There Is No Escaping This Aggressively Stupid Godforsaken 'Transformers' Franchise

transformers: the last knight

I feel like I’ve been lobotomised. That’s all I could think as I staggered out of Transformers: The Last Knight, reeling from two-and-a-half hours of 3D iMAX eyesore CGI, ear-splitting sound effects, endless explosions, boundless idiocy, screenwriting calamity, and general cinematic cacophony. My head throbbed, my perception wobbled, my will to live waned. Having been bombarded by a relentless flurry of light, sound, fury, and artistic nothingness, my mind reeled, and my senses seemed on the brink of packing up. I was suffering from PTSD: Post-Transformers Stress Disorder; and I needed a quiet corner, a stiff drink, and a healthy dose of perspective.

But, the more I thought about The Last Knight, the less it made sense. How to explain this film? It’s a feature-length ad for toys that’s also an extended commercial for the US military, a showreel for 2016 model motor-vehicles, and an endless parade of placed products, corporate logos, and patronised sponsors. It’s a stylistic mix between laboured comic banter, action-chase set-pieces, barrages of weaponfire, earnest workplace depictions of Army/Navy employees, Anthony Hopkins chewing the scenery like a half-starved dog, strident anti-intellectualism, borderline Faith-Based symbolism, and mystical space-saga.

Its non-human stars are a race of robots from a distant galaxy who disguise themselves as Earthly vehicles to blend in with their surroundings, except some of them are dinosaurs and dragons, which don’t seem like great disguises. And, though they hail from some far-flung cosmos, they’re also a collection of repellent, racist stereotypes: there’s a Japanese one spouting samurai clichés, a Citroën with a thick French accent, a posh butler that turns into an Aston Martin. Countless robots shuck-and-jive. John Goodman voices an ambulance that, for some reason, smokes a robotic cigar. Lots of robots have swords. The whole thing is aggressively, repellently stupid.

Every character talks as if they’re in a wrestling promo, whether they’re trading ball-bustin’ banter, out to destroy things, or save the world. There’s a jive-talkin’ “punk” robot with a green mohawk that actually says, out loud, “Oooooh yeah, Decepticons is in the streets! I’mma let you know what we came here to do!” People (or, y’know, alien robots) get called “dickhead” or “punk-ass bitch” numerous times. The Optimus Prime character says his name, repetitively, as if an insecure rapper out to build brand recognition.

It’s a 149-minute, $260mil shrine to the adolescent male aesthetic: all rebellious swears, rampant testosterone, and ill-conceived attempts to be ‘cool’. Befitting a film made for an audience of virgins, there’s a sexlessness, too: for all the leering shots of Laura Haddock (who legit plays a ‘sexy’ professor of English history, make-up remaining flawless even in apocalyptic battle) and the respectful pans up Marky Mark Wahlberg’s buff bod (u lift, bro?), The Last Knight goes to great pains to point out how they’re both totally single —all the better for love-interest foreshadowing!— and haven’t gotten laid in years.

Despite the fact Haddock ends the film in an army jumpsuit, it’s hard to miss the franchise’s inbuilt hatred of women. It’s not just that this flick is, as usual, entirely populated with men, except for two instantly-sexualised women; Haddock and “streetwise tomboy” Isabela Moner, who drives a crew of pre-teen delinquents wild in the opening reel. It’s more that the villain is a woman, a tentacled Mystic Medusa succubus who is the Mother of a planet (Cybertron!) that she’s piloting on a collision course with Earth; a giant vagina verily hurtling through space.

Like some Nagging Girlfriend destined to destroy the boy’s-own sanctuary of the Transformers universe, she’s coming to suck the life out of mankind, and the only thing that can stop her is a host of manly men: army officers shot from below in heroising fashion; homoerotic robot monsters; totez-ripped former Calvin Klein underwear models. And they’re united in their manliness: the word “brother” is bantered about so much you wonder if Hulk Hogan co-wrote the script.

