FADE IN:

EXT. MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

KING ARTHUR and his KNIGHTS are sort of hanging out near a huge battle.

KING ARTHUR

And then they had Mordred be some wizard that my dad killed when I was like two, when Mordred’s supposed to be my son! Honestly, why didn’t they fire Guy Ritchie as soon as he started writing me as a gangster pimp?

LANCELOT

Um, aren’t we gonna join in the battle anytime and stop our men from getting slaughtered?

KING ARTHUR

No! I told you, the plan is to sit on our asses and wait for Merlin to swoop in and save us.

LANCELOT

Merlin? That guy’s just a drunk! And in a classic piece of Michael Bay storytelling we reveal that he’s a drunk by having me say he’s a drunk, then showing him drunk, then having him say he’s drunk.

EXT. HILLSIDE

STANLEY TUCCI, as MERLIN, is DRUNK.

STANLEY TUCCI

I’M DRUNK! Hey you, giant space robot, come win the war for us.

MEDIEVALBOT

Now Earthling, why should I take your side in this battle? All the information I have about the conflict is that one team has a drunken lying fake wizard. On the basis of this I should go murder your enemies for you?

STANLEY TUCCI

Aw c’mooonnnn.

MEDIEVALBOT

(pause)

Oh all right. My people will now devote their lives solely to protecting humanity, for centuries to come.

STANLEY TUCCI

Huh. This negotiation went SURPRISINGLY well.

EXT. MODERN-DAY AMERICAN SLUM

SANTIAGO CABRERA is the leader of some kind of special ANTI-TRANSFORMER MILITARY UNIT which has been dispatched to find a crashed SPACE POD.

SANTIAGO CABRERA

All right men, you know the situation, the current administration has introduced bigoted policies against all space robots who enter the United States illegally. It’s our job to hunt them down, at least until we can force Cybertron to pay for the space wall.

DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY

DO YOU GET IT IT’S LIKE STUFF HAPPENING IN POLITICS I AM VERY CLEVER AT SATIRE

SANTIAGO CABRERA

Yeah well, not sure the comparison holds up when you consider that the past four times these robots showed their faces the entire world was nearly destroyed.

On their way to the POD, SANTIAGO and his MEN spot and shoot down another TRANSFORMER. The Transformer’s human owner/adoptive daughter/something ISABELA MONER sobs over its corpse.

ISABELA MONER

NOOO, you can’t die, crappy Transformer that doesn’t transform and just looks like a pile of broken concrete! Ah buh huh! I can only imagine how moved the audience is that some girl they’ve known for thirty seconds has to witness the death of an ugly-ass glob of twisted metal.

The ANTI-TRANSFORMER SQUAD moves in on ISABELA and her other, even crappier Transformer but then who should show up but MARK WAHLBERG and BUMBLEBEE!

MARK WAHLBERG

Get them, Bumblebee! Get them by falling completely to pieces and then having each piece keep fighting and then reassembling yourself, thus making it even harder for anyone who watches these movies to keep straight exactly what kills you guys and what doesn’t!

After the SOLDIERS have been defeated and left, MARK approaches the POD to find the Transformer inside is DYING.

DYINGBOT

Cough, hack... I’m not gonna make it... Mark, take this MacGuffin.

MARK WAHLBERG

I appreciate the gesture, but I can’t accept. You keep it.

DYINGBOT

What? Look you idiot, this isn’t a token of my appreciation or whatever, I NEED you to take this. The WORLD is going to be destroyed and-

MARK WAHLBERG

(leaving)

Helping is all the reward I need! Farewell, friend!

DYINGBOT

Oh for fuck’s sake. Hey MacGuffin, Mark’s no use whatsoever, you’ll have to actually grow legs and chase after him.

MACGUFFIN

You got it! Cause every damn thing from Cybertron is sentient apparently.

EXT. INCOMPREHENSIBLE JUMBLE OF SPIKES - SORRY, APPARENTLY THAT’S MEANT TO BE CYBERTRON

A frozen PETER CULLENBOT crashlands on the remains of the planet CYBERTRON.

