To better understand the art of filmmaking, Roger Ebert created what Howard Higman called “Cinema Interruptus”. He and some dedicated film lovers (sometimes students, sometimes festival audiences) dissected great movies scene by scene, studying how composition, lighting, and movement affect the viewing experience in ways both obvious and subliminal. These seminars could last as long as two hours per day for one week—per film. I would love to replicate that idea with Transformers: The Last Knight (though I’d have to find a substitute word for “Cinema”). In his fifth outing with the Hasbro toy franchise, Bay incorporates Arthurian legend into an already dense and contradictory history of robot-v-robot-v-mankind combat. Yet not even Merlin’s sword can summon a single, coherent sequence of events from the mercilessly weightless two-and-a-half-hour run time. With this film, Bay achieves art via transcendent incompetence. The Last Knight must be studied, so as not to be repeated.
Listen to Kicking the Seat Podcast #234 to hear Ian and Keeping it Reel's David Fowlie dismantle Transformers: The Last Knight!