Transformers: The Last Knight

Michael Bay's problems are rooted in cohesion, specifically he struggles to arrive at a consistent tone or emotional wavelength. With Transformers: The Last Knight the director appears to have manufactured a solution - endless, breathless propulsion. Tossed off concepts and writer's room notes boil in a cauldron of pure, kinetic imagery. Bay is keyed into a ratcheting, agitated movement that extends to every facet of the filmmaking experience, even a constantly changing aspect ratio. The film never sits still, there's none of Christopher Nolan's stately approach to IMAX inserts, Bay's film is rabid, hurtling back and forth between the towering, vertical photography of super projection and letterbox vistas that read left-to-right.

Viewers are warned early and often that The Last Knight has been assembled to express a specific vision. It is not an easily digestible Summer product. Even for a Michael Bay film Last Knight is aggressive and inflexible, chewing up hundreds of millions of dollars so the director can scratch his various itches. Like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword before it, The Last Knight holds up John Boorman's Excalibur as a primal filmmaking text. Ever the obsessive, Bay zeroes in on the details, littering the battlefield with the swords that assailed Gabriel Byrne's Uther Pendragon and replicating Terry English's chromed plate armour on a massive, techno-organic scale.

Although The Last Knight lacks Excalibur's mythic sweep, God-King Optimus Prime notwithstanding, Bay's film does attempt to replicate the elliptical storytelling of Boorman, a model in which image and feeling trump structure and order. Boorman's compression came from a desire to fit a storied King's entire lifetime into 140 minutes of film. Bay's truncation is different, more about removing any peak on the film's carefully calibrated emotional chart that isn't total, screaming noise.

The Last Knight then allows us an insight into how Bay chooses to interpret the screenplays he's assigned. An undercooked example like Bad Boys urged the director to lean heavily on his cast, using them to create skits that conveyed critical plot details in a package that, if not organic, at least had a fair opportunity to be entertaining. The career that has followed that film is indicative of a talent not completely sold on writing as anything other than a blueprint used to string together disparate, fantastical situations.

Armageddon and Pearl Harbor stand as garbled attempts to ground the director's bombastic leanings in human stories about amateurs under stress. Bay fails to draw out any finer details in these situations because he either doesn't believe the moments or simply cannot relate to them. The Last Knight is, at a conceptual level, a committee crafted jump-off designed to dangle threads and hit specific, audience friendly targets. Bay has been handed a piece wringing with a particular kind of arrogance, it's a franchise maker. Bay may be on his fifth Transformers film but the director has never been asked to do anything as vulgar as consider continuity.

Each Transformers film has been an iterative example of what a live action interpretation of the 80s toyline could be. Love interests and even protagonists have come and gone; doomsday scenarios are replayed and reconfigured; the Transformers themselves die and are resurrected over and over again with zero regard for where the previous films left them. The Last Knight places a marker and, barring another entry that dispense with the concepts presented here, asks that further sequels proceed from a point where the Earth is slowly mutating into Unicron, the world-eating machine from Nelson Shin's The Transformers: The Movie, while Optimus Prime battles a malevolent robotic Gaia.

With very little need to spin wheels, Bay delivers a film that moves at two hundred miles an hour. Aiding and abetting this rampage is Sir Anthony Hopkins, the actor brimming with the kind of unfiltered glee he brought to the later, trashier Hannibal Lecter films. In Hopkins Bay has a collaborator genuinely capable of plugging one of the director's most obvious leaks. Hopkins can deliver stilted, stuttering exposition as a lark, turning the kind of heavy lifting usually reserved for a bug-eyed John Turturro into something that actually moves.

The winding, circuitous logic of Hopkins' info dumps are adrenalised by a companion action sequence that sees super-charged sports cars attacking London's landmarks and side-roads. The set-piece focuses on tourist destinations and the old city arteries that connect them. Bay forcing a McLaren 570GT down cramped, atypical alleyways manages to evoke the brief, busy thrill of Claude Lelouch's C'était un rendez-vous if not that piece's sustained, death-defying intensity. The image of gleaming, finely-tuned automobiles struggling along cobbled streets could even be read as the director using the absurdity of the film's unceasing momentum as a literal, self-referential component. Michael Bay has been allotted several finely packaged ideas and they're going down your throat whether you like it or not.

