to evoke honest emotional connection between BFG (excellently captured by Rylance), Sophie and the viewers. It's insulting in a way to try to protect children from a little nastiness. They can handle a little fear and some intensity along as there's a parent or two around to remind them things will be OK. And Dahl was an expert on never taking things too far; bad things only really occur to the wicked or vile characters in his work, so good and decent children like Sophie and Charlie Bucket and James and George never received a harsh comeuppance. Sadly Spielberg and Mathison remove much of the peril and insert dangerous levels of cuteness to the mix, including a few fart jokes bandied about, a rather silly secondary story about a replacement family for Sophie and an overall failed attempt to make The BFG a nauseatingly British experience. Even the most aesthetically wondrous moments – the most notable being a sequence at a dream tree – come across as sweet diversions rather than interesting plot points.

These little diversions into the saccharine rob The BFG of a clean narrative, or at least one that is more linear than episodic. Viewers never really learn an adequate amount about the other giants (poor Jemaine Clement and Bill Hader, the two lead giants, get precious little time to shine), about Sophie's orphanage experience, and even about the relationship between the BFG and Sophie. A vital theme of this film is skimped over so Spielberg can go toy around with motion capture technology for almost two hours at the audience's expense. Spielberg’s created a beautiful world yet fails to fill it in with depth and heart. Sadly, I find The BFG more interesting as an interpretation of Spielberg's and Mathison's perception of the book than an actual movie. That they see so much lightness in a film clouded by darkness is an impressive show of optimism but a rather dishonest read of the book’s message and intention. Spielberg mentioned in a featurette prior to the film that the technology to make this a film wasn't available when the book came out in 1982; perhaps 2016 Spielberg is no longer capable of making a film as dark and nasty as The BFG is meant to be.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 117 minutes

Genre: Fantasy

Ask Away

Target audience: People like me who grew up reading Roald Dahl and Steven Spielberg fans.

Take the whole family?: Most of the dark stuff is discussed and never shown, so this is pretty safe and tame for the kiddos.

Theater or Netflix?: If you see it, theater is probably the best bet just for the visuals. Don’t pay the extra costs for the 3D option though.

How beholden should the movie be to the book?: Not completely given the impossibilities of perfectly encapsulating a book in two hours or so, but there should be something resembling a baseline for it. The main issue is when the alterations from book to film make for a lesser film, which is the case more often than not in The BFG.

Watch this as well?: Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory is the most beloved adaptation of Dahl's work and comes relatively close to capturing the original's tone, although The Witches is the best of them all at capturing Dahl's nastiness. Matilda, James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox are very much worth watching as well, as is a film Dahl wrote himself, the surprisingly creepy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.