PETER CULLENBOT

Boy, it’s crazy lucky I landed on my exact destination considering the fact that I was frozen and drifting, and the fact that Cybertron isn’t currently in its correct location.

(frowns)

Wait a minute, why are we acting like I had intended to come to Cybertron? At the end of the last movie I was flying off to find the aliens who built me.

GEMMA CHANBOT

That’s me! I, a single sexy robot, am the race of snail aliens who don’t live on Cybertron that you were looking for.

PETER CULLENBOT

Holy shit, are we really going to just completely disregard the sequel hook? Just make up something new and pretend like that’s what we said we were doing all along?

GEMMA CHANBOT

Silence! Cybertron is dying. I need your help to fly the planet over to Earth and suck out all its planet juice, thus killing Earth so that Cybertron may live.

PETER CULLENBOT

Ouch, what a quandary. I can save my home planet! But I would have to sacrifice Earth. Then again, after everything I’ve done for Earth they’ve done nothing but reject and slaughter my kind! This is a truly painful dilemma which could be an interesting and organic way for my character to be drawn down a dark path-

GEMMA CHANBOT

(just zaps his brain with magic)

PETER CULLENBOT

BLURK I AM EVIL NOW DEATH TO EARTH!!!!

INT. VAGUE MILITARY BUILDING

Military guys JOSH DUHAMEL and GLENN MORSHOWER are discussing PLOT STUFF.

GLENN MORSHOWER

So Earth has grown a bunch of giant mechanical horns, a planet-sized anomaly is charging through space right towards us, and basically we’re totes fucked. Our intel says that somewhere on Earth there’s a superweapon which the bad guys can use to cause Armageddon, or we can use to prevent Armageddon, or maybe both? It’s not clear. Either way, we want it.

JOSH DUHAMEL

Oh, hang on-

He opens his jacket to reveal he’s wearing a T-shirt that reads, “We need to gain control of an ancient alien artifact to keep the evil aliens from wiping out humanity”.

JOSH DUHAMEL

Ha! I had this thing printed as soon as I found out this was going to be a Transformers movie. Anyway, since we know that Mark’s MacGuffin can lead us to the superweapon, we should probably just go talk to him? Despite our differences, I’m sure he’ll gladly cooperate in any plan which prevents the apocalypse.

GLENN MORSHOWER

Work with Mark and his good-guy robots? Don’t be silly! No, instead we’re going to work with the most evil terrorist in the world, Frank Welkerbot.

JOSH DUHAMEL

...You mean the guy who’s nearly succeeded in killing all humans on four separate occasions?

GLENN MORSHOWER

That’s the one. We’re gonna let him murder Mark and his pals, take the MacGuffin, and go off to seize the superweapon for himself. Oh, and we’ll need to release some of his more psychotically violent terrorist pals from prison too, one of whom is literally named “Dreadbot”.

JOSH DUHAMEL

Um. Okay. Good plan. The planet is clearly in safe hands.

(desperately tries to thumb ride on Vogon Constructor Fleet)

EXT. JUNKYARD

MARK and BUMBLEBEE returns to their secret base in a JUNKYARD, where JOHN GOODMANBOT, KEN WATANABEBOT, JOHN DIMAGGIOBOT, those DINOSAUR ROBOTS from AGE OF EXTINCTION and some OTHER TRANSFORMERS are all hanging out in the open.

JOHN GOODMANBOT

(blows random shit up)

T-REXBOT

(breathes fire)

(eats cars)

MARK WAHLBERG

(yelling every line of dialogue)

Yes, you can see how we’ve managed to stay completely hidden and off the radar when we keep this kind of a low profile.

ISABELA MONER

Hello, me and my Crapbot followed you home! Let me live here! I can help out, I have Transformer-repairing skills that are even more inexplicable than yours.

MARK WAHLBERG

Get outta here kid, I’ve got enough on my plate without being stuck looking after a YOU ARE FAMILY NOW.

ISABELA MONER

Wow. That easy?

MARK WAHLBERG

We live in the Fast and the Furious/Guardians of the Galaxy age, kid, of course family is that easy.

