[Updated: Now with a recap of Bumblebee!]

To prepare for the premiere of Transformers: The Last Knight, I watched all four prior Transformers movies—all 611 minutes—in the span of two days, an experience I’m confident changed me as a person. I now dream of explosions, think primarily in Linkin Park songs; I blacked out halfway through Age of Extinction, and when I woke up I was leasing several Dodge Chargers. I cannot afford any of them. What I can do, however, is explain every detail of Michael Bay’s pyrotechnic-porn franchise based on a line of toys from the 1980s, the ins-and-outs of the Transformers universe.

What is the difference between an Autobot and a Decepticon? Who is Sentinel Prime? Why would a robot incapable of reproducing sexually need a giant, swinging pair of testicles? Dive in to these burning questions, and more, right here.

To navigate to the Transformer of your choice, click through these links:

Transformers (2007)

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So, before we officially begin, a few important technical aspects to keep in mind throughout:

  • For a franchise that is ostensibly about a race of robots made of outer-space sheet metal, the Transformers films have a nasty through-line of borderline racist caricatures. For example: the jive-talkin’, breakdancin’ Autobot named Jazz, who speaks around three times throughout the first movie. The first, to ask “What’s crackin’, bitches?” The second, to say, “Earth looks like a cool place to kick it.” The third, to say “Aghhhh” as he’s ripped in half during the climactic battle scene. Everyone cares about Jazz’s death for roughly 22 seconds.
  • Michael Bay films the female body like Guy Fieri films pulled pork on Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives. I swear in some scenes there is audible heavy breathing just off frame.
  • The only thing Michael Bay shoots more lustfully than women is the United States military. Ninety-five percent of the reason Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson are in the series is for Duhamel’s Captain Lennox to call in an air strike, and for Gibson’s Tech Sergeant Epps to look up and say, “Oh yeah, that’s an airstrike.” If you cut out every shot of a jet taking off from an aircraft carrier, each of these movies would be half an hour long.

Just...keep all that in mind.

Centuries ago, in the furthest reaches of space, a planet called Cybertron thrived, the native “autonomous robotic organisms” (Autobots for short) living in perfect harmony. Like Krypton, but populated by sentient SUVs. Cybertron’s peaceful existence was rocked by the betrayal of Megatron, leader of a faction called the Decepticons, which is a bit like being surprised when the head of the Coalition For Pushing People Down the Stairs pushes you down the stairs, but the Autobots were an incredibly trusting race. In the civil war that followed, Autobot leader Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) jettisoned the planet’s power source, the AllSpark (or “The Cube,” colloquially), into space, where it traversed the stars and landed on Earth. For years, the AllSpark rested, sitting dormant like a giant, useless art installation.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

So, naturally, it attracts Shia Labeouf. The actor plays Sam Witwicky, a high school junior whose last name sounds like someone bumped into a turntable, who is fixated on two things: his classmate, Mikaela (Megan Fox), and owning a car. He can’t get the first, not yet, but his father does buy him a yellow, rusted Chevrolet Camaro. Not a day later, the Camaro reveals itself as an Autobot named Bumblebee. The Autobots have this thing where they scan a mechanical object—in this case, the Camaro—and then can transform into that object at will. This ability gets super wonky down the road, and you have to wonder why any Autobot would choose to scan an ordinary car over, say, a tank, but for now just accept that Bumblebee can turn into a Camaro and Sam now owns that Camaro.

Which, as it turns out, is no accident. You see, Sam is the descendant of the 17th century explorer, Archibald Witwicky, who not only discovered the AllSpark in the Arctic Circle, but also the frozen body of Megatron. Archibald, who was good at exploration but bad at spacial awareness, accidentally activated Megatron’s navigational system, imprinting the location of the AllSpark on to Archibald’s glasses.

In present day, Sam has the glasses, and therefore the coordinates, which attracts everyone. Optimus Prime and a band of Autobots arrive on Earth, nobly causing millions of dollars in property damage in the process. A Decepticon named Frenzy hacks into the Pentagon’s mainframe, gleaning Sam’s whereabouts. Finally, a subsection of the CIA named “Sector Seven” interferes to round up Sam (and Mikaela, who gets dragged into all this and then contributes very, very little). Sector Seven is led by Agent Seymour Simmons (John Turturro), which is helpful to know in case Trivia Night ever asks “in which movie did a robot urinate on Emmy-winner John Turturro’s head?”

