Ranking The Live Action TRANSFORMERS Movies
A while ago I published a review of the first live action Transformers movie, where I wrote about how much I like it and what it means to me. At the end of it, I teased my opinions on the sequels, writing that I would save them for another review.
With hype starting to build for the latest in the series, soft-reboot/prequel Bumblebee, directed by Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) and releasing this December, I felt that now would be a good time to give my opinions on the Michael Bay directed films.
Moving from worst to best, here is my personal ranking of the five live action Transformers films.
(Reminder: All my personal opinion.)
5. TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT (2017)
“Autobots and Decepticons are at war, with humans on the sidelines. Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of the Transformers on Earth.”
The absolute worst in the franchise. I had a bad feeling about it from the trailers, which for the first time in this franchise did nothing to excite me.
The film was noisy, incoherent and hollow and I hated nearly everything about it. The only things I did like were the return of Decepticon Barricade (who funnily enough only appears in odd-numbered instalments up to this point), the design of Megatron (with original actor Frank Welker providing his voice), and Steve Jablonsky's score.
As soon as my brother and I arrived home after seeing this film, we ranted so much that we compiled a lengthy list pertaining everything we disliked about it. Unfortunately, this list has since been lost after he changed his smart phone, which is a shame as I would have loved to read through it before writing this..
A lot of the characters annoyed me. All Mark Wahlberg did, returning as Cade Yeager from the fourth film, was shout and look bewildered and his romance with Laura Haddock's Vivian Wembley, though telegraphed through some forced, awkward dialogue about why no one will go out with her and how long it has been since he last had sex, was very unbelievable and unearned. Then there is the issue of Izzy (Isabella Moner), a preteen tough girl who seems like she's going to be important due to her introduction at the start of the film, but then completely disappears from the story in the second act, only showing up again at the end.
In fact, for the sake of the story, two characters could easily have been merged into one. Izzy and Wembley should have been the same person. One underdeveloped moment should have been turned into character development. Cade is a fugitive in this story for helping the Autobots in Transformers 4, so he is not allowed to see his daughter, who is away in college. Enter Izzy, a street savvy orphan who crosses paths with Cade and the Autobots and gets involved in the battle against the Decepticons. There are scenes where the two begin to bond; asking about what happened to their families and attempting to fix Bumblebee's voice box. These end up going nowhere. There should have been more of these moments threaded throughout the film where they bond as surrogate father and daughter, assisting and supporting each other. At least this way, her character would have served more of a purpose than "our movie has a tough young girl in it, appealing to a wider demographic" and we would not have to suffer through the poorly written "love story".
There are also so many continuity issues that are introduced by the film's insistence that the Transformers characters we see arrive on Earth in the first film had actually been on the planet for decades longer than that, through old paintings featuring Ironhide and statues showing off Optimus Prime in his design that he only acquired in Transformers Age of Extinction in "present day".
There are so many more issues I have with this sorry attempt at a Transformers film that were on the aforementioned lost list. If I remember them in future, I will update this post on The Last Shite.
Coming Soon: Ranking Number 4.
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