Suddenly FRANK WELKERBOT, SANTIAGO, JOSH, and their various human and robotic MINIONS descend upon them! MARK, ISABELA and the GOOD ROBOTS flee towards TOWN.

SANTIAGO CABRERA

Not so fast, Mark! My fleet of jeeps will catch up to you and-

The DINOBOTS erupt out of the ROAD and start EATING SOLDIERS!

SANTIAGO CABRERA

WHAT?! What what WHAT what?! WHAAAT were the dinosaur robots doing literally IN THE GROUND?! As in, buried in the earth underneath the paved road? HOW DID THEY GET THERE?!

DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY

I DUNNO I GUESS THEY TRANSFORMED THEMSELVES INTO BEING UNDERGROUND OR SOMETHING I MEAN GEEZ WHO CARES WHY OR HOW ANYTHING HAPPENS EVER

MARK AND CO. head into town, the bad guys in close pursuit.

MARK WAHLBERG

Don’t worry guys, I’ve led them into a trap! I’ve rigged this whole town to blow!

He presses a DETONATOR and like THREE BOMBS GO OFF, barely doing ANYTHING.

MARK WAHLBERG

...Or not? Holy shit, is this really a scene in a Michael Bay movie which suffers from not enough explosions?

They get chased through town by a bunch of military drones. Then 39th President of the United States JIMMY CARTER shows up.

JIM CARTERBOT

No no no, an easy mistake to make, but actually I’m a robot who seems to be either a miniature C-3PO or a giant Oscar. Mark, some other plot has to happen elsewhere now. I’m here to pretty much airlift you and Bumblebee out of this scene and deposit you into a different one.

MARK WAHLBERG

No way am I gonna leave Isabela and the guys to get killed by the military and the evil robots!

JIM CARTERBOT

Don’t worry, those guys appear to have temporarily ceased to exist.

INT. FANCY BRITISH MANOR

PRESIDENT CARTER brings MARK and BUMBLEBEE before British earl ANTHONY HOPKINS.

ANTHONY HOPKINS

That’s right, Anthony Hopkins in a Michael Bay movie! Not even the fifty metric shittons of selling out I’ve done over the past couple decades prepared you for that one, did it?

MARK WAHLBERG

Well at least you seem to be having fun with this movie, which is more than we can say for the audience. Who are you?

ANTHONY HOPKINS

I’m the last surviving member of an ancient order which have been serving the top-secret human-Transformer alliance since the days of Arthurian legend. Come, look at my big wall of pictures documenting the completely classified and secret involvement of Transformers in human history. Including WWII propaganda posters.

(pause)

Um. SECRET propaganda posters?

MARK WAHLBERG

What I’m taking away from this is that Michael Bay had the idea of Transformers serving King Arthur, AND the idea of Transformers killing Hitler, and then instead of making either of THOSE movies he chose to make this piece of shit.

(sighs)

Also, what the fuck did they transform into back in, say, 1860? Were there a bunch of Transformers disguised as bicycles and hot air balloons?

ANTHONY HOPKINS

I don’t know. Maybe we had robots posing as old-west hookers and gunslingers. Ooh, you know what, that gives me a great idea for a theme park...

JIM CARTERBOT

Sir, the plot.

ANTHONY HOPKINS

Oh, quite right Mr. President. So that superweapon which can destroy the world or save it or something is Merlin’s staff. We need Merlin’s last surviving descendant to operate it for us.

MARK WAHLBERG

Wait, you mean - Shia LaBoeuf?! I mean your family tree there has Merlin as the head of the “Witwiccan clan”, and Shia's character name was “Witwicky”, so clearly-

ANTHONY HOPKINS

No no no, that’s just a confusing reference.

MARK WAHLBERG

Then, surely it’s Stanley Tucci’s character from Age of Extinction. I mean why else bring back the same actor to play a completely different-

ANTHONY HOPKINS

Stop acting like this is a franchise that actually thinks anything out! No, the descendant is Laura Haddock here. When this situation emerged I sent her a polite invitation to come urgently.

LAURA HADDOCK

Which I might have accepted, if you’d given me a chance to even read it before you had your Transformer car LOCK ME IN AND ABDUCT ME, WISECRACKING IN THE FACE OF MY TERRIFIED SCREAMS.

