Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Transformers: The Last Knight
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The Transformers movies have, from the beginning, been preoccupied with "secret history" subplots of the type popularized by the last decade or so of The History Channel - i.e. elaborate conspiracy theories wherein seemingly disparate events of the past are revealed to be part of an even more elaborate long-term calamity that has (without fail) been "covered up for centuries!" but also ever on the cusp of "blowing wide open!" with earthshaking implications for all of humanity.
This particular strain of pseudo-history in the franchise mythos (an angle that is largely unique to the Michael Bay-directed films and does not figure nearly as prominently in most of the pre-film Transformers animated or comic adaptations) first rears its head in the original film, with the reveal of a great deal of modern technology having been reverse-engineered from research conducted on the frozen body of Megatron. Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen raises the bar by having The Fallen turn out to be the inspiration for Ancient Egypt's gods and the construction of the pyramids, and future sequels would work Cybertronian visitors into everything from the Moon Landing to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
But now, Transformers: The Last Knight steps up to reveal (or, rather, invent and retroactively insert into the mythos for effect, but why quibble the semantics in a five-movie series about robots disguised as various cars?) that the true history of Transformers on Earth goes deeper and spreads broader than we ever previously imagined - not simply filling in some key gaps in Autobot and Decepticon history but upending the entire setup of the franchise with new reimagined origins for both Cybertron... and Earth itself.
WHAT WE ALREADY KNEW
To be fair, that the Transformers have been a regular presence on Earth for at least as long as modern man has (probably much longer) isn't exactly news. Almost every film after the first has gone back to the "actually, there were Transformers during [Insert-Historical-Event-Here]!" well as part of its plot. In the original, Decepticon leader Megatron crashes on Earth in antiquity while searching for The Allspark and winds up frozen in the Arctic for thousands of years, only to be reawakened in modernity when the great-great grandson of the human explorer who discovered his frozen body in 1897 inadvertently alerts both the Autobots and Decepticons to his presence on Earth.
But in Revenge of The Fallen, it turns out that the ancient ancestors of the Autobots and Decepticons ("The Fallen" and "The Primes") also warred on Earth over The Matrix of Leadership long before Megatron (attempted) to show up. In that same film, we also learn that at least some Transformers are suspected to have been on Earth for many centuries prior disguised as archaic machinery - though how long they'd been there to begin with, how many there were, and what the "Robots in Disguise" disguised themselves as prior to the Industrial Revolution was left unexplained. (Oh, and The Fallen were actually the "ancient aliens" who inspired the gods of Egypt and The Great Pyramid was actually a giant sun-draining doomsday weapon. That seems like something that would be of long-term importance, but it actually never comes up again.)
Dark of The Moon, the second sequel, is all about cover-ups within the Transformer community itself. We learn that the Apollo Moon Mission was actually dispatched to explore an Autobot ship discovered crashed on the Moon, and when the present-day Autobots find out they excavate it and find that it was the ship of their original leader "Sentinel Prime." Bad news: It turns out that the reason both Sentinel Prime and Megatron had crashed on or near Earth is that they were planning to meet there and strike a "peace deal" that would have seen Earth destroyed in order to recreate war-ravaged Cybertron - the Transformer homeworld that had been ripped apart by the eons-old Autobot/Decepticon civil war.
To save the Earth, Optimus Prime both kills Sentinel Prime and stops the process of transporting Cybertron into near-Earth orbit, leaving the planet in an even more devastated state than it already was and seemingly leaving Earth as the remaining Transformers new home. That turns out to be more bad news, as sequel #3 "Age of Extinction" picks up in the near-future with humanity having declared war on Transformers of all alignment - in part because of a deal struck between an evil tech corporation looking to produce "bootleg" Transformers of their own, the American CIA and a group of Transformer-hunting robot aliens who claim to be working at the behest of the Cybertronians' unnamed original Creators.
In the process of sorting this out, we learn that "The Creators" are not exactly benevolent gods: The special material ("Transformium") that they used to create the Cybertronian races is produced on a planetary scale using terraforming "bombs" that kill and convert all plant and animal life into said Transformium - and it was this process that caused the mass-extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth. It's implied that this process was resisted (or, at least, observed with disapproval) by some Transformers already on or near Earth at the time, as Optimus Prime discovers and frees a group of ancient Autobot Knights whose alt-modes are modeled on Earth dinosaurs from the collector's slave-ship. Imbued with renewed sense that he's not getting the whole story about his own origins, Prime blasts off for deep space to find and confront the Creators face-to-face. Which just about brings us up to The Last Knight.
