Michael Bay’s Transformers movies have a certain familiarity. The Autobots and Decepticons — the long-standing rivals in this toy-ad-turned-mega-franchise about transforming alien robots — beat the crap out of each other, endangering Earth in the process. A human hero (usually a man, with the assistance of a very beautiful woman) saves the world. Optimus Prime waxes poetic about how Earth is the new Transformers home, and how it’s a pretty rad place to be. Fin.
(Light spoilers ahead for the end of Transformers: The Last Knight. Seriously, I mean light.)
So it’s not terribly surprising that, if you’ve seen any of the last four movies, you can guess how number five, Transformers: The Last Knight, will draw to a close: with a flowery, vaguely heroic-sounding speech from Prime about the Transformers’ adopted home.
In theory, giving Optimus Prime the last word is a charming touch, a nice way to add harmony to the overarching universe. But Prime’s closing words can be applied to almost any of the Transformers films, making each speech — and by extension, each film — feel hopelessly generic. These stories are about humans and Transformers uniting as friends and allies… but since it’s the same humans and Transformers every time, this feat becomes a lot less impressive with each movie.