ANTHONY HOPKINS

(chuckles)

Yes, we are a surprisingly psychotic lot. President Carter here is prone to bouts of homicidal rage, aren’t you?

JIM CARTERBOT

(suddenly strangling Mark)

Of course! I mean what would Michael Bay characters be without the tendency to do bizarre things at random, and make the movie feel like it’s set in a nightmarish alternate reality where causality has broken and events are no longer connected by any form of logic?

ANTHONY HOPKINS

Anyway we need to find the location of Merlin’s staff. But doing that involves rattling off like another ten pages or so of exposition, so let’s break it up with an injection of arbitrary action.

MARK WAHLBERG

Sure, sounds good. OH NO THOSE TRANSFORMER HUNTERS HAVE A LONDON BRANCH AND THEY’RE HERE NOW WE MUST FLEE!

OMAR SYBOT

Fear not, I, that creepy abductor car we mentioned a little while ago, will stall them by using this incredible futuristic weapon!

SYBOT shoots an ENERGY BLAST at the BAD GUYS and they all go FLYING.

MARK WAHLBERG

Big deal, you knocked them off their feet.

OMAR SYBOT

No, look, it’s a time-stopping gun! See how they’re all falling down in super slow motion?

MARK WAHLBERG

Ohhh, okay. I didn’t realize, on account of the fact that every single other action shot in the movie also takes place at that speed.

MARK and LAURA speed off in BUMBLEBEE to her FATHER’S STUDY where a BOOK reveals the location of MERLIN’S STAFF.

LAURA HADDOCK

Aha, it turns out that Merlin is buried in a spaceship at the bottom of the ocean! We’re just randomly stringing words together and calling them plot points by now, I see.

MARK WAHLBERG

Say, wasn’t the whole reason I got roped into this because my MacGuffin was supposed to help us find the staff? Because that seems to have just plain not happened.

INT. SUBMARINE

MARK, LAURA and BUMBLEBEE get into a TRANSFORMER SUBMARINE.

MARK WAHLBERG

So then, Laura - er - I believe that now we’re meant to have an interlude which appears to be a romantic scene?

LAURA HADDOCK

Oh? I thought it was meant to be a comedy scene.

MARK WAHLBERG

Wait. I think it’s both. It’s two of the director’s weakest suits at once. Whatever it is it’s awkward and painful and I want it to stop.

LAURA HADDOCK

Relax, the non-action scenes in Michael Bay movies are always rambling, half-sketched-out ideas which abruptly cut out as soon as-

DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY

MAN I’M BOOOOOORED SOMEBODY MAKE THE NEXT ACTION SCENE HAPPEN

INT. SUBMARINE

MARK and LAURA find STANLEY TUCCI’S COFFIN.

LAURA HADDOCK

So we’ve entered a long-sealed crypt and found an ancient coffin covered in creepy warnings. And now we’re gonna open it and steal a mystical artifact from the mummified corpse within. Boy, if this was any other movie we’d be about to get cursed six ways from Sunday.

They open the COFFIN and retrieve the STAFF. But then CULLENBOT bursts in, all brainwashed and stuff!

PETER CULLENBOT

You fool, Laura, as soon as you touched the staff Chanbot was alerted to its location! So then I came here, to this isolated location at the bottom of the ocean, within the subsequent thirty seconds somehow.

He seizes the STAFF and goes to LEAVE.

MARK WAHLBERG

Shit! Stop him, Bumblebee! Stop him by seemingly making a sincere, concerted effort to blow him to pieces!

BUMBLEBEE fights CULLENBOT, but CULLENBOT overpowers him, pins him down and goes to stab him.

BUMBLEBEE

(can talk again all of a sudden)

Wait wait wait! Uhh, I don’t suppose we can do that lame Hollywood thing where emotional pleas instantly cure brainwashing?

PETER CULLENBOT

Oh, BULLLLLSHIT. Just bullshit. I mean, the thing where a disabled character regains their abilities at the exact right dramatic moment is always bullshit, but this is steaming deep-fried bullshit with a side of baloney! You have no VOICE BOX. This isn’t like Forrest Gump suddenly being able to walk without his braces, it’s like Lieutenant Dan suddenly growing a new pair of legs!