Three people —Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, and Ken Nolan— actually wrote this shit. Four if you’re down with Akiva Goldsman’s ‘story by’ credit. All of them, we assume, hurled screenplay dung at the wall until the script was populated with lame jokes and facepalm-worthy clichés. British people take tea and crumpets. An onscreen intertitle says: ‘England – UK’; another ‘Badlands – S. Dakota’. In the absence of his daughter, from last film, Wahlberg gets a new daughter figure to try and paternally protect. Optimus Prime becomes Nega-Ninja evil, pronouncing “I am Nemesis Prime!” At finish, he actually says “there is more to this planet than meets the eye”. A transformer named Bumblebee says “sting like a bee!” before killing someone. After coming up with that line, the writers must’ve just taken the rest of the day off; done laps, basically, after that.

The story —if we can call it that— begins in the Dark Ages, with a drunken Merlin (Stanley Tucci, mugging) carousing in a cave with Transformers-in-hiding, who swing a cod-Thrones battle between Britons and Saxons. Later, we learn that Hopkins is the gate-keeper of a clandestine illuminati who’ve kept knowledge of Transformers on Earth under wraps for centuries; everyone from Galileo to Einstein to Stephen Hawking are members of this secret society, human history and ingenuity indivisible from our robotic Based On The Hasbro® Toy Line conspirators. It’s audacious to evoke a host of very-smart humans in a film this stupid, but audaciousness is not what Transformers auteur Michael Bay needs. That’s humility, artistry, an understanding of human behaviour, a grasp on logic, and a punch right in the cock.

Bay keeps the whole thing barrelling along: there’s evil killer robots, a fleet of military drones, bomb strikes, black actors in comic-relief roles, a romantic candlelit sushi dinner on a vintage WWII submarine, a mystical underwater chamber of slumbering-for-centuries knights, people surviving plane-crashes like it ain’t no thing, dramatic use of slow-mo, lame attempts to gin up entry-level emotion, flashbacks shot in black-and-white, and science taking the L in the face of magic.

It all builds to a finale both Bay-like and generic-blockbuster, a standard CGI-apocalypse climax where the Destroying Woman Planet takes out the moon and knocks over the pyramids, but is thwarted —at the buzzer!— before she sucks the life from Earth, and the manly men who populate it. Only for us to be, mid-credits, promised another Transformers instalment; a vision of the future that strikes me with horror; there no escape from this godforsaken franchise.

rough night

Rough Night is a girls-doing-bad-things barney with Broad City alumni (director Lucia Aniello, star Ilana Glazer), scene-stealing comic actors (Jillian Bell and Kate McKinnon), and bona fide movie-stars (Scarlett Johansson, Zoë Kravitz). It’s a femme-powered take on Hangover-styled R-rated comedy, with a plot that makes like Very Bad Things by way of Bridesmaids. There’s jokes about periods, waxing, HPV; and the whole is pitched as a Ladies Night Out film. Given Hollywood’s ongoing struggles with gender equality, both on screen and off, the commercial success —or, indeed, failure— of Rough Night will be the source of think-pieces, and possible over-reactions. But, if we really want to ask sticky questions about gender, here’s one: is it a problem that all of the funniest moments in Rough Night involve the male characters?

The main storyline —five old friends get together for Scar-Jo’s bachelorette weekend in Miami, hijinks ensure— is full of generic outrageous behaviour: dick jokes, lines of cocaine, pot smoked from an apple, slapstick pratfalls. And, sadly, there’s also the accidental murder of a male stripper, which begets a host of unfunny, morally-creepy attempts to cover up the crime, dispose of the body, and/or dry-hump the corpse. To go with this inversion of gender expectation, back home, Johansson’s fiancé (Broad City’s Paul W. Downs, also the film’s co-writer) is having a far-different bachelor party. Here, his crew (whose ranks include Bo Burnham and Eric André) are all about madeira, soft-cheese, wine-tasting, and therapeutically-deep emotional conversation.

