Film review: ‘Transformers 5: The Last Knight’

Michael Bay films are now mostly about the experience of watching a Michael Bay film. His latest is “Transformers: The Last Knight,” the fifth installment of a franchise that increasingly serves as a pyre on which their director burns money - in this case, $217M.

Like the great silent films of the past, Bay’s movies ought to be almost wordless - the corny jokes are as relentless as the fireballs. The heart of “Transformers” is vast orchestrations of CGI, actors against green screens stretching their necks back to look wonderingly around at objects in a sky they’ll never see.

This “Transformers” screenplay actually impresses, if you believe the writers were forced to plot the entire film in one night while shooting tequila every time a new Transformer was introduced (there are more than 30). The complete narrative summary must be Googled to be believed but it begins, as you would expect, with the knights of the Round Table.

Arthur and co. are losing a muddy battle while waiting on Merlin (Stanley Tucci!). The sozzled wizard is supposed to visit a crashed alien ship, convince an ancient Autobot to give him a staff of great power and conjure a three-headed dragon Transformer to save the day. Happily he does, and the Autobots go on doing favors for humans down the ages - we learn, for instance, that they also helped out with the Underground Railroad, which was nice of them.

But Earth has enjoyed the staff long enough. Quintessa, a purple space sorceress trailing squid tentacles, is going to bring it back to the Transformers’ home planet, Cybertron. To do so, she enlists the always duplicitous Decepticons and hoodwinks good guy Optimus Prime into doing her bidding - his eyes turn from true blue to a lustful violet color.

This is a real downer for Prime’s human chum Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg, occasionally donning glasses because he’s playing a genius inventor) and Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) the last in a line of an English royal house that protects the secret of the Transformers. Amid the bombast, it’s a small pleasure to watch Hopkins call Wahlberg, “duuuuuude.”

Bay’s gender politics remain mind-blowingly retrograde, as exemplified by Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock), a polo playing descendant of Merlin with a doctorate in English lit and proclivity for skin tight attire. Burton conscripts her to track down the staff, but she’s sexualized every second in spite of her qualifications as a doctor.

Nevertheless, Bay’s view of posh England is tremendous, like the most basic tourist brochure: Big Ben, Stonehenge, the white cliffs of Dover.

The contrast to America is useful as Yeager and the Autobots are chased across South Dakota by Decepticons and Colonel Lennox (Josh Duhamel) of the Transformers Reaction Force. Bay’s Badlands, unlike Terrence Malick’s, are ruin porn par excellence: broken windows, dirty puddles in which we see the reflections of flying things, tumbleweeds. As one Decepticon mutters, “This planet is hell.” But he hasn’t been to England yet!

Michael Bay - the man with “Bayhem” stitched on his custom sneakers - generates a bewildering but consistent amalgam of fiery crashes and rainbow lens flares and tears in the eyes of beautiful people. There have been five “Transformers” films and a less vulgar auteur would have left the direction of the later installments to a younger man.

His directorial devotion might stem from the fact that Optimus Prime is the most Michael Bay of characters - cheesy, gorgeous and impossibly, irrevocably violent. Optimus Prime never misses a chance for metaphorical flourish: “The account of the ages is etched into the cosmos.” Bathed in celestial light, stepping out of a ceiling fresco of the heavens that couldn’t be better painted by Michelangelo, Optimus Prime holds Cade and Viviane - holds us! - in his hands like toys.