Review: Transformers: The Last Knight

Transformers 5 is a better movie than The Shining.

Transformers 5 is better than Star Wars.

I even think I like Transformers 5 better than Speed Racer.

Michael Bay has given us an astonishing, impressive gift with this film. He has done a rare thing: built a movie franchise where the last film is by far the best one. The first four are massively underrated. Transformers 4 was cemented into the blockbuster canon by its influence on The Age of Ultron and ESPECIALLY Jurassic World. Transformers 5 is very possibly the best film of all time, and it couldn’t exist without the first four.

Transformers 5: The Last Knight, is a film about stories. Vivian, played by Laura Haddock (who seems an exact genetic cross between Megan Fox and Rey from Star Wars), studies mythologies. The film is mythological without being Campbellian.

People seem to exist in various states of denial about this film ("THERES A TRANSFORMERS 5??") so I'll list some of the amazing things in this movie. There is a scene where Transformer John Goodman throws grenades at Transformer Steve Buscemi. John Turturro lives in Cuba and plays volleyball with Transformers. The butler from Downton Abbey plays a kung fu butler C3PO. Merlin is a drunk who finds a transformer accidentally and then gets a robot dragon. Marky Mark has pet dragon transformers.

This is a film about a global society, a unified planet, literally a new world order, which collides with another planet, another world, and that world literally begins subjugating the stories and land and icons of Earth. It’s the Macrocosm to the Shining’s microcosm. the carpet from the shining can be found in the hexagonal framework of Cybertron. Cybertron literally colonizes earth.

This is a dense, complex, joyous movie. Each of the previous transformers makes important appearances here — Transformers 5 would not be possible without the previous four. This film elevates this franchise to the most structurally complex of any film franchise on the planet.

The predominant visual motif in Transformers is the Gnostic Cross, which along with all of its conventional symbolic baggage, in this film also represents the first four films. The cross also morphs between swords and pentacles. The Celtic Cross is also a timepiece in the same sense as the mayan pyramid from Star Wars or The Shining.

Films like Pirates of the Caribbean and Kingsmen have used 2d motifs in complicated ways such as this, but Transformers 5 takes the Gnostic Cross, thrusts a wand through it, and transforms it into a 3d motif. Very few films are able to produce this complex dimensional space.

The characters are also incredibly compelling. Izabella makes me cry. Her first line in the film is “Mira, puto!” and she is just totally awesome all the time. Mark Wahlberg is hilarious as always, and also a virtuous character, rare in films like this. Vivian is talented, brilliant, and handles role with grace and class. Anthony Hopkins plays an absolutely hysterical, bonkers, perhaps inbred character as the last remaining member of the “Witwickians”, a secret society that appears to be founded based on Shia LaBeouf’s ebay account from the first film.

Transformers is a series about AR, to some extent. Each movie is about a different part of the world coming to life, having motion breathed into it. The All-Spark in Revenge of the Fallen brings Xboxes and Coke Machines to life. The Nanotech in The Age of Extinction foreshadow the remarkable world we are about to find ourselves living in. Transformers 5 is about what to do when you start in that world. Each act of the film is the process that bigger and bigger machines are in fact transformers. First, Vivian finds the car she rides in is a Transformer. Then, the submarine. Then, the ship (a gnostic cross, happily, Bumblebee and Optimus are literally fighting each other across the structure of the four previous films), and finally, we discover that the entire earth is in fact a Transformer.

In Transformers lore, Unicron is the planet eater, he can take over planets and hijack them. In Michael Bay’s masterstroke, he changes Unicron to actualy be the earth itself. This is the alteration to the mythology that makes the film function. The battle between Unicron and Cybertron is a war of colonial stories. Earth wins, Cybertron is defeated, but now the planets are joined and must work together. The terror of Unicron sets up the battle for the franchise to continue in other directors’ hands.

Go see this film while you still can. See it in Imax. Trust me, you’re gonna want these neuron connections.