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Sector Seven has been holding the AllSpark and Megatron’s body underneath the Hoover Dam since the 1800s, testing the device’s ability to turn iPhones into slightly deadlier iPhones. Optimus Prime explains that Decepticons want to use this ability on Earth’s technology, so they can take over the galaxy with an army of sentient Xbox 360s.

Unfortunately, Optimus is also telling this to Frenzy, who has been hiding in Mikaela’s purse the entire time. Frenzy broadcasts the AllSpark’s location to the rest of the Decepticons, just as Megatron awakens from his centuries-long nap.

A fight between Autobot and Decepticon ensues over the fictional Mission City. Thousands of extras whose names’ are not on the IMDB page are killed. Optimus Prime tells Sam he must get the AllSpark to safety, or else he will be forced to combine it with his own internal spark, destroying both Cube and Prime in the process. Like the taco deal at Jack in the Box, those are your only two options with the AllSpark—you hand it off to someone else for safekeeping or shove it into your body, where it will kill you from the inside.

But Sam devises an Option C. He shoves the AllSpark into Megatron’s chest, leaving behind a depowered Decepticon leader and one, tiny AllSpark shard. With the battle won, Megatron’s body dumped into the ocean and the AllSpark destroyed, the Autobots decide to stay on Earth, “leaving no evidence” they were ever there. Which is a hilarious way to describe the fiery pile of rubble and corpses that used to be Mission City, but maybe it’s a translation thing.

Transformers concludes with Optimus Prime broadcasting a message into the galaxy for any Autobots still in hiding. “We are here, and we are waiting." Not a single person on Earth told Optimus he could do this, and frankly I’d be a little annoyed. He’s lucky his open invitation doesn’t lead to any further cataclysmic alien invasions and countless more deaths.

Haha no, it totally does.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen does this interesting thing where it takes the events of the first movie and renders them obsolete faster than you can process the words “executive produced by Steven Spielberg.” Right off the bat, “the Transformers have never been to Earth” becomes “actually they were here way before us, 17,000 B.C. to be exact, when they murdered some cavemen and built a machine to suck all the energy out of our sun.”

Here’s the explanation for...all that. Originally, Cybertron was run by Seven Primes. This council of elder-bots discovered they could harvest Energon, the fuel that powers Transformers, by collecting other planets’ suns using machines called Sun Harvesters. (They were good leaders, not good copywriters). The Primes had one rule: check the planet for people before collecting that sweet, sweet Energon. One of them, Megatronus Prime, who hates organic life like current day leaders just hate the poor, made a move on Paleolithic Earth anyway. He was defeated by the six other Primes using an artifact called The Matrix of Leadership. With Megatronus branded The Fallen and sent packing into the furthest reaches of space, the remaining Primes sacrificed their bodies to hide the Matrix, in a spot that went undiscovered for several thousand years. Which, if we’re being honest, makes the part where they sacrificed their bodies seem like overkill.

Because no one holds a grudge like a dude named Megatronus, The Fallen stewed for eons, waiting for the perfect chance to enact revenge on Earth.

As fate would have it, that chance occurs two years after the events of Transformers. The remaining Autobots have joined forces with the United States, under the Classified Alien Autobots Cooperation Act, to form the covert Decepticon-hunting team, NEST. They carry out secret, undercover missions away from the eyes of humanity, most of which involve the destruction of several landmarks and the deaths of countless bystanders. Just real off-the-grid stuff.

Sam is going away to college, leaving behind Mikaela (now his girlfriend) and Bumblebee (still a giant robot). Just before move-in day, Sam brushes up against an AllSpark shard that was stuck in his jacket. Not only does this low-key mean he hasn’t washed that jacket in two years, but the shard also implants the knowledge of the AllSpark into his head. Labeouf plays this like a malfunctioning machine, his twitching eyes unable to process the alien symbols flashing across his vision, assumedly very similar to his first read-through of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Naturally, this draws the Decepticons’ attention. They plant one of their own at Sam’s college, disguised as a beautiful woman named Alice (Isabel Lucas). This raises approximately one thousand new questions about the Decepticons, and if you think any of them are answered logically I have a brand new Dodge Charger to sell you. Alice is the only Transformer we see into a person. Can they all do that? Shouldn’t the Decepticons do it a lot more? I’m no interstellar robot assassin but I do feel it’s easier to be deceptive while disguised as a human being than it is as a Land Rover.