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THE NEW REVELATIONS
Transformers: The Last Knight rolls out its big-deal answers as to just what's really been going on with the Transformers on Earth this whole time in a slow but steady drip over the first two acts in a manner that's designed to leave the audience almost as confused and skeptical as the characters who are unraveling it. Since the whole point of this is to lay things out more understandably, let's lay it all out in something-like chronological order. Firstly: The Transformers' creator-god (or at least the being who claims to be their creator-god) is a female machine-entity called Quintessa, and she is indeed actually evil - as in, evil enough that when Optimus Prime first encounters her and falls under her control, he immediately renames himself "Nemesis Prime." So, pretty evil.
Also, as mentioned, she may be either lying about being the Creator or about being the sole Creator, as an ancient Autobot Knight with firsthand knowledge of the situation calls her "The Deceiver." These Autobot Knights got wise to her being evil (possibly, but not necessarily, because of the whole "Transformium is made of Planetary Genocide" thing), stole a special staff that's key to her power, and spirited it away to Earth, where they crashed and hid in secret for an undetermined number of years. It's implied that they left after the Autobot/Decepticon War broke out, but not confirmed whether they arrived on Earth before or after The Fallen and The Primes had fought in Egypt (though likely before, as the staff is described as "the reason they are constantly drawn to Earth.")
The Autobot Knights are discovered in the Middle Ages by Merlin, a drunken fraud masquerading as a magician to King Arthur (who, in this timeline, is a real person who existed), who entreats the Autobots to use their powers to help Arthur win a precarious war. The Knights give Merlin the staff, which becomes the source of his legendary "magic," and join Arthur in helping to establish Camelot - warning Merlin that he has to protect the staff because "a great evil" will come for it one day. After this, the Transformers live and fight alongside humanity throughout most of our history, though making themselves increasingly scarce as the age of industry and media dawns - eventually being forgotten as giant robots and instead remembered as giants, dragons, gods and other figures of human mythology.
The truth about The Transformers and the Staff of Merlin is kept alive, however, by a secret society called The Order of Witwiccans (read it again) who also work to protect Merlin's bloodline - since the "magic" staff is coded to his DNA and can only be used by his descendants should Quintessa ever actually arrive on Earth to reclaim it. The Witwiccans have included in their number essentially every major historical figure that multiplex audiences can be expected to recognize from a photograph (Abe Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Shakespeare, Fredrick Douglas, George Washington and Harriet Tubman to name just a few) and also (given the name and all) at least a few ancestors of Shia LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky from the first two films, whose image gets a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo during one of the big expository montages.
Oh, one other thing: Earth isn't actually "Earth." Earth is actually the inert (possibly just "sleeping") corpse of Unicron, another quasi-sentient robo-planet described as "Cybertron's ancient enemy" on top of which Earth's surface has grown over however many centuries something like that takes. This is what The Staff is all about: Quintessa can use it to activate an apparatus that will repair and restore Cybertron by siphoning out whatever energy remains in said "ancient enemy" by zapping Unicron's apparent heart/brain/weak-spot (it's sort of unclear) - which The Ancients helpfully marked by building Stonehenge on top of it. It's also unclear whether anyone outside of Quintessa and the original renegade Autobot Knights have known this the whole time or not, though it seems like kind of a big thing to not mention before now...
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS IN THE LAST KNIGHT?
Basically, all of that business comes to a head: Prime's search for The Creators leads him to the remains of Cybertron (which he acts surprised to find destroyed even though he gave the order to do it in Dark of The Moon) where Quintessa immediately enslaves him and turns him, turns him into Nemesis Prime (he doesn't undergo a physical transformation, he just starts saying "I am Sentinel Prime!" a lot) and orders him to "pilot" Cybertron on a collision course with Earth to activate our fifth Doomsday Weapon in as many movies.
