It feels like almost everything went wrong with this movie.
Optimus and Bee: Overpowered to the point of self parody
Drift/Crosshairs/Hound: If you enjoyed them in the last movie, well too bad because they're barely in it
Isabella and Sqweeks: Useless
Hot Rod: Lame one-trick pony
Quintessa: The same damn thing as The Fallen but lamer
New Decepticons: Dumb stereotypes that get killed off with no effort
Cogman: Irritating waste of CG budget, doesn't even do the one gimmick he's explicitly stated to have
Daytrader: WHY?
Mini-dinobots: WHY?
Dragonstorm: I don't even know where to start asking questions about this thing. No aspect of it made sense to me.


The previous 4 have their problems, but there are things I enjoy about them; Bonecrusher's highway fight, The Forest Battle, Duel With Sentinel Prime, Dinobots,etc. I still pull up the DOTM final battle from time to time on Youtube. But this one, there's no "payoff" to anything. How is it that the movie with the biggest budget out of all of them, ends up with the worst action sequences, and seemingly the least significant amount of Transformer involvement?

 

Because AoE gave a false positive with regards to "throw nonsensical garbage on the screen and people will still pay to see it", so with Transformers proving to have had two back-to-back billion dollar films, emerging market presence in China, and Disney ramping up the MCU...it was time for Paramount to make their move.

TLK sucks because it decided to just throw out literally everything it could from AoE, retconning itself hard as much as possible because it turns out trying to murder your entire cast was a dumb fucking idea that Hasbro should have learned to not allow to happen after the first time it occured back in 1986. Moving past that, TLK's main focus is flawed identically to why Universal's The Mummy is a crap film: they gave more of a shit about trying to do rapid fire worldbuilding as opposed to making a good, standalone film. All that shit about WWII where Hitler got killed by a watch robot? DOES NOT FUCKING MATTER TO THE ACTUAL MAIN PLOT. All that shit about the Witwickians through history and I guess the only reason Anthony Hopkins is even in the film to begin with? DOES NOT FUCKING MATTER TO THE ACTUAL MAIN PLOT. The only things TLK served to do ultimately was twofold: establish the Ancient Aliens aspect of the lore hard enough to allow for spinoff films (like that abysmally shit looking, thank-fucking-god-its-not-happening WWII Transformers film, *shudders*), and set up Unicron as the 'Thanos'.

Suffice to say, even with TLK's stinger, Unicron was not happening in the sequel. He would have been saved for like, TF10 or something I dunno. But instead, TLK's "sequels" would have really amounted to period pieces much in the vein of Bumblebee, since Bumblebee was one of them (why else was there dumb looking concept art of Bee in the Vietnam War for some undisclosed reason?)

Everything else can be attributed to Lorenzo and Bay hillariously mismanaging the overpromoted 'writer's room' by simply taking all the ideas they thought were the best from different scripts and gluing them together, because if AoE can have a nonsensical plot where some dumbass third party is somehow simultaneously the biggest threat and the smallest threat because nobody fucking knows anything about them, then TLK can get away with ripping off Suicide Squad and The Force Awakens (it wasn't a coincidence that Izzy/Squeeks suspiciously seem similar to Rey/BB8) in an attempt to basically make AoE Part II.

 

Short answer: they just didn't care.

I've seen this with other films that are trying to do 'world-building,' where they try to entice you to enter a world much larger than what you've known...only to make it just a bunch of 'blah,' to the point where you don't care. Like "Jupiter Ascending," "Valerian: City of a Thousand Planets," where you have all this stuff happening, but there's nothing to really focus on or care.

Plus, I also feel Bay just didn't care at this point, given how everyone in the film didn't seem to be enjoying themselves, it felt like this film was all about the rage of doing another Transformers film. There was nothing really enjoyable.

 

The thing is, just about everything people rip The Last Knight apart for was already present in the early days of the films in 2007 and RotF (And actually many other parts of the brand, too). Excessive characters and plot points. Stereotypes and cliche characters. Ridiculous dialogue and humor. Strange editing. Etcetera.

I will agree that TLK is undoubtedly the weakest of the films as a sequel, given no mention of Galvatron, minimizing the Creators angle, and Earth and Cybertron going back to being the only planets that matter again. I'd say for TLK specifically that ignoring or minimizing AoE's threads and trying to be a cinematic universe are its biggest weakness compared to the other films.

 

The simple answer is as said by Unuseiranma, they just didn't care. They took as many short cuts as possible. Don't even get me started on the aspect ratio. TLK is proof that they should've stopped at Dark of the Moon. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I heard that the film is so bad, that Paramount lost $100 million because of it.

 

As an actual movie, it wasn't bad at all and gets humor around Transformers correctly. Other than that...not worse than other stuff we've seen.

 

Because they didn’t care! Seriously who films a movie in 3 different aspect ratios and doesn’t bother to fix it? Michael Bay does! They just didn’t care at this point.

 

It’s been a thing since AoE. I don’t know if it’s because of nostalgia or what but it seemed a lot worse in TLK.

Whoever edited that abomination deserves to be fired.

 

Couldn't agree more, it's so distracting. Shame on the person who was in charge of the editing process.

 

I mean, there are so many threads talking about this. You really wanna start this conversation again? It's been 2 years.

 

Although TLK is bad, for me the worst will always be ROTF

 

I think TLK's failure was a combination of several thing. A big factor in AOE's success was the China market. Abandoning that without attempting to step up the storytelling to compensate was probably a bad decision. As was merging three scripts into one. And they gave it to a director who seems to be running out of steam since 2011 (his heart really doesn't seem in this series anymore).

I personally don't think TLK is nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. As @Galvatross said, people tend to criticize TLK for stuff that they'll give the other movies (especially the first three) passes for. Possibly more than anything, I think TLK was just a breaking point. Audiences wanted a fresh start for the "Transformers Cinematic Universe", and they essentially got more of the same.

 

as others have china, purely existing there makes money. while Michael bay isn't really talented he had passion at least first three, by the time tlk came around he had lost pretty much any passion and just wanted to get his paycheck and forgot it ever happened

 

Because they so clearly did not give a shit while making it. Every scene just bleeds apathy and inhumanity that can only come from borderline contempt for the subject matter.

The movie has no focus, no real plot, just a jumbled mess of "things." It's so divorced from the very idea of Transformers that the movie's title isn't even in reference to one.

 

I think you answered your own question.

 

I've added more to your post. It's all I can think of for now.

 

It's honestly kinda sad, thinking back on it.

It even gives off a vibe of self-sabotage, Like "Let's just deliberately throw in every bad idea so that these movies will end." I could be completely wrong, but I get that feeling from it. Especially Daytrader.

 

Two responsible: Bay and Bonaventura.

 

I don't think it was horrible. It just failed to live up to it's potential set up by AoE.

 

What kind of narcotics do you take to come up with the idea of Earth being Unicron???