You know what? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that, as Sam gets seduced by the T-X from Terminator 3, the rest of the Decepticons are raising Megatron from the dead with the remaining AllSpark shard. In the immediate confrontation, Megatron manages to murder Optimus Prime.

With Optimus dead, The Fallen returns to Earth and the Decepticons run amok. One of them knocks over an American flag, like he doesn’t even care about Democracy. As it turns out, Megatron was acting under the orders of The Fallen this entire time, despite no one mentioning his name throughout the entire first movie. "The Cube is merely a vessel. It's power, it's knowledge can never be destroyed,” The Fallen tells Megatron, confirming all those faceless, CGI Mission City residents died for no reason.

Sam, Mikaela and a returning Agent Simmons embark on a long, runtime padding search for The Fallen’s hidden Sun Harvester that leads them to the Great Pyramids of Giza. That’s right: the ancient Egyptians built one of the Seven Wonders of the World over a massive, sun-destroying machine then said nothing more of the matter. Sam manages to locate the Matrix, which immediately turns to dust in his hand.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

It’s not until after the prerequisite battle between Autobots and Decepticons takes several innocent lives that the original Primes appear to Sam in a vision. “The Matrix is not found, it is earned,” they tell him. Again, really does not seem like they had to kill themselves to effectively hide this thing.

Either way, Sam uses the Matrix, which totally works now, to reignite Optimus’ spark. The Autobots leader bursts back to life and promptly puts his robo-fist through The Fallen’s face. It’s not even hard, to be frank. Megatron and the remaining Decepticons flee. Optimus and his Autobots let their foes go, safe in the knowledge they will never return to wreak havok upon the human race again.

Haha no, but they totally do.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

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Right from the jump, Dark of the Moon attempts to rewrite history, from the USA vs. Russia space race, to the Apollo 11 Moon landing, to the fact Megan Fox ever starred in a Transformers movie.

Let’s start on the moon. Or, I should say, on Cybertron, where a lone vessel named The Ark escaped from the Autobots war with the Decepticons. Onboard was Sentinel Prime, the “Albert Einstein of Cybertron,” carrying hundreds of Pillars that connect to create a “space bridge,” the Autobots’ version of a teleportation device. Why, you ask, would a race of aliens who can transform their own bodies into a spaceship need a teleportation device? It’s unclear. Why anything, really? What are we doing here? How did this movie gross more than $1 billion worldwide? All legitimate questions, lost to time.

Speaking of: The Ark, damaged in the battle below, crash-landed on our Moon in 1962. Through a montage intertwined with real, historical footage that somehow looks worse than the one in Forrest Gump, we follow the United States’ rush to the crash site. In 1969, Apollo 11 retrieves Sentinel Prime’s body, along with five of his Pillars.

Fast forward through several decades of the human race still, somehow, remaining unaware of the existence of extraterrestrials, to 2011. Following the events of Revenge of the Fallen the Autobots are working under National Intelligence Officer Charlotte Mearing (Frances McDormand) who is clearly as fed up with her crew as Frances McDormand is with playing Charlotte Mearing about a quarter of the way into Dark of the Moon. During a routine mission, Optimus stumbles upon a piece of The Ark, forcing Mearing to admit the U.S. has his old buddy Sentinel Prime strung up in a supply closet. Optimus uses the Matrix of Leadership to revive Sentinel, who just happens to have the voice of Leonard Nimoy (in all seriousness, Nimoy’s authoritative, shockingly measured performance is by far the highlight of this entire series).

Meanwhile, Sam is out of college and, because of Megan Fox’s abrupt ouster from the franchise, living with a new girlfriend, Carlie Spencer (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). “She dumped me. I moved on to something better,” Sam informs his parents, because no one has ever accused Michael Bay of being subtle.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Dark of the Moon introduces the idea that Decepticons have used human collaborators for decades. One of them, Jerry Wang (Ken Jeong), works alongside Sam at his new job. Another, Carlie’s smarmy boss Dylan Gould (Patrick Dempsey) practically runs the country club for wealthy supporters of evil robots, proving once again that the real Decepticons are—and always will be—rich, white assholes.

