Verdict
Summary
With big, exciting (and quite beautiful) cues, Jablonsky’s music is the perfect underscore to the mayhem and destruction director Michael Bay orders up for these movies.
Review: An unlikely sword and sorcery entry, Transformers: The Last Knight begins in the dark ages during the era when King Arthur (Liam Garrigan) is struggling in a war against a force that is stronger than his army. He’s waiting for the wizard Merlin (Stanley Tucci) to come up with a plan to save them all, and Merlin seeks out the Transformers, who have landed somewhere near Stonehenge and have developed a trust with Merlin. They bestow a scepter on Merlin, who uses it to command a transforming three-headed dragon, which is all Arthur needs to defeat the opposing force. Hundreds of years later on present-day earth, mankind has declared war against the Transformers, perceiving them a threat against the people of the world. Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots, is summoned to Cybertron, his fallen planet, where his deity commands him to betray humankind and even his fellow Autobots to find and retrieve Merlin’s scepter, which can be the catalyst to rebuild Cybertron. Meanwhile, all kinds of crazy stuff is going on down on earth: Everyone seems to agree that the end of the world is nigh, and a British Lord named Edmund (Anthony Hopkins) is on the verge of having a nervous breakdown trying to locate the scepter himself before the world ends. His hope lies in the form of two chosen warriors, one of whom is “the last knight” himself, an adventurer named Cade (Mark Wahlberg). The other chosen warrior is a beautiful historian named Vivian (Laura Haddock), who is the last in the lineage that goes back to Arthur himself. These two are meant to save the world, but before they do Earth is going to take an incredible pummeling.
The fifth and possibly the most frenetic of the Transformers movies from Michael Bay, The Last Knight feels like a post-apocalyptic end of the world movie, but it also feels like a sword and sorcery spectacular with giant robots wielding swords alongside their human counterparts who might as well be video game heroes, dodging every conceivable type of shrapnel from explosions on every side. Like the previous movies in the franchise, it’s a vomitorium of noise and furious motion, but these movies are spectacles in their own way. They’re too intense for kids, but if you have the constitution for it, it’s quite a ride.
La La Land Records has just released a two-disc soundtrack of the score for Transformers: The Last Knight by composer Steve Jablonsky, who thus far has composed the music for all five of the Transformers films. Jablonsky, who approaches these scores as if they were operatic adventures, has always been the right composer for this franchise. With big, exciting (and quite beautiful) cues, Jablonsky’s music is the perfect underscore to the mayhem and destruction director Michael Bay orders up for these movies. This is the second Transformers score that La La Land has released, but this time they’ve outdone themselves with a lavish treatment, as this two-disc set contains over 120 minutes of music. This release is limited to only 3000 units, so grab one while they’re still in print!