Well, Westworld is over, but Anthony Hopkins isn’t yet done beautifully delivering convoluted monologues about sentient robots. He’s the narrator for this first trailer for Transformers: The Last Knight, somehow the fifth movie in this unbearably enduring series.
The trailer, like so many in recent memory, is set to a sparse, haunting cover—this time, The Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” rendered painfully on the nose. Now, the singing voice is robotic, and when it sings “floating in space,” a robot is shown literally floating in space. It’s about as subtle as we’ve come to expect from Michael Bay.
Equally subtle and predictable is the abbreviated history of the world Bay displays here. Medieval knights explode. World War II Nazis explode. Modern infantrymen explode. It plays more like a pyrotechnics demo reel than a movie about robots that turn into cars.
The Transformers do eventually show up, though, as does Mark Wahlberg—now in a Michael Bay wig, in case the director’s signature wasn’t written clearly enough in his visual piss. It seems that Optimus Prime is now robo-possessed or something, and it’s up to Wahlberg, the US military, and some children to stop him.
“You want to know, don’t you—why they keep coming here,” Hopkins’ voice-over asks us, speaking of the Transformers. It’s audiences that are the real question, though, huh, Tony?