Megatron, who spent the past few years in Africa wearing a cloak despite not having any skin, gives the order to start eliminating the human loose ends. When that is through, the head Decepticon unveils the final piece of the puzzle: Sentinel Prime. The elder Prime turns on his Autobot pals, siding with the Decepticons for the good of Cybertron. After murdering the Autobot named Ironhide, Sentinel broadcasts a message to the world threatening destruction if Optimus and his team don’t vacate the planet. The Autobots comply, boarding the spaceship Zanthiam—which, again, is a bit like putting your car inside of a bus to get to work, but whatever—and take off. As soon as they hit space, however, the Decepticon Starscream blasts the Zanthiam to bits, seemingly killing the Autobots in the process.

What follows is a non-stop, near hourlong action sequence inside a Decepticon-held Chicago; think the second act of Mad Max: Fury Road, if that movie made no narrative sense and Furiosa was constantly wearing Daisy Dukes. Sentinel intends to use his Pillars to transport the entire planet of Cybertron to Earth and use the human race as slave labor to rebuild it. Sam and a ragtag crew of soldiers dive into the wartorn city to stop him and rescue a kidnapped Carlie along the way. There’s an admittedly impressive, extended set-piece inside of a collapsing skyscraper that defies the laws of physics so blatantly I’m genuinely shocked its mere existence has not yet killed Neil Degrasse Tyson.

Eventually, the Autobots return. Optimus basically shrugs and says, “Are you kidding? We make so much money for Hasbro. We’re still alive.” The head Autobot bests his old mentor Sentinel in a fight with the unlikely help of a jealous Megatron. As thanks, Optimus proceeds to violently rip out his archnemesis’ robot spine. These movies are marketed to children.

Dark of the Moon comes to a conclusion on an uplifting note. “The day will never come where we forsake this planet, or its people,” Optimus’ voiceover intones. And, because the human race is a peaceful, logical species, we never forsake our robotic protectors either.

Haha no, we totally do.

Transformers: Age of Extinction

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Age of Extinction truly marks the end of an era, as it is the first Transformers movie not to feature a theme song from Linkin Park. Instead, we get Imagine Dragons, a band genetically engineered in a laboratory to somehow be lamer than Linkin Park.

Oh, also, there’s everything else. Labeuf’s Sam Witwicky is out, presumably living somewhere with Carlie and a hefty dose of PTSD. Instead, we follow the exploits of Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), an unusually sweaty inventor with a Boston accent living in Texas with his high-school senior daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz).

In the five years since Dark of the Moon, the human race has turned completely against the Transformers. A black-ops CIA unit called Cemetery Wind publicly hunts Decepticons, while also low-key rounding up Autobots. Cemetery Wind director Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) sells Autobot parts to K.S.I. Industries, where tech billionaire Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) is developing his own brand of Transformers. In the biggest missed opportunity in this entire franchise, he is not calling them iRobots. What he is doing is cultivating a substance known as Transformium, the alien material that all Cybertron residents are made of.

Turns out, Earth is just chock-full of Transformium, because at this point we’re not even pretending Transformers haven’t been here since the dawn of time. Sixty-five million years ago, the “Creators” dropped hundreds of devices called Seeds onto our planet, killing the dinosaurs and coating the surface in enough Transformium to build the Autobots. The Creators left just enough behind for us to eventually build Ryan Seacrest, and dipped back to the stars forever.

But some Seeds are still floating around; Joshua Joyce wants one—so he can drop it in the Gobi desert, creating “enough Transformium for 100 years”—and a Cybertronian bounty-hunter named Lockdown is willing to trade. In exchange, Cemetery Wind offered to hand over Lockdown’s ultimate prize, Optimus Prime.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Where is Optimus? Injured and hiding, disguised as a dirtier-than-average semi-truck, in Cade Yeager’s garage. At the moment, Cade is preoccupied with making sure his 17-year-old daughter never goes on a single date. In a B-storyline that seems massively unimportant next to the fate of the universe, Tessa eventually reveals a secret boyfriend, a rally-car driver named Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor). Shane is 20 years old, and this movie cites Texas’ “Romeo and Juliet Law” and asks we forget Tessa is 17. I did not forget. Not the entire time. “I'm totally legit. I just got picked up by Red Bull,” Shane explains to Cade, and I must point out this film is two hours and 45 minutes long.