Transformers: The Last Knight - 'TIL ALL ARE NONE

Presumably sad robot Dad Optimus Prime is possessed or reprogrammed or whatever, based on all his boring, stated regret, not to mention those glowing purple eyes he's sporting in this Transformers: The Last Knight trailer. Bit of a shame really, it'd be fun if Michael Bay and pals really leaned into their portrayal of Prime as total weaponry by having him return to Earth after communing with some spectral ancestor who instructs him to completely eliminate the ongoing, intergalactic threat the Transformers race represents. Failing any of that, it's comforting that it actually looks like Bay's remaking Claude Lelouch's landmark speed-racing short C'était un rendez-vous using Lamborghinis and IMAX cameras. Something for everyone.

Death Race

If you browsed print criticism of Paul W S Anderson's Death Race, you'll have noted repeated assurances from critics that the film's aesthetic resembled that of a video game. Does it though? In some corners, likening a motion picture to a video game has become lazy shorthand for stressing that a shallow artificiality has been detected in the piece. Death Race fits that bill: it's a film thrash-cut to a point were geography and the spatial relationships of characters are unintelligible. Anderson's remake is superficial, mindless and designed to elicit maximum gratification from a pubescent, predominantly male audience, hence it resembles a 'lower' art. Comparing a film to a video game is seen as the absolute lowest kind of slight. The filmmakers are so inept that they've accidentally made something subterranean. There's an arts class system in place, with video games right at the absolute bottom of the heap.

Perhaps you wonder why this is the case? Is it the medium's (relative) newness that offends? Or is it that games are exclusively written on computers in an office setting? This carpeted crucible apparently antithetical to many people's idea of what art is. These sort of people, it must be said, are those who seem to believe that films and music are simply wished into being by magical 'creatives' rather than toiled over in locked, industrialised settings. Video games are then a horrifying example of incomprehensible modernity: they're mass-produced, and largely premised on the ability to express the violent urges that most responsible adults would deem embarrassing. They're artless simulation, basically. Even with all of this in mind, Death Race does not resemble any kind of video game I've ever played. More specifically, Death Race does not resemble a racing game. 

Video games are about play. They're about feedback led choices in scenarios with hardwired rules. The accurate feedback required to make second-by-second decisions means the player requires a static viewpoint. Death Race is nothing like this. The film's action viewed from hundreds of brief, contrary vantages. In video games based around racing vehicles there is a choice - you are usually either explicitly the driver (inhabiting an increasingly realistic cockpit), a third-person perspective that resembles that of a child playing with their toy or, literally, the vehicle itself. You are never anything as passive as an audience. Anderson's Death Race is constructed out of tiny disconnected impressions, but, in the main, it represents the crowd's impression of events. There is no overall sequence. This is the problem, if you can't understand what is going on, you can't play. 

Interactive viewpoints for racing games have long been patterned after Claude Lelouch's 1976 short film C'etait un rendez-vous. This exhilarating piece is one unbroken eight-minute take, shot through the eyes of a speeding car. This sustained perspective paying dividends in immersion. You're there for the duration of the hair-raising drive, rather than just a jumble of carefully selected highlights. Comparatively, Death Race is about a simulated kind of excitement, and perhaps this is were these critics falter. Presumably, nothing genuinely spectacular was captured on film during the making of Death Race or, perhaps, nothing spectacular enough. Anderson's rolling cameras captured no sequences so arresting that whoever directed the film's moment-to-moment assembly then felt emboldened enough to hold on a particular shot, and allow the audience to really take in an overall sense of space. Instead the film is viewed in fragments, the perspective repeatedly juggled in the hopes of suggesting chaos. There is no sense of speed in Anderson's Death Race. Rapidly cutting on fast moving cars kills any sensation of speed. There is no propulsion. Cars move by the same barely dressed warehouse set again and again. They may as well be trapped in amber. Death Race resembles nothing at all.