The "Last Knight" is actually Mark Wahlberg's Cade Yaeger from the previous film, who is working to protect Transformer refugees on Earth and is gifted a pendant that crawls around on his skin like Venom and transforms into an Excalibur-like sword - it's implied that one of the reasons he is found worthy of this is that he has not dated or had sex in a very long time and "chastity" is one of the classical virtues of medieval knighthood. His role is to protect the last descendant of Merlin, Oxford Professor Vivian Wembly (a new character played by Laura Haddock) and help her retrieve Merlin's Staff from within Unicron - whose "horns" have begun to protrude all over the planet. They are assisted in this by Anthony Hopkins' Sir Edmund Burton, the last of the Witwiccans, and his steampunk human-sized robot butler Cogman.
Nemesis Prime's assault on Earth is repelled by Bumblebee, The Autobots and the revived Ancient Knights; and Prime regains his true self in order to lead the combined forces of Autobots and humanity in an assault on Quintessa and Cybertron (and also Megatron and The Decepticons, who are back because the Army initially tried to use them as indentured-muscle Suicide Squad-style but instead they sign up to replace Prime as Quintessa's goons almost immediately.) Quintessa is apparently killed, bringing peace between the Autobots and Humanity once again and leaving the floating ruins of Cybertron (somehow) hovering in low-Earth orbit to be dealt with in a later film; with a final stinger (and the usual portentous monologue from Optimus Prime) confirming that Quintessa has survived and that Unicron himself will be a problem to be dealt with in the near future.
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WHAT DO WE STILL NOT KNOW?
Well, we still don't know the full sweep of the timeline on the Transformers' side in terms of who knew what when or how: If Quintessa knew Earth was Unicron all along, did it make a difference when she blasted all the life off his (its?) surface for Transformium? Did The Fallen know when he was in Egypt, and if so did it factor into the reasoning for all that? Was the sun-eater inside the Great Pyramid part of Unicron, or an entirely independent construction? Did either Megatron or Sentinel Prime know about this when they picked Earth for their secret meeting spot? If not, would Unicron have eventually spoiled their plans - or was their "kill Earth to revive Cybertron" machine a variation on the one Quintessa is using... and if so why does only she need the Staff of Merlin?
For that matter, why did she need to wait for Nemesis Prime to send Cybertron to Earth? It doesn't seem to take all that long to get there, and she already has a small army of her own Transformers (including a particularly nasty Combiner named "Infernocus"), who are fully capable of overpowering Prime in the first place. Did she not know the staff was there until recently? If so, who told her? Was she on or around Cybertron when it was (briefly) transported to Earth's orbit in Dark of The Moon? If we were able to find Sentinel Prime's ship on The Moon in the early-1960s, how did we miss that most of our own planet (that we've been punching full of holes looking for oil for over a century) is actually a planet-sized Transformer (or at least sentient robot) not all that far below the surface?
Those are the questions that will bedevil particularly-attentive mainstream audiences. Devout Transformers fans will likely have more in-depth questions about the nature of our two new villain characters - Quintessa and Unicron. Both of whom exist as radical reinventions of some of the most important "deep lore" figures in the Transformers mythos and both of whom are telegraphed as being central to the plot of wherever the franchise goes in the "main" series, since the next film set for release is a spin-off prequel about Bumblebee purportedly set in the 1980s. (Oh, speaking of which, Bumblebee fought in World War II and knew Hopkins' character, who owns a Transformer alarm clock he introduces as "the watch that killed Hitler.")
Unicron was introduced in the animated Transformers: The Movie as a massive-scale planet-eating evil Transformer whose alt-mode was itself a planet. Quintessa is based on The Quintessons, a scheming race of cruel alien robots introduced in the same film - where neither they nor Unicron received actual origin stories. Both have had several origins applied to them across various Transformers cartoon and comic-book continuities, though they tend to share common threads among them; with Unicron sometimes presented as the evil opposite number of the Autobots' "god" Primus, another planet-sized Transformer who's long-slumbering alt-mode is (you guessed it) Cybertron itself.
The Quintessons are similarly fraught with multiple histories, though in the original animated series they were framed as the "creators" of the Transformers, having ruled over Cybertron as a factory-planet and created the original "Trans-Organic" sentient robots as a slave race; the Autobots being laborers and Decepticons being soldiers (in case you were wondering what they were originally fighting over.) It's these versions that Last Knight seems to be drawing on, though it seems unclear whether Quintessa is the only being of her kind, Cybertron being sentient or what makes Unicron the "ancient nemesis" actually means... though we'll apparently soon enough have not only a Transformers Universe and an entire Hasbro Cinematic Universe to help explain it all.