Eventually, both Optimus and Tessa are taken aboard Lockdown’s ship, The Knight’s Temenos. The bounty hunter uses the vessel as a floating prison, converted from the old headquarters of an ancient, King Arthur-esque society of Cybertronian Knights. Optimus Prime was a member, because honestly there is not much Optimus Prime was not a part of. It would not shock me if the fifth Transformers confirms that Optimus Prime was actually the Biblical Jesus.

Either way, Cade, Shane, and Earth’s remaining Autobots—Hound (John Goodman), Drift (Ken Watanabe), Crosshairs (John Dimaggio) and Bumblebee—successfully rescue Tessa and Optimus from the ship. Back on the ground, things come to a destructive head in Hong Kong, where Joyce attempts to hide the Seed after having a change of heart. The Transformer prototypes built by K.S.I Industries were constructed using Megatron’s DNA, and it turns out hooking your machines up to a word-destroying monster-machine is bad business practice. The business’s main project, Galvatron, reveals himself as Megatron reincarnated.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

With his nemesis reborn and a pissed off Lockdown returning to Earth, Optimus hops back onto the Knight’s Tenemos for backup. He frees a race of warriors called the Dinobots, an ancient sect of Autobots left over from the Creators’ initial Earth-Seeding, who can transform into different species of metallic dinosaur. In an image I am 95 percent sure is tattooed across Michael Bay’s back, a sword-wielding Optimus Prime rides a gargantuan, fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex into battle.

Lockdown is destroyed, Megatron-as-Galvatron retreats, and the Autobots stand victorious despite the fact a good three-quarters of their race is now dead. Optimus sets the Dinobots free —so thank him for the silver pterodactyl you see on the way to work—and blasts off into space (remember when he needed a spaceship in Dark of the Moon? This movie does not). "This message is to my Creators,” he says. “Leave planet Earth alone. Because I'm coming for you."

Which is comforting, and in no way suggests that Age of Extinction was a near three-hour-long teaser trailer for the fifth Transformers movie.

Haha no, it...well, you know.

Transformers: The Last Knight

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The best way to explain Transformers: The Last Knight is to simply say Michael Bay and co. officially decided these movies don’t need to make sense on a narrative, cohesive, or even moment-to-moment level. Every single line of dialogue contradicts a plot point from one of the prior movies. It may be the first film since the invention of the medium in which not a single action that takes place on-screen, at any juncture, needs to happen. It’s just lights and colors. It is two-and-a-half hours of white noise turned to 11. When William Shakespeare wrote about “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he was describing Transformers: The Last Knight. I mean that literally. This movie establishes that Shakespeare knew about the existence of Transformers, as did humanity’s greatest intellectuals and leaders dating back to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, who were totally real. So was Merlin the Wizard. So were dragons. Everything is real. Nothing matters. This film will gross one trillion dollars.

We begin in 484 AD, with the aforementioned King Arthur at war with the Saxons. The invading army has the numbers advantage, but Arthur has 12 similarly-bearded knights and a legitimate wizard on his side. “Magic is real,” Anthony Hopkins, as Sir Edmund Burton, says in a voice-over I assume was recorded two minutes after the Oscar-winner woke up from a nap. But Merlin (Stanley Tucci) isn’t so much magical as he is an alcoholic that made friends with the robot aliens he found inside a crashed spaceship. The Autobots inside—twelve in all, calling themselves the Knights of Iacon—gift Merlin with a magic staff, then combine themselves into a winged beast named Dragonstorm to help defeat the Saxons. In my admittedly limited knowledge of British castles, this image was not recorded on one, single tapestry.

From that point on, Cybertronians influenced world history under the guise of an ancient brotherhood called the Witwiccan Order. How the order is seemingly named after the Witwicky family despite the fact Archibald Witwicky didn’t discover Megatron’s body until 1895 is just something we as a society are going to have to accept. Other things we have to accept include 1) A small, unnamed piece of Autobot technology killed Adolf Hitler, 2) Bumblebee and other Autobots fought Nazis during World War II, which really makes the atomic bomb look unnecessary if you think about it, and 3) Burton claims to be the last surviving member of the Witwiccan Order, but a photo of Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) among their roster, so somewhere between finding love amid countless human casualties in Dark of the Moon and this movie, Sam Witwicky died.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Fast-forward to present day: with Megatron in hiding and Optimus Prime floating around outer space, the Decepticons and Autobots have taken to knockdown street brawls in the middle of crowded cities. Most governments have declared Transformers “illegal,” but it turns out just declaring these walking, 40-foot-tall war machines to be “illegal” is not as effective as planned. The U.S. military forms the Transformer Reaction Force (TRF) to deal with any and all Autobot or Decepticon activity. Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), the only Red Sox fan in Texas and inventor of literally nothing of use, has taken to the life of an outlaw, living under-the-radar and aiding Autobots in evading the TRF. He lives in a South Dakota junk yard with the remaining Autobots, the Dinobot Lockjaw, as well as several baby Dinobots that bring up questions about the Dinobot reproduction process that are best left unspoken. Cade’s daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz), is off at college; her boyfriend, Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor), either was arrested for dating Tessa while she was 17 or drove his Red Bull-sponsored rally car into a wall. I assume.

