22 Things I Learned from Transformers: The Last Knight

1. It’s easy to sneak onboard a military flight with a robot the size of a fridge freezer.

2. Oxford, Westminster, and the White Cliffs of Dover are minutes apart.

3. Decommissioned submarines come fully equipped with pickled ginger and grated radishes.

4. Transformers have been on Earth for several thousand years, arbitrarily intervening in our wars to keep themselves busy. Only the tireless efforts of Albert Einstein, Frederick Douglass and others have kept their presence hidden.

5. Oxford lectures take place while – and indeed, consist solely of – wandering around museums making snide remarks about history.

6. Astrophysicists speak only in simplistic metaphors, and refer to these loudly and grandly as ‘physics’ (eg ‘Like Tiger Woods taking a swing: physics!’; ‘Earth will cook like a bag of popcorn in a microwave: physics!’).

7. Transformers can now reassemble themselves when they’re dismembered.

8. Except when they can’t.

9. English women find it acceptable to spy on the passionate lovemaking of their relatives.

10. Transformers hang out in Cuba because they seek both non-extradition territories and places to tan.

11. Stonehenge was at the exact centre of Pangaea.

12. There’s always a mysterious artefact.

13. There’s always a prophecy.

14. There’s always an air strike (or twelve).

15. There’s always a secret message hidden in the childhood relic from the father who you always thought neglected you.

16. There’s always a bit where Anthony Hopkins says ‘dude’, ‘bitch’, or ‘bro’. Oh no wait, that one’s new.

17. Two films in and already Mark Wahlberg looks bored.

18. There’s only one female Transformer, and she’s a villainous temptress from deep space with the power to warp men’s minds.

19. Which does beg the question: where did these baby Dinobots come from?

20. The headquarters of the European Space Agency look a lot like London’s City Hall; Sir John Soane’s Museum is a private residence; and London streets consist of nothing but one intersection near Bank, the Mall, and Westminster Bridge, repeating over and over during a car chase like the backgrounds of a cheap cartoon.

21. In the world of Transformers, everyone is gratingly obnoxious to everyone else most of the time. (When not being obnoxious, people either ignore one another, or tell one another they’re the best mechanic/father/honourable knight they’ve ever seen).

22. No-one crashes two planets into one another like Michael Bay crashes two planets into one another.

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