Transformers: The Last Knight

There really wasn't any need for another Transformers live-action movie. It's definitely one I would only watch on the plane. And if I'd checked and seen it was 2 1/2 hours long at the beginning, I wouldn't have bothered. 

But I have to admit this film was actually a lot of fun. It was very stupid indeed, Michael Bay presumably wanting to throw a bit of Game of Thrones and The Da Vinci Code into his franchise by tying his giant gun-toting robots into the mythos of King Arthur, with some World War 2 action thrown in for good measure. Transformers have been part of human history all along, you see, kept secret by a hidden society. A macguffin even more macguffin-y than the All-Spark appears, key to activating Merlin's staff but also tying into self-proclaimed Tranformers creator Quintessa's plans to bring Cybertron bizarrely quickly across the universe to Earth. Which is secretly Unicron. 

There's a lot more silliness here. Anthony Hopkins having much more fun and putting in much more effort than in Thor as a guardian of an ancient society. A posh English butler robot with a psychotic streak. A human weilding excalibur to be able to fight on even terms with a giant robot and screw physics right up. A descendant of Merlin who happens to be a smokin' hot British Professor of English at Oxford (college unspecified).Hot Rod made French purely for the comedy of how his name sounds in that accent.

Though the big climax is a typical big ole robot scrap, what makes this work as well as it does is that there isn't that much focus on the Transformers, and they're less annoying than they were in the first Bay films anyway. The human characters are much more central, and though they're very broadly-drawn, they're still likeable and compelling. 

This is totally brainless eye candy, with a stupid plot driven by prophecies and magical items, which is the laziest kind of writing, and they could really have just had Quintessa come and attack and gone straight to the big fight and you would have just about the same level of substance. But dammit, it's fun, sometimes it made me laugh, and it was visually stunning. And it's nice to see glamorised England, from Tower Bridge to Stonehenge. Perhaps it's just that my expectations were very low this time, but this was probably the most fun I had watching a live-action Transformers film, because it was just so unashamedly silly.