Oh, for f**ks sake.
A very pedantic and specific example of why this movie is going to suck is what I'm going to coin "The Transformers Run Time Addition Effect." The phenomenon where each successive Transformers film is, on average, 6.3 minutes longer than the previous installment. Transformers (2007) 2h24m Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen 2h30m Transformers: Dark of the Moon 2h34m Transformers: Age of Ultron 2h45m Extrapolating this data indicates that The Last Knight is going to be 2 hours and 51 minutes, which is almost the run time of The Godfather. Transformers 8 will be longer than Lawrence of Arabia. Transformers 15 will be as long as Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. As a point of comparison, John Wick, Scott Pilgrim, Kingsman, Pacific Rim, all of the Fast & Furious movies, and the 1986 Transformers movie are all shorter than Transformers '07. Why are these movies so f**king long?!? I'm kidding obviously, the day they make a four hour movie about robots fighting is the day hell freezes over (I hope), but there's something in The Transformers Run Time Addition Effect emblematic of the actual problems with the franchise, namely it's excess. The explosions are numerous, the world grows more convoluted by the nanosecond, the visuals only get denser, and we were already pretty up in the air in the first one. This is the reason people complain about these movies. Weird politics and tone-breaking comedy aside, these movies are exhausting with no rationale to back that up, except in the first one. When you look at the "Making of" documentaries from the first film, there's a common theme that the producers and writers discuss. They wanted to tell a story about a boy and his car. There's a heavy focus by the proverbial camera on the human characters in that movie, as there should be. Especially when you're trying to bring something kinda goofy down to earth, a really good way to make it feel concrete is to introduce the world to us through a fish-out-of-water protagonist or at least a relatable perspective. The movie is generally filmed with the camera at head height or lower. A lot of the giant robots fighting happens above us, and this is important both thematically (boy and his car) as well as emotionally. We as the audience look up at Optimus Prime in awe and the Transformers themselves take on an unprecedented scale. It is epic. Michael Bay's greatest strength as a director is his ability to create scope in storytelling through visual dynamics. Every Frame a Painting does a really good job of deconstructing this, but the thing that I care about is not necessarily the technique but the rationale. There are certainly a couple different directions that you could go when making a live action Transformers film. Epic is the direction they took and epic is the direction they've stuck with, but there's a bit of a spectacle creep problem that's gone unaddressed. I think epic was fine for one movie, but since then it's over-inflated. To see this in action, let's compare the climaxes of the first film and the last film. The first film concludes with a fight in a city. There are five robots on each team that are fairly evenly matched. Once they actually get into the city, the battle is mostly contained to a single city block. The Decepticons want the Allspark, the Autobots want to defend it. Our protagonist, Sam Witwicky, is caught in the action because he has the Allspark, and he knows that shoving the Allspark into Optimus Prime's chest will destroy the cube but kill Optimus. Over the course of the film we've seen how indestructible just one small transformer is time and again; we know that this is going to be a tough fight, but it's all been building to this. Everyone has a clear objective, and the human characters are there for a reason. Age of Extinction ends with a bunch of stuff that makes no sense. The Autobots are in Hong Kong to fight Galvatron I think. Galvatron wants to blow up Hong Kong with the thing that Stanly Tucci has. Lockdown or Longstike or whatever is there because he wants to kidnap Optimus Prime. Marky Mark is there to... help. Lockdown's Spaceship has a giant magnet on it that picks things up and doesn't really make sense. The Dinobots show up to help in the brawl that John Goodman is singlehandedly fighting for a substantial portion of the climax, amazingly. Then things come to a head on a loading dock or something? And Kelsy Grammar blows up. Who the hell knows. I attribute this almost inspiringly convoluted set of story beats to the franchise's spectacle creep. The first movie was allowed to have a narrow focus and a battle with concise intentions and sides. Over the next three movies, so many balls got tossed into the air that it's a marvel anybody could follow the story at all. And even then there are so many contradictions and internal retcons that each movie might as well be in it's own continuity. It's a complete and utter mess and it comes back to the fact that they're trying to create and sustain an epic tone. The movies need to get bigger every time or else they lose that momentum completely. This is the reason elements exist like the ship with the magnet and the characters constantly getting redesigned and replaced. This is why Transformers 2 had the weirder designs of the Primes and a bunch of robots that turn into one really big robot. Why Transformers 3 had a giant metal Sandworm and people being vaporized into skeletons. Why Transformers 4 introduced the Lamborghini guy and the man-made transformers. It's all in service of gradually ratcheting up the scope. They need to constantly be upping the ante or risk doing something bold. At this point, any change in direction is going to feel like a capital B bold statement concerning creative intent that they don't want to risk pulling. Maybe that's a bit cynical, but they already have a specific audience that it isn't good business sense to startle them. With this in mind, I think that it's a bit weird for The Last Knight to be doing what it's doing. Not because change generally is unwelcome, I've already written my pitch, but because it's a change that doesn't do anything substantial. There's been a bunch of meninists and other less respectable people complaining about how the kids are going to ruin the movie, and I'm just sitting here pondering how this is a change that stirs the series up at all. There doesn't seem to be a massive shift in vision, it doesn't take itself more or less seriously, it doesn't look too different, there's more screen time with people than robots as usual, nothing has fundamentally changed. Michael Bay caved to social pressures and then didn't know how to direct kids. It's here, reviewing this draft, when I sighed audibly. I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. The reason all of this is a problem is that they've sacrificed the fun of Transformers for the tone. All of the moments where I've really had fun at one of these movies come from the first one, and even then, those scenes are a minority. This is a shame, obviously, but mostly I question why they took something as joyful as the Transformers and sucked the joy out of it. |