Starring Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Sir Anthony Hopkins

Directed by Michael Bay

Earth becomes the battleground for another confrontation between the Autobots and Decepticons as they fight for control of an artefact which could hold the key to the survival of their home planet, at the expense of our own.

Coherency has never been a strong point of the Bay Transformers movie-verse from the beginning. There have been contradictions and retcons of various elements of the established lore from movie to movie since Revenge of the Fallen. However, this new entry takes this lack of coherency to all new levels, as the lore in this movie not only once again wipes away anything that came before, but also contradicts itself within its own run time. Even by the standards of this franchise, there’s something oddly impressive about that.

We open with a scene involving King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, facing down some barbarian horde or other. In this movie, Arthur and his knights were real historical figures (there’s a half-hearted stab later on at one character arguing that Arthur was a mythical melding of several historical figures, but basically the movie 100% believes that Arthurian legend was actual history). As the fighting commences, sans Merlin (a well-disguised Stanley Tucci, playing for the cheapest of cheap laughs) the explosions start. Yes, that’s right, explosions. In a dark ages battle between knights and barbarians, somehow there are explosions. And not just any explosions, 3D IMAX explosions, with little particles flying out of the screen at you in crystal clear high definition. If you’re wondering why I am so fixated on this display of debris, it’s because the rest of the action was a blurry, shaky-cam mess of flailing. Every so often, you’d be able to make out a body pinwheeling across the screen in slow motion – indeed, this seems to be one of the movie’s signature visual themes – but otherwise it’s just a blurry, shaky mess of noise and shapes.

And that’s pretty much how the rest of the movie proceeds. Five films into a franchise that started out with complaints that the robots were difficult to tell apart or understand and that the actions scenes were too messy to see what was occurring, it seems that Bay’s response to this critique is simply to double down even harder and keep going the same way. And that applies across the board. Age of Extinction, for example, garnered complaints for the leery way in which the daughter of main character Yager (Wahlberg) was treated, being in the movie 17 and therefore a minor in the US. Here, Bay gives us a 14 year old character who gets the same lingering, slow motion running shots, and it’s just uncomfortable. Fortunately, said character hardly appears in the movie, and in all honesty it’s unclear what role she is supposed to serve in terms of the narrative.

But then, that would be to assume that there was a narrative here, beyond establishing the next explosion sequence. Yager encounters the TRF and the US military early on (in a sequence where his appearance is random and utterly unaccounted for) and then escapes. Or more accurately tells them that he’s walking away and then does so, unopposed. Very shortly afterward we are told that Yager is (and has been for some time now) a super fugitive, liable to be arrested on sight and unable to so much as speak on an encrypted phone for fear of being traced and arrested. By the same authorities who literally not only just let him walk away but turn out to be monitoring him anyway. Sir Anthony Hopkins’ eccentric Scottish Lord proudly gives a speech about his family’s long history of protecting the secret of Transformers, particularly the McGuffin du jour, then promptly sends Yager and Haddock’s Professor Wembley (yes, really) off to search for said McGuffin. And not only must they do so, but they must do so with no actual clue beyond that Wembley ‘will know’ for reasons too tedious to even get into. Then there’s a sequence with a submarine that even now I couldn’t explain to you if I tried, and then a big climactic finale involving a well known British landmark and a sky ray thingy (of course) and lots more explosions.

There’s also an odd amount of familiarity here. The eccentric Cogman, Hopkins’ inexplicable English butler bot, is so obviously based on Bay’s idea of an homage to C-3PO that it actually gets called that at one point by another character. The final sequence strongly recalls the Omaha Beach scenes in Saving Private Ryan (albeit with a Bay-esque fascination for the explosions rather than the people), and the actual, film-halting title cards for Megatron’s rogue’s gallery as he names each one, could literally fit straight into Suicide Squad. These and many other examples are littered throughout, giving an oddly disjointed feeling as one is reminded of better movies by a movie that isn’t all that strong anyway.

There are three clear themes which run throughout. Visually, Bay clearly has a particular fondness at the moment for somersaulting bodies. Additionally, he also has a fondness for sliding. There’s lots and lots of sliding in this movie, from both humans and robots. Entire sequences of just folks sliding across, up and down things. And the third, and perhaps most troubling theme, is Bay’s apparent hatred of intelligence and establishment. As usual, every person in authority must be a bumbling idiot (Mark Dexter has a particularly thankless turn as the UK Prime Minister being shouted at by the increasingly unhinged Hopkins, clearly the only one having fun as he not so much chews but fully digests the scenery) but here we also see the anti-intellectualism of America writ large, as frustrated scientists are treated with contempt by everyone else as they try and explain that the world is ending and then just get plain ignored as they offer solutions. Then, just as the movie seems to be offering a concession and one of their scientific solutions is tried, it fails, everyone sighs in disgust and the real heroes bring on more explosions and hitting stuff to fix everything. It is without doubt, the most nakedly transparent attack on intellectualism that I have seen in modern action cinema, and in these times, a worrying sign in a tentpole franchise that is bound to make another billion dollars for the studio and tempt Bay back once again in spite of his current protestations that this is definitely his last one (where have we heard that one before?)

It’s a terrible, noisy, blurry, plotless mess, and even though it runs to two hours and thirty minutes – shorter than the last instalment and one of the shortest entries overall – it still manages to feel incredibly long. It’s not even possible to get angry, because it’s so blindly incoherent, so oddly thrown together, that it becomes ephemeral. Even now, barely twelve hours after seeing it, I am finding it a struggle to recall much of what happened. It’s a fairground ride of a movie, all big explosions and loud noises and silliness happening at you, and utterly forgotten even as you step off.

Verdict: Honestly possibly the worst two and a half hours I have ever spent in a cinema seat. Lacking any sort of structure, story or cohesiveness, this is (hopefully) the nadir of how bad these movies (and indeed action cinema in general) can get. It is unarguably pretty to look at (when not in motion) but utterly and completely without narrative merit of any kind. The one positive I take is that the franchise can only possibly get better from here. 1/10

Greg D. Smith