Michael Bay

For all intents and purposes, every sign points to Michael Bay and the Transformers series going their separate ways after The Last Knight. Bay even wrote a goodbye letter to the franchise thanking everyone involved for five movies’ worth of explosions, robots fighting each other, and female characters introduced from the legs up. But there’s one person who thinks he might be faking it.

The new Transformers movie is all about buried secrets. Texan Bostonian inventor bro Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and brainy Oxford professor Vivian Frumplebumple (okay I admit it: I didn’t catch her last name so I made that up) discover a world they never knew: The hidden history of Transformers on Earth. It turns out the Transformers have played a role in every armed conflict throughout time. The Transformers helped King Arthur, and they threw an assist to the Allies during World War II. There’s more to meets the eye in those history books, doncha know.

Has any franchise ever been more successful and less beloved than Transformers? Even before this week’s release of Transformers: The Last Knight, the series had made almost $3.8 billion worldwide, despite an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 32 and three straight sequels that run the gamut from “kind of crummy” to “possibly the actual worst mega-budget blockbuster ever made.”

You know the Transformers series, which unveils its fifth film, The Last Knight, later this week. But did you know that the franchise largely exists because of the war in Iraq? It’s true; producer Don Murphy originally pitched Hasbro on making a G.I. Joe film series, but because of the political climate in the early 2003 after 9/11, they were hesitant and suggested Murphy instead devote his energies to the Transformers. Hasbro did eventually make two big-budget G.I. Joes, but only after the Transformers became a massive success with Paramount and DreamWorks. That’s just one of the facts featured in the latest installment of You Think You Know Movies!

You would think that after five attempts, Michael Bay would eventually figure out how to make a coherent Transformers movie. Apparently not. I challenge anyone — including this film’s four writers — to explain the story of Transformers: The Last Knight, how the characters get from point A to point B, and why any of it matters. I maintain that it cannot be done. Either this movie is dumb or I am.

Transformers: The Last Knight will indeed be Michael Bay’s last foray into the world of Autobots and Decepticons, and the conclusion of the series that started with Shia LaBeouf and a little yellow Camaro. But it won’t be the end of the Transformers filmic universe, and Bay says that, because of the questions raised in the final film, there are a lot of directions the franchise could take.

When Michael Bay makes a movie, he likes to make a BIG movie. No measly 35-millimeter film stock for him. Bay, like James Cameron and others of their ilk, enjoy being on the cutting-edge of filmmaking technology, utilizing the newest, boldest thing to make their movies pop off the screen. And regardless of your thoughts on the Transformers franchise, there’s nothing quite like seeing them in an IMAX movie theater.

Actually, Optimus Prime Has Always Been a Total Jerk

There is so much going on in this international trailer for Transformers: The Last Knight that I can hardly begin to imagine how bananas Michael Bay’s latest sequel will actually be when it hits theaters this month. It may not be over three hours long (as was erroneously reported last week), but given just how much story is happening here, that runtime doesn’t seem all that crazy. This movie just looks real extra.

Our relatively brief national nightmare of the new Transformers movie being three hours long is over. It’s a small but curious story, yielding little more than a detail in terms of intel on Michael Bay’s latest film, but more telling with regards to how information is generated and spread online today.