It’s rather poetic that Paramount’s world-building process for Transformers: The Last Knight and its inevitable sequels/spinoffs led the studio’s brain trust to circle back to the past, with Michael Bay’s imminent blockbuster poised to crack open the secret history of Transformers.
As Anthony Hopkins’ wise old astronomer and historian Sir Edmund Burton has teased, it’s a legacy that has been buried on Earth for a thousand years, stretching all the way back to Arthurian times when a conflict was settled on a battlefield torn apart by trebuchets, knights on horseback, and…Transformers, as it turns out.
Yes, it seems those towering robots in disguise have been a permanent fixture in human history, and we’re intrigued to uncover the ways in which Michael Bay and his creative team have woven the two together – Transformer and human; flesh and metal – in The Last Knight. And even if you’re not particularly fussed on the actual story of Paramount’s lucrative Transformers universe, there’s always the eye-popping spectacle to look forward to on June 21st. Because let’s face it, few directors are able to dazzle (overwhelm?) the audience in the visual department quite like Michael Bay, and you’ll be able to catch a glimpse of the filmmaker paying tribute to America’s armed services up above.
Transformers: The Last Knight opens on June 21st. And though it’s still early days, the relatively lacklustre performance of pre-summer tentpoles such as Alien: Covenant and the recently-released Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales has fuelled talk of franchise fatigue – neither film performed terribly at the international box office, with Pirates turning in the second-worst opening weekend in the franchise’s history. The real question now is, can Michael Bay’s soft reboot avoid the same pitfalls? We’ll find out soon enough.