Despite having once again sworn that he was done with Transformers and ready to hand the directing reins over to somebody else after the very successful Age of Extinction, Michael Bay wasted almost no time jumping right back in to helm the next sequel himself anyway. Unfortunately, by this point, even longtime fans had enough. Transformers: The Last Knight was the lowest-grossing of Bay’s five films for the franchise, pulling in close to half what either of his last two entries had.

That The Last Knight is easily the worst of Bay’s five Transformers movies may have played some part in that, though probably not as much as you’d think. Michael Bay fans are known for having a high tolerance for his movies being extremely dumb and gruelingly long. The writing for this one seemed to be on the wall even before it opened. Especially in its primary North American market, The Last Knight faltered very early, debuting with a franchise low opening weekend gross. From those results, it would appear that the so-called “Bayformers” had finally started to lose their appeal.

The irony in making a claim like that, of course, is that the film still pulled in over $600 million worldwide, which would be an astounding success for a movie with any sort of reasonable budget. A lot of fans still turned up to see The Last Knight, and some of them did so more than once. Nevertheless, due to its massively inflated budget and marketing costs, the production reportedly lost Paramount around $100 million and brought an end to Bay’s stewardship of the franchise.

Title:	Transformers: The Last Knight
Year of Release:	2017
Director:	Michael Bay
Watched On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Also Available On:	Blu-ray Blu-ray 3D Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

With a screenplay cobbled together by three writers new to the series, plus a worrisome “Story By” credit given to Akiva Goldsman (of Batman & Robin notoriety), The Last Knight is even less narratively coherent than usual for a Transformers movie, and that bar had already been set pretty damn low. The story in this one feels like it makes no sense at all, and seemingly doesn’t try very hard to pretend otherwise.

While Dark of the Moon established that the governments of Earth had secretly known about the existence of Transformers since at least the 1960s, and Age of Extinction showed that some had been around during prehistoric times (but gone dormant soon afterwards), The Last Knight puts forward the cockamamie conceit that Cybertronians have been present and active on Earth for all of human history. The film opens by declaring that not only were the mythical King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, and wizard Merlin completely real, but were aided in defending Camelot by a giant robot knight and dragon.

Later, we learn via a totally extraneous flashback cutaway that Autobot Bumblebee fought with the Allies during World War II and personally killed Hitler. That none of this nonsense at all jibes with the first couple Transformers movies (nor of course with actual historical fact) I’m sure matters little to Michael Bay, who no doubt has choice words for “history buffs” and other nerds that might question him on it.

In the present-day storyline, Mark Wahlberg returns as failed inventor and Autobot ally Cade Yeager. Although The Last Knight is another LaBeouf-free installment in the franchise, John Turturro and Josh Duhamel are back following their absence from Age of Extinction. Newly joining the cast to humiliate themselves are Jarrod Carmichael, Tony Hale, Santiago Cabrera (from Star Trek: Picard) and – most depressingly – Oscar winner Sir Anthony Hopkins. The latter delivers a distracted, obviously-not-giving-a-shit performance as a batty English nobleman with an obnoxious robot butler. Hopkins’ role is such a shameless paycheck-cashing gig that I’ll bet you anything the actor probably doesn’t even remember doing this movie by now.

For the requisite female eye candy in this outing, Bay brings in Laura Haddock (Star-Lord’s dead mom in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies’ flashback scenes) as a sexy historian who contributes virtually nothing to the plot beyond being an unlikely love interest for Wahlberg’s blue collar grease-monkey. In the voice cast, John Goodman once again stands out as Hound, the Autobot who inexplicably smokes a big metal cigar. Steve Buscemi also pops in for a brief role as a robot junk merchant.

As for what passes as plot, in the couple years since the prior movie, all the nations of Earth (except Cuba) have outlawed Transformers, yet more keep arriving on a regular basis to battle one another. Their conflicts have more or less turned the world into a post-apocalyptic hellscape. The remaining Autobots live in hiding, constantly squabbling and infighting. Megatron has a scheme to negotiate with the U.S. government to release his Decepticons. Meanwhile, Optimus Prime (still voiced by Peter Cullen, really sounding his age now) has left to return to the shattered remains of Cybertron, where he meets a self-described robot “god” called Quintessa (Gemma Chan), who brainwashes him into becoming her evil servant in a plan to bring what’s left of their home to Earth (basically the plot of Dark of the Moon all over again) and reawaken Unicron.

Oh yes, The Last Knight tells us that Earth itself is actually the hibernating sentient robo-planet Unicron, villain of the 1986 animated The Transformers: The Movie. The film even leaves off on a cliffhanger regarding that, which will apparently go forever unresolved after Bay’s ouster, as a later movie down the line has already ignored and rewritten that plot-point.

Needless to say, this is a bunch of stupid bullshit. All of Bay’s Transformers movies are. Still, this one feels even more haphazardly written and constructed than its predecessors. The story meanders from one pointless scene to another, the characters jabbering idiotic dialogue to no particular purpose. Worst of all, even the action scenes are tedious. Any trace of restraint the director may have shown in the last couple films gets tossed to the wayside, and we’re once more back to the Michael Bay who likes to stage and shoot hugely expensive visual effects set-pieces from terrible camera angles and edit them into frenzied incoherency.