As for Optimus Prime, the Autobots leader finally makes it to Cybertron only to find his home planet in pieces, the rubble being controlled by the Autobots’ “creator,” the sorceress Quintessa. She takes control of Optimus’ mind, dubs him Nemesis Prime, and explains her plan is to suck the sweet, sweet life force from Earth and use it to rebuild Cybertron. Earth, you see, isn’t even a planet at all; it is Unicron, the ancient enemy of the Cybertronians, which is something at least one other person probably would have mentioned over five entire movies but, if we’re being honest, would also explain so many things about the planet Earth right now.

Events come to a head, and fast. William Lennox (Josh Duhamel) brokers a deal between the TRF and the Decepticons to help track down Cade, because trusting a group whose name is mostly made up of the word “deception” has never ended poorly for anyone. A dying Autobot, Steelbane, bequeaths a talisman from the Knights of Iacon to Cade, therefore making him the prophesied “last knight.” Burton brings Cade together with Oxford professor Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), the last descendant of Merlin; together—using the talisman, Merlin’s staff, and Cade’s ability to be vaguely racist toward every person he meets—these two are destined to save the world.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

But first, every character in this film must switch allegiances at least once. Optimus returns to Earth brainwashed, willing to kill his own friends and allies, until Bumblebee speaking with his own voice snaps the Autobot leader out of his trance. The original Knights of Iacon, awoken from their slumber underneath the ocean, sentence Optimus to death for his betrayals, but chill out once Cade reveals the talisman attached to his body is actually the legendary sword Excalibur. To the surprise of absolutely no one, the Decepticons turn on the TRF and take Merlin’s staff to Quintessa. In the process, Megatron murders Burton, marking the second time Anthony Hopkins was shot and killed by a robot in the past year.

In the end, Quintessa’s plan is thwarted by a humbled TRF and the Autobots, because nothing of consequence has ever happened in a Transformers movie. Optimus Prime sends out another invitation for all Autobots to come to Earth, because Optimus Prime is forever and always that guy who brings his friend from out of town to happy hour without asking the group.

A mid-credits scene reveals Quintessa, still alive and disguised as some concept art for Saban’s Power Rangers, offering mankind a way to destroy Unicron. This franchise will outlast us all.

Bumblebee

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After five movies, $4.6 billion at the box office, and enough CGI property damage to make even Zack Snyder be like "hey, come on now", Bumblebee has completed revitilized the Transformers franchise by making the radicial decision to be a movie that is both good and enjoyable to watch. By replacing Michael Bay with director Travis Knight we've certainly lost numerous shots of military helicopters framed with an obvious sexual lust, but we've gained a film with a ton of heart, an endearingly charming lead performance from Hailee Steinfeld and a Smiths-filled 80s pop soundtrack to match. From a script by Christina Hodson, Bumblebee is part E.T., part Iron Giant, and 100% a story that makes the timeline and chronology of the Transformers franchise even more goddamn incomprehensible than it already was. Welcome back once again to "Transformers Franchise, Explained"—also known as Witwicky-Pedia™—the long-running Collider feature we return to anytime a new Transformers film is released and/or I feel my sanity and self-respect may just be returning.

The year is 1987. The Simpson family recently made their first appearance on the Tracy Ullman Show, history's first Tricept-icon Michael B. Jordan had just been born, and Cybertron—a planet made up of robotic organisms constructed from car and truck parts despite seemingly not having trucks or cars—is at war. Is it the same civil war that the original Transformers established happened several millenia ago and caused Optimus Prime to jettison the All-Spark into space? Friends, it's extremely unclear. What is clear is that the Autobots are getting their tail pipes kicked by the villainous Decepticons and need to retreat. Looking for a safe outpost, Optimus Prime sends B-127—a robot soldier with the exact color scheme and facial structure of a bumblebee who is not yet named Bumblebee—to Earth.