If that’s not enough, when Downs senses disaster is brewing down South, he steals the film: heading on a ridiculous cross-country (mis)adventure where —inspired by Lisa Nowak— he’s clad in an adult diaper. Every time he’s on screen, it’s funny. Which you can’t say about anyone stuck in the main storyline, which involves death, felonies, and, eventually, a host of guns. Not to mention contrived emotions, shrines to friendship, and lessons learned. Viewers who come expecting any of the anarchy of Broad City will surely be disappointed. But, as much as this is a mediocre, middling movie with a questionable premise, none of that really matters, as long as no one really takes this as a referendum on women in Hollywood.

first girl i loved

The proposition seems like pure cliché: a queer teen movie in which the nerdy, arty photographer type falls for the sporty softball star. You can picture it all before the film even plays: the growing passion, the transgression, the coming-out, the overcoming of small-minded prejudice, the rom-com-worthy happy ending; all the tropes of those tepid genre movies that perennially clutter queer film festivals. Gladly, despite its anodyne title, First Girl I Love upends this familiar narrative, and does so via its non-linear storytelling.

The narrative is simple: Dylan Gelula and Mateo Arias are best pals, but, when Gelula crushes out on —and then gets fresh with— Brianna Hildebrand, Arias gets mad; he that classic guy-BFF who’s really just in love with his gal-pal. But, writer/director Kerem Sanga shuffles the chronology of the story, parcelling out information in ways that reverse, or upend what’s come before; not just audience’s assumed notions of coming-out stories, but of what’s actually occurred in the story. It may seem strange to employ mystery devices in a teenage drama, but there’s thematic resonance in the approach: Sanga turning the confusion of teenage hormones, sexual discovery, and nascent identity into narrative confusion. The audience, via this cinematic sleight-of-hand, is left as bewildered, delirious, and turned-around as its teenage protagonists.

It also speaks to another recurring theme, of communication and miscommunication; of the language of consent, and the spooked jargon of ‘safe space’, lawsuit-fearing schools; of the things people do and don’t say, and whether anyone else hears them. The climax comes with a school meeting populated by the love triangle, their various parental figures, teachers and guidance counsellors; and everyone is speaking a different language, whether English, Spanish, therapeutic clichés, or legalese. It’s a device that essentially litigates same-sex attraction in a formal setting, which, in turn, suggests greater themes, of homosexuality’s outlawed past, and its present-day status as battle-ground for legal rights.

The film even delivers an ending daringly close to downbeat; there no storybook coming-out/finding-love end, only a more realistic depiction of self-acceptance. Here, first love isn’t romanticised, only depicted in all its awkwardness, confusion, projection. The way Sanga upends clichés —dramatically, thematically, structurally— makes First Girl I Loved unexpectedly artful. And good enough for you to get over the fact that Hildebrand, having shaved her head for her turn in Deadpool, spends the whole film burdened with a wig so terrible-looking you’ve gotta knock off a half-star.

una

The premise of Una will make plenty of viewers queasy: it’s a film about the psychological fall-out from a scandalous affair, between Ben Mendelsohn and Rooney Mara. Only thing is, the affair happened when he was in his mid-30s, and she was 13; he the friendly neighbour, she the girl-next-door. He ended up going to jail, changing his name, moving away. But, fifteen years on, she’s tracked him down, and shows up in his workplace. They lock themselves in his office, with shades of those theatre-productions-turned-films —like, say, Death And The Maiden— where victims turn the tables with theatrical relish.

Only, nothing in this fascinatingly-written film —where David Harrower adapts his own stage-play— is so simple a reading. The early scenes only artfully allude to the central dramatic device, but even when their shared history comes spilling out, new facts —and feelings— emerge. Has Mara arrived for revenge? Or to rekindle old feelings? Did Mendelsohn fall earnestly, if illegally, in love? Or is he a sexual predator, with a penchant for hard candy?

