Michael Bay’s fifth Transformers film opens with a wizard. In 484 AD, Merlin finds the Knights of Iacon, a group of Transformers hiding on Earth, and asks them to help King Arthur fight the Saxons. They hand him a staff, help Arthur win, and warn him to hide it. That staff is the engine of the next 154 minutes, and the film never finds a way to make it matter.
Trailer, via Transformers.
A Talisman, a Junkyard, and a Dying Knight
The plot moves fast and explains little. Optimus Prime arrives on the ruins of Cybertron, where the Cybertronian goddess Quintessa brainwashes him into Nemesis Prime and sends him to Earth to retrieve Merlin’s staff. The staff will restore Cybertron by draining Earth’s energy core. On Earth, the Transformers Reaction Force hunts Transformers, though some U.S. military personnel, including Colonel William Lennox and General Morshower, are against it.
Cade Yeager, played again by Mark Wahlberg, hides Transformer refugees in his junkyard. In a war-torn Chicago, he and Bumblebee meet a scavenger named Izabella and her Transformer companion, Sqweeks, before a dying Transformer hands them a talisman. Megatron, having dropped his Galvatron identity, joins forces with the U.S. government to get the talisman back.
The pieces are all here. None of them lock.
Anthony Hopkins Reads the Exposition
Anthony Hopkins plays Sir Edmund Burton, the eccentric British lord who recruits Cade to save the world. Hopkins is the best thing in the film and the film knows it, which is the problem. Burton exists to explain. He explains the hidden history of Transformers on Earth, the talisman, the staff, and the prophecy. Hopkins delivers this material with more wit than it deserves, and the script rewards him by giving him more of it.
Laura Haddock plays Viviane Wembly, the Oxford professor dragged into the same mess. Her job is to be the other half of the key. The film pairs her with Cade and asks the audience to care, without building anything between them worth caring about.
Jim Carter voices Cogman, a human-sized Transformer and Burton’s servant. Bay revealed the casting a month before release, at the request of co-writer Matt Holloway, a Downton Abbey fan. Cogman is the one new piece with any personality. He is also a butler joke repeated until it stops being one.
A Cast of Returning Names and Missing Ones
The film is the sequel to Age of Extinction and the fifth installment in the series. Wahlberg reprises his role from the fourth film. Josh Duhamel, John Turturro and Glenn Morshower return from the first three. Stanley Tucci comes back as a different character after appearing in the fourth. Peter Cullen returns to voice Optimus Prime.
Isabela Moner, Jerrod Carmichael, Santiago Cabrera and Anthony Hopkins join the cast. Tyrese Gibson said he would return as Robert Epps, then revealed on June 16, 2017, that scheduling conflicts with The Fate of the Furious kept him out despite a closed deal. That absence is a small thing. It is also the shape of the whole production: a lot of pieces assembled, several of them not fitting.
The scale is real. About 850 cast and crew were hired, 450 of them Michigan residents, equating to 228 full-time positions. Another 700 extras came from Detroit under Paramount’s incentive deal with the state. That is a jobs program with a movie attached. The movie is the weaker half.
Two Worlds Collide, One Franchise Stalls
The tagline promises “Two worlds collide. One survives.” What actually collides is a King Arthur legend, a Cybertronian sorceress, a paramilitary task force, the Dinobots, and a robot butler. Bay stages it all at his usual volume. The problem is not the noise. It is that the noise has no stakes.
The Last Knight premiered on June 18, 2017, at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London, and Paramount released it in the United States on June 21. It grossed $605 million against a production budget between $217–260 million. That sounds like a hit until you do the math. The film became a box office disappointment, with an estimated $100 million loss for Paramount on the theatrical release.
That number is the most interesting fact in the whole package. A $605 million gross is not a failure by most measures. For this franchise, at this budget, it was. The series had reached the point where its floor was still enormous and its ceiling was gone.
What the Fifth Film Actually Proves
The Last Knight is not the worst idea in the series. The buried-history angle, with Transformers behind Arthur and Merlin, is at least a story. Burton’s whole function is to sell that story, and Hopkins almost does.
Almost is the word for the entire film. The cast is deep, the budget is enormous, and the runtime is 154 minutes. Bay has made this movie four times before and has never been less interested in the people inside it. Wahlberg coasts. Haddock is given nothing to play. The returning names show up and collect.
The film’s real failure is structural. It spends its first act on a talisman, its second on a recruitment, and its third on a countdown, and never decides which of those is the point. A movie about the hidden history of Transformers on Earth should feel like a discovery. This one feels like a delivery.
The franchise answered with Bumblebee in 2018, a standalone prequel that stepped away from the pileup. That was the right read. The Last Knight is what happens when a series keeps adding instead of choosing.
KEY FACTS
- Title: Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)
- Director: Michael Bay
- Runtime: 154 minutes
- US release: June 21, 2017 (Paramount Pictures)
- Premiere: June 18, 2017, Odeon Luxe Leicester Square, London
- Production budget: $217–260 million
- Worldwide gross: $605 million
- Estimated Paramount theatrical loss: $100 million
- Metacritic: 27/100
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