Even with a runtime pared back by ten minutes (compared to the outrageously bloated Age of Extinction) to just 2.5 hours again, getting through Transformers: The Last Knight is a dreary slog that offers next to no sense of entertainment or enjoyment. Knowing that its failure would mark Michael Bay’s final involvement with the franchise is the only saving grace that makes its existence at all tolerable.

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Transformers: The Last Knight was released on home video in multiple editions including Blu-ray, 3D, and 4K Ultra HD in late 2017. By that time, I had given up on the franchise and elected not to purchase any of them with my own money, yet somehow wound up being given a free copy of the 4K disc anyway. As I recall, it was an extra review screener that I was not obligated to actually review myself. In any case, I left it in the shrinkwrap and had no intention of watching it until my son begged me to do this marathon with him.

A SteelBook edition was also released, but I somehow resisted it at the time. To my great shame, after watching the movie for this review and being fully aware of everything I don’t like about it, my collector’s OCD got the best of me. I found a copy for $10 on the Walmart web site and decided to splurge for the sake of uniformity on my movie shelf. Sadly, Walmart shipped it in a flimsy cardboard mailer and the case arrived dented to hell and split in half at the spine. I’m currently in the process of trying to get a replacement for that. [Note to self: Never order another SteelBook from the Walmart web site.]

While I was at it, I also couldn’t resist buying the 3D edition on sale for $5 at Hamilton Book. That one arrived safely, but the 3D disc in the set is defective and can’t be read by my Blu-ray player. I suppose I should write this off as karma for wasting money on extraneous copies of a movie I don’t even like.

The version I watched with my son was the 4K Ultra HD, and he was grateful that he didn’t need to wear special glasses for it. In regards to general picture quality attributes, the 4K transfer is sharp and slick, with strong colors (especially the flesh tones in Bay’s preferred shade of deep orange) and good contrast. Use of HDR is a little restrained with only mild highlights, but looks well-balanced overall.

The most notable, and frustrating, facet of the disc is its endlessly fluctuating aspect ratio. Bay had already played around with IMAX Variable Aspect Ratio presentations for Revenge of the Fallen and Age of Extinction. For this entry, he takes the gimmick to its furthest extreme. The director shot The Last Knight in at least eight different aspect ratios ranging between 1.90:1 to 2.40:1, and flits between them shot-to-shot with no clear rationale or logic behind the transitions. The most heavily used are 1.90:1, 2.00:1, and 2.20:1. Personally, I find this visually irritating, and it plays terribly on my Constant Image Height projection screen, where the wider ratios wind up shrunken down into a small window with bars on all sides.

Other IMAX VAR movies are typically safe to mask down to a common 2.35:1 or 2.40:1 (using the projector’s electronic blanking feature) to replicate how they were projected on theater screens other than IMAX. I was able to do that to adequate success with both Revenge of the Fallen and Age of Extinction. However, The Last Knight was projected with a variable ratio in all theaters, not just IMAX, and the photography was not composed for a Constant Height presentation. Though some scenes (even many of them) look fine masked to 2.35:1, others result in character heads cropped in half at the top of the screen or text clipped at the bottom.

Experimenting with this a little, I found a workable compromise by zooming and masking to a 2.20:1 size. While even that may look a bit cramped in some shots, essential picture information remains visible within the safe area, and the appearance of black bars jumping around on screen is greatly minimized. (It’s only noticeable for the minority of shots in the widest 2.40:1 ratio.)

I don’t advocate this for all viewers. Anyone watching on a traditional 16:9 television or projection screen should just play the disc as it’s authored and learn to get used to the black bars dancing around all over the place. The minority like me with wider screens may wish to give this 2.20:1 presentation a shot in order to optimize image size on the screen.

The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is once again loud and rumbly. While the track has plenty of bass, it doesn’t dig quite as deep or hit as hard as prior movies in the series. I also found that the Atmos mix has little of note going on in the overhead speakers – at least, nothing that called much attention to itself.

All bonus features are found on a dedicated supplement disc (none on the 4K or Blu-ray discs for the feature). This time out, extras are limited to a half-dozen featurettes that add up to 85 minutes of content I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste my own time watching. Sorry.

Related

• TV
  • The Transformers (1984) Series Premiere
  • Beast Wars: Transformers (1996) Series Premiere
• Movies
  • The Transformers: The Movie (1986)
  • Transformers (2007)
  • Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
  • Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
  • Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)
  • Bumblebee (2018)
  • Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023)
  • Transformers One (2024)
• Reading
  • The Transformers: Issue 1 (1984) Marvel Comic Book
  • Void Rivals: Issue #01 (2023) Skybound Comic Book
  • Transformers: Issue #01 (2023) Skybound Comic Book
• Michael Bay
  • Armageddon (1998)

Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the standard Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.