Main cast: Mark Wahlberg (Cade Yeager), Josh Duhamel (Colonel William Lennox), Laura Haddock (Viviane Wembly), Isabela Moner (Izabella), Jerrod Carmichael (Jimmy), Santiago Carbera (Santos), Glenn Marshower (General Morshower), John Turturro (Seymour Simmons), and Anthony Hopkins (Sir Edmund Burton)
Director: Michael Bay
For a while now, there have been grumbles about how Hollywood is nowadays churning out tentpole movies aimed mostly at the “overseas market”, which is a nice way of saying that they want the Chinese bucks. But let’s face it, the Chinese generally have poor English proficiency – and before any white people get offended by this statement on their behalf, let me point out that I am allowed to say this because I am Chinese – they need to be distracted by loud and shiny things on screen. This means that those movies need to have explosions, more explosions, and then some more explosions. Because we don’t want the Chinese to be confused by too many spoken words, we have the main characters say the same few catchphrases over and over again when they are not narrating things to one another as if the members of the audience are incapable of understanding nuances or inferring from a scene. Which, of course, is exactly the case when it comes to the Chinese audience.
As a result, Transformers: The Last Knight is not a movie. It is a montage of explosions and shootings and other action scenes, and whatever is between these scenes is filler. There are four people credited for the story and three for the screenplay, which means either it takes so many brains to come up with a movie equivalent of being vomited upon for almost two and a half hours – yes, the movie is that long – or the original draft must be so awful that it takes two other people to cobble it into… this. Either possibility is tragic.
The plot… oh god. Cade Yeager is now a runaway, running around rescuing Autobots because once again, the world has outlawed robots. Once again, we get the same old message about how the Autobots are our willing slaves, ready to come to our rescue no matter how many times we ill-treat them, so we should stop being so mean to them. And yet, the humans double cross the Autobots and leave them to die two times in this movie, but Optimus Prime is like, ooh, once again, we are now family, the world is one, so people please line up and violate my exhaust pipe as I have no dignity and live only to be a cuck for ungrateful humans.
Oh yes, in the last movie, Optimus Prime flew off to confront the creator of the Transformers, only to be literally bitch-slapped by Quintessa, the creator and the knock-off of the Diva from The Fifth Element, into… becoming evil? He’s Nemesis Prime now, and apparently Earth is a giant robot thing called Unicorn or something, so Cybertron is heading over to Unicorn-Earth to retrieve a magic staff once belonged to Merlin so that Quintessa can use it to drain all life from Unicorn-Earth to restore life in Cybertron – robots need life essence? – and Cade gets an amulet that turns into Excalibur while he and Viviane (a scholar who can’t keep her shirt buttoned up because cleavage brings Chinese boys to the Paramount studio yard to buy all the milkshakes there) are in a submarine that magically teleports to space and stupid kids run around being chased by a killer clown as Bumblebee tells Optimus Prime that their moms have the same name so they stop fighting and then Optimus Prime is good again and everyone starts running around shooting and being shot at by who knows what and how on earth did a deserted floating ball of scrap iron suddenly become so populated by enemies what are those things in spacecrafts shooting at them oh god are they even spacecrafts and why are the humans trying to kill Cade and Cleavage when they are supposed to get those two to lead them to Merlin’s stick and Anthony Hopkins totally forgoes his dignity acting like a ham with his underpants ten sizes too small here what the hell how did Cade get from the bottom of the submarine to the top of Cybertron like that are we talking about teleportation here and what why does his daughter spend three of the five minutes telling him what they already know when they are supposed to have limited time to exchange words why does Cade act like his daughter is still alive when Diva Palaquintessahakuma is harvesting all life and they spent like ten minutes wasting time waiting for Optimus Prime to finish taking an oil wee and show up only to then give the same speech he gave in every movie I HOPE SHE IS DEAD JUST LIKE HOW MY BRAIN IS DEAD and what is that thing oh my god what the hell is happening I can’t take it anymore bring back Shia HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
