Transformers: The Last Knight

Absolutely unnecessarily overcomplicated trash and the worst Transformers ever. Seriously. I liked the previous film, but this is not so much a jump as a fall down, which is not saved even by the special effects or action and it’s nowhere near as good as any of the previous films. This time people do not matter to the screenwriters or the director at all, the storyline is a downright parody (but unfunny)... And on top of that, it's awfully long. It’s too bad, I was expecting to have fun. (06/30/2017)

Digital Bayfest. Each shot could make great wallpaper. Tony Hopkins in cool slow motion strides toward Stonehenge to destroy Megatron, a metal dragon spewing fire, Bumblebee slaughtering Nazis, Optimus chopping off heads etc. a visual feast from start to finish. It’s just that it’s so exhausting to watch. No solid ground to grip on to, the storyline is confusing. It jumps from character to character. Actors roll off their lines, but say nothing to the viewer. The finale is probably the biggest caning ever in Transformers, but it’s so damn difficult to reach it. Even the TV cartoons thirty years ago made more sense. Jablonsky’s music however is awesome. He gave it his best. (06/27/2017)

Michael Bay has finally eradicated even the last remnants of his greatest enemy: logic. He serves us a divine 151 minutes of eclectic spewing of unspoken / discontinuous motifs. This is finally an abstraction that was only in its infancy in the previous half-timing hypnagogic installation. A spectacular ADHD attack that begins at the end and then progresses to an admitted self-parody. At the same time, it contains the mutated bacteria of several films, which the director's feverishly working mind will never allow to overcome the embryonic stage and moves on. Bay's ability to move in the narrative chaos and find a robotic order in it is liberating to surreal. Finally! The first film that gives the impression that it was created by a combination of a random generator of trending motifs and a wonderfully ill human mind. It may seem like a recession on my part, but I mean it. Compared to Transformers 5, other blockbusters feel like a careful game of certainty. I couldn't tear myself away from this eruption of confusing, yet strictly arranged shapes; I wasn't bored for even a second. The best, most detached and strangest Bay film. I urge anyone who gives it five stars to call me on the secret line. I will pass them on silently to Witwicky. They are the people of the future. Or the people of a world that will never happen. Robots write human history and chat with John Turturro on Cuban beaches. All the power to imagination and Optimus! (06/22/2017)

Little more than a day after watching it, I have to admit that I haven't had such mush in my head after a movie in a long time. The fact that it comes after a 217-minute movie strikes me as the amusing symptom of a completely confused age where no one really knows what anyone else wants anymore. To name the film with a caption, I guess the most apt one for me is "The Most Americanized Chinese Sex Fantasy Ever". Subjectively, I find it hard to give a mediocre rating to a film where my jaw dropped during several scenes at their incredibly megalomaniacal detachment. Yet unlike, say, Marvel, Bay is able to accentuate this detachment with his directorial trademarks. The camera, focusing on people, is often perfectly placed, handheld but stabilized, so that it actually floats behind the characters from a slight angle and stands very close to them. It doesn't "zoom in" on people's faces and figures, but moves realistically just in front of/behind them. It then benefits from a sense of enormity when confronted with giant robots and a parasitic planet approaching Earth. Yes, we can laugh at the fact that, for example, a good half of the shots are into the sun, but when this installment of the series is so detached from everything, the over-colored visuals start to break the boundary of dreamlike experience, and indeed the chaos that remains in your head after the film is comparable to a long night of strange dreams, from which you remember only unrelated sections in the morning and it takes a while to shake off all the snatches and return to reality. To then attack the film on the grounds of its pointlessness (and it is pointless, the character of Optimus Prime is probably the worst creation since Morpheus in the Matrix sequels (on the other hand, damn, with the fifth Transformers installment you at least sort of know what you're getting into)) seems to me like a resignation to a certain type of experience that a film can bring us. So why the three stars? Weeell, you're not going to believe this, but it's short. It was supposed to be four hours long. Sure, you would definitely be leaving the cinema as a different creature afterwards, and would probably get hit by a tram on your way out of the IMAX, but there's an awful lot of motifs, characters, one-shot scenes, unfinished scenes, and throwaway details that I would have liked to have focused on. Give me a director's cut in which that amazing chase in London lasts, say, half an hour, and the scene between the NASA scientist and the arrogant government representative lasts, say, ten minutes, and I will explode with infantile visual delight, for which I make no apologies. And Bay is still at the top of the food chain when it comes to action scenes. Give him more action scenes. Give him all of them. (10/02/2017)

Michael Bay goes on and on and on, and this fifth episode might give you the impression that you are watching the fourth or the third. The originality is gone, so is the scriptwriting inventiveness and, unfortunately, the initial charm and idea too. Wahlberg does his thing, and every episode has a hot chick in the mix – it's almost like a Bond tradition. One can't deny the visually pompous finale and the intended self-parody, but the intertwining of the story with the Knights of the Round Table, well, that was a bit too much, even by Hollywood standards. On top of that, the ending hints at one or two more episodes. God help us all. (09/17/2017)