It is far too warm to watch Transformers: The Last Knight. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to die soon, so the last thing I needed was Michael Bay overheating my head with one of the most incomprehensible films in the history of the universe and every encompassing dimension. Already hallucinating from the humidity, this fifth instalment of the never-ending franchise provided me with a violating existential experience, comparable to being forcefully baptised in sewage water.
As I type this, with a wet flannel on my head, the dog is following the fan around the room and keeps asking if I can open the front and back doors to create a through draft. This weather is immoral. I tried my best to follow the film, but between repeatedly peeling my back off a leather seat and aggressively gurning in an attempt to stay conscious, it was pointless.
For the entirety of the 400-minute runtime, I had no idea what was going on; something about the Transformer planet wanting to sap energy from Earth, which I think was meant to be a metaphor for the welfare system. Mark Wahlberg is the chosen one for some unexplained reason. He’s teamed up with Laura Haddock who is also special because she’s the only one who can work a magic staff or something.
There’s a bit at the beginning with Merlin in it that implies Transformers have been on the planet since the dark ages, before machines even existed and the Transformers had vehicles to imitate. And nonsense expert Anthony Hopkins dementedly runs around London like he’s trying to escape the smell of his own incontinence. It is too hot for this.
It is quite possible that The Last Knight is operating on some deeply profound, cerebral level that is beyond my comprehension. When Bumblebee broke into several pieces, then magnetically reassembled himself in a slow-motion sequence that lasted approximately 48 minutes, I wondered if this was some sort of abstract statement about the Paris Climate Agreement. But thinking about the climate only made me realise how hot it was again.
I tried to contemplate the philosophical symbolism of Optimus Prime beheading several alien robot knights, but I was distracted by the short-wearing gentlemen sitting beside me, whose balls had slipped out and fused to his chair, sweat dripping from them directly into my drink. The entire cinema fucking stunk and a woman near the front even died, although the dialogue might have been responsible for that.
Having since been resuscitated four times, I am able to conclude that Transformers: The Last Knight is as unwatchable as the weather is unbearable. In one scene, Bay typically adorns Haddock in a revealing dress and then draws unnecessary attention to it by having Wahlberg describe her as a stripper. I thought I’d completely hallucinated that bit, along with the rest of the film. I have no idea what happened.