B-127 crash-lands in the middle of a training exercise being carried out by Sector 7 and headed up by lieutenant Jack Burns, played by John Cena, Earth's widest human. Before the humans can react to this 20-foot-tall Has-bro from the stars, B-127 is blindsided by a Decepticon named Blitzwing. B is able to fend off his foe, but Blitzwing, because Decepticons are notably petty as fuck, rips out the Autobot's mechanical voice box. With his voice gone and memory core and power reserve depleting, B scans a nearby Volkswagen Beetle before shutting down.

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Charlie (Steinfeld) is an eighteen-year-old living in San Francisco, a former competitive diver whose father died of a heart attack and mother, Sally (Pamela Adlon), has moved on to a bearded goofus boyfriend named Ron (Stephen Schneider). Charlie's late father passed down a love for car tinkering, which leads her to a junkyard and an old, rusty yellow VW Beetle.

Instead of getting tetanus or a good old fashioned hobo stabbin’ like your average junkyard forager, Charlie instead finds...a friend. She fiddles away B’s structural damage, remains incredibly chill about the massive walking alien car who now lives in her garage, and dubs her new pal “Bumblebee. Charlie replaces his voice box with a car radio so the Autobot can communicate using 1987 Top 40 hits, leaving me breathless in anticipation for the remainder of the movie’s runtime waiting for Bumblebee to say “Everyone Wang-Chung tonight.” This does not happen. It should have, but doesn’t. What does happen is Bee and Charlie—along with Charlie’s new friend, an awkward bumbling neighbor named Memo (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.)—help each other find an inner strength neither knew they had. It’s a genuinely heartwarming, very Spielberg-ian “girl and her pet monster” coming-of-age story that completely made me forget until this moment that inRevenge of the Fallen Michael Bay made a point to emphasize that male Transformers have both a dick and balls.

Unfortunately, a pair of Decepticons, the fantastically-named Dropkick (Justin Theroux) and Shatter (Angela Bassett), are hot on Bumblebee’s trail. The duo arrives on Earth— scorching cars, homes, and the entire plotline of Dark of the Moon where the Autobots needed a ship to travel through space, in the process—and immediately link up with the American government through a combination of subterfuge and the human race being the absolute dumbest. Jack Burns becomes a top 10 favorite character in all of cinema for pointing out these aliens calling themselves DECEPTICONS might not be on the up and up, but the creepy, mad scientist-y Dr. Powell (John Ortiz) convinces the military that siding with the massive deadly war machines over basic common sense will probably not backfire. This will remain America’s overall mindset for [checks notes] the rest of forever.

Eventually, siding with the massive deadly war machines over basic common sense backfires horribly for everyone. Sector 7 abducts Bumblebee, and Dropkick and Shatter use information gleaned from his hard-drive to learn Optimus Prime is on his way to Earth. Their job done, the Decepticons show their true colors—the color of deception—and attempt to broadcast a signal into space letting the rest of their clan know that Earth is ripe for the people slaughterin’. Bumblebee, Charlie, and Memo, the only beings on the planet who know what’s actually going on, work together to stop the Decepticons. The planet is saved, and humankind is safe from harm until the next time Optimus Prime invites all his goddamn friends here without asking.

It’s a lovely movie, honestly. (Read Matt Goldberg’s full review here.) Bumblebee is a franchise-saving bit of delightfulness that makes no sense in the context of the five movies that preceded it in the following ways:

  • Bumblebee claims to be the story of Bumblebee’s arrival on Earth, despite The Last Knight making it clear that he fought actual Nazis during World War II.
  • Bumblebee shows Cybertron engulfed in civil war in 1987, where Transformers (2007) showed that same civil war happening several thousand years ago.
  • Shatter and Dropkick have the power turn into cars and planes at the same time. This only makes me mad because the Transformers’ scan-a-thing-become-the-thing ability is so ill-defined. If a Transformer can scan literally anything, why would any Transformer spend any time as like, a milk truck.

You know what, though? Fine with it. Fine with it all. Bumblebee rules. I am 100% happy with thinking of theTransformers franchise, the whole thing from 2007 to 2017, as a fever dream I had after taking mescaline while binge-watching Top Gear. Completely fine with that.