Harrower never ducks difficult questions; and, indeed, throws troubling, tricky subjects at his audience, viewers left to come to their own moral conclusions. As his screenplay moves back and forth between past and present, director Benedict Andrews —an Australian who, himself, is coming from the theatre— nimbly weaves images together. The photography evokes the greater themes of memory and perception; Una lingering uneasily, on both screen and, afterwards, in the mind.

lady macbeth

On the wiley, windy moors, in a country manor in the 19th century, a young bride (Florence Pugh) has been sold into a loveless marriage. Her husband (Paul Hilton), once he sees her naked, has little interest in her. Her father-in-law (Christopher Fairbank), a glowering, lecturing ogre, despises her. Her handmaiden (Naomi Ackie), yokes her into the shackles of corsets and dresses, and silently judges her. Once an outdoorsy, independent girl, she's been made an ornamental figure; yet another period-piece’s headstrong modern woman imprisoned by the social values of yore. What to do, then, but fuck the dirty, caddish, handsome groomsman (Cosmo Jarvis!) whilst her husband's away?

This sounds like a familiar frock-movie set-up, sure, but, luckily, Lady Macbeth is no polite portrait of forbidden passion. Instead, all that hot, hot sex with the hired-help goes to Pugh’s head, and the film slowly tilts into a psychodrama, charting her descent into depravity and skulduggery. William Oldroyd, a veteran theatre director making his first feature, watches all this enflamed passion from a cold, often sardonic remove; his meticulously-composed frames remaining unmoving even when things get wild, dramatic, murderous. It's, ultimately, a portrait of outlawed female desire, a wild, untamed, un-British force regarded with fear and terror.

a quiet passion

“A posthumous reputation is only for those who weren’t worth knowing when living,” says Cynthia Nixon, shaking off more of that old Miranda (hand)baggage with a stern lead turn as Emily Dickinson. It’s the closest A Quiet Passion comes to revisionist history, offering a wink to modern viewers who know this unknown, unwed, housebound, anxiety-stricken figure as the Belle Of Amherst, one of history’s greatest poets. Otherwise, Terence Davies —maker of a whole filmography of starchy period-pieces— doesn’t do much to flatter his audience, nor attempt to put Dickinson’s work in a modern context. In fact, this cheesily-named film often seems like a old man’s valentine to the past: a scene in which a family quietly sits around a fire after dinner, reading, is essentially ol’ Terry’s silent lecture on noisy modern life and kids-these-days with their hippity-hop music.

In Davies’ films, the past is hard and gloomy, but he clearly prefers it, and things that way. The 71-year-old Englishman remains one of cinema’s great wowsers, something on show throughout A Quiet Passion. Instead of attempting to convey the psyche, artistic impulse, or restless creativity of his subject, we’re served a tedious history lesson. It’s not just the pioneer-village costumes and the local-theatre-production acting that give off this vibe: a terrible photo montage of Civil War pics, overlain with the statistics of casualties of various battles, is randomly inserted into the middle; the Ghost Of Home-Made-YouTube-Videos Future fluttering in to a film that, otherwise, never leaves the house.

William Oldroyd’s direction in Lady Macbeth shows how the interior of an old-timey home can be meticulously framed and photographed; made evocative, provocative, redolent with both beauty and theme. Davies —perennially in the running as one of cinema’s most overrated directors— shoots his every scene, however, like a poorly-lit BBC telemovie: shot/reverse/shot-ing the audience to death. His dialogue, whether overwrought witticisms, haughty outrage, or moralising lectures, feels stiff, woollen, wooden; and the contrast with the breathy voice-overs of Dickinson’s poetry doesn’t create thematic frisson, only a collision of unfortunate stagey extremes. Davies delivers all the E-Dix hits —This Is My Letter To The World, I’m Nobody! Who Are You?, etc— in predictable fashion, right up to the point where we hear Because I Could Not Stop For Death as her coffin is being carried away.