Well, sh-t. Here we go again. This is the fifth installment from Michael Bay and he's probably made this his most Michael Bay-some film possible with even some slight improvements compared to the mess that was Age of Extinction, but this certainly isn't any better, however.
So apparently it starts in medieval times and we have Merlin (Stanley Tucci in a whole different role from the last film.) finding a special staff from early cybertronians, foreshadowing the impact they made in every historical event on earth, then we cut the story back to Mark Wahlberg's Cade Yeager, now working at a junkyard with his daughter and her boyfriend out of the picture. (Which is best because I just didn't care about them before.) But Cade is also on the run because he still sides with Autobots such as Bumblebee, as humans are in an all out war with Transformers, yet a bigger threat looms upon the earth and it's up Wahlberg, an Oxford professor (Laura Haddock), and Anthony Hopkins, a legendary actor who had to be dragged into this movie as well, and has a C-3PO-like robot butler, to fight whatever makes up the climax.
But man, where to start about how this film was made? It just became an exhausting experience on the eyes because if you've been watching Michael Bay's films for this long, you'd come to accept that he won't hold back or make any promises. One of my biggest issues was the editing, like you can easily notice the aspect ratio when it changes from black bars to no black bars, cut after cut. It may be because it was filmed specifically for Imax, but makes the movie in general look so scrappy and uneven, you often can't tell where each character is at and what's going on. It's only up to the third act that it gets a little more exciting, the best actor of the whole movie probably has to be the little girl playing Izabella, and it's only later Optimus Prime finally shows up to become the inspirational-quoting badass he's supposed to be.
This is supposedly the last film in this saga and Bay's last time directing, (though that doesn't mean there won't be more movies later) and if this really is his last time, he definitely made this go out with a bang. C-