Have you ever been watching DOWNTON ABBEY and said to yourself, "Y'know, this is a pretty good show, but what it really needs is giant robots that can turn into other stuff fighting each other"?
Because that's kind of what you get in TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT, at least part of the time. Some of the film is set on an English country estate, complete with big, castle-like house, and Jim Carter, who played Carson the butler on DOWNTON ABBEY, plays another butler in this one, only he's a Transformer. And if you think that's kind of weird, hearing Carson's voice coming out of a robot, you'd be right. Elsewhere, Anthony Hopkins is the nobleman Carter's character works for, Mark Wahlberg and Josh Duhamel are our stalwart heroes helping the Transformers fight the evil Decepticons, and a whole crew of veteran voice actors are behind all the computer-generated robots.
The plot, you ask? Well, it fills in some of the Transformers' back-story and how they came to earth, which involves King Arthur and Merlin (no, I'm not making this up), and a secret weapon they create and give to Merlin which has been hidden for centuries, until it becomes the only thing that can prevent the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron from crashing into Earth. And Earth holds another secret that effectively sets up the next movie in the series, which I'm sure we'll watch, too, since we've seen all the others. Sure, the Transformers movies are big and loud and silly, but a few times in every one of them, they manage to create the sort of epic feeling that I enjoy. And to be honest, I'm still enough of a 12-year-old boy at heart that giant robots whaling the tar out of each other still seems like fun.
I thought about doing this post as part of the Overlooked Movies series, since I didn't know this movie had even been made, let alone was available on DVD, until I happened to come across it, but it seemed too recent and probably was too successful for that. So if I'm still doing the blog in a few years and the Overlooked Movies series is still going on, I'll do a repost of it when I'm stuck for anything else.
1 comment:
James, you should have been in the Downton Abbey Wrtier's Room. I'd love to have seen the faces of your colleague when you said, "It's a pretty god show. But you know what we need? We need giant robots that can turn into other stuff fighting each other!"
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