BUMBLEBEE

Or maybe it finally occurred to me that, if I can shapeshift into a Ferrari or a tank or a Harrier Jet, why is it so hard to shapeshift into myself with a vocoder attached.

PETER CULLENBOT

Well fine, you win, I’m not evil anymore. I guess this fight is over-

Suddenly some TRANSFORMER KNIGHTS show up and start FIGHTING CULLENBOT!

KNIGHT

It is our duty to protect the staff! We’ve known for over a thousand years that Chanbot would send someone after the staff, and if she got it she’d end the world!

PETER CULLENBOT

Then why protect the staff instead of destroying it? Not like it's doing anyone any good anyway, sitting at the bottom of the ocean for a millennium.

(frowns)

Wait, didn’t we point out the exact same thing about the knife in The Mummy, and the apple in Assassin’s Creed? Man, what’s the matter with ancient orders lately, that they don’t bother to destroy objects made out of pure unleaded evil?

The KNIGHT goes to CHOP CULLENBOT IN HALF, but then MARK’S MACGUFFIN transforms into a SWORD and BLOCKS THE BLADE!

MARK WAHLBERG

(sighs)

Sure, why not. The robot's sword only weighs about as much as a Mack truck full of iron safes full of gold bricks, of course I can block that attack without my arm snapping clean off. Whatever. I don’t care anymore.

KNIGHT

Gasp, you have the MacGuffin so we’re not angry anymore! I guess this fight is over-

WELKERBOT and his CRONIES show up and start FIGHTING CULLENBOT!

FRANK WELKERBOT

Hey, look at my face, it seems Chanbot brainwashed me too! When the hell did that happen? Did I fly off into outer space and visit Cybertron also? That seems fantastically unlikely. Anyway, YOINK!

WELKERBOT grabs the STAFF and GETS AWAY.

EXT. STONEHENGE

All the GOOD GUYS and BAD GUYS gather at STONEHENGE to make the CLIMAX HAPPEN. CYBERTRON arrives directly overhead!

MARK WAHLBERG

Welp, that’s it, we lose. A whole other planet just parked on top of ours so everybody’s already dead. The tidal forces alone-

LAURA HADDOCK

Hey now, you can’t make that joke, that joke was already done when Dark of the Moon did basically this exact same villain plot.

WELKERBOT starts activating the STAFF.

ARMY GUYS

Fuck, he’s doing whatever the hell it is he has to do to make the world start ending! Let’s bombard the evil robots with our tanks and mortars, men!

ANTHONY HOPKINS

Yes, excellent idea! And while you do that I’ll totter right up to them and shoot them with my gun.

(dies, obviously)

CHANBOT starts draining energy out of EARTH and pouring it into CYBERTRON, which starts to HEAL, mostly by random chunks of it SMASHING INTO EACH OTHER.

MARK WAHLBERG

Crap, we have to end this now! Me and Laura and Cullenbot and Bumblebee and Josh and Santiago and Isabela and her Crapbot and Goodmanbot and Watanabebot and Dimaggiobot and Cybot and the soldiers and the dinosaurs and the knights have to fight Welkerbot and his minions and Chanbot and her evil reverse knights HOLY FUCK do you think this scene has enough fucking characters or what?!

A whole bunch of STUFF STARTS HAPPENING.

PETER CULLENBOT

Hey, Chanbot’s evil knights just voltronned into a demon thing but then I chopped them back apart and decapitated them, that was kinda cool.

JOSH DUHAMEL

Yeah well we just deployed tactical nukes to make a chunk of Cybertron swing loose and knock another chunk to pieces like a giant geological game of conkers, haven’t seen that before.

LAURA HADDOCK

Now this entire island is freefalling and all kinds of neat zero-gravity action is happening.

(frowns)

I don’t get it, the individual elements of this scene kind of work, why is the scene as a whole such an obnoxious piece of garbage?

MARK WAHLBERG

Because everything’s happening all on top of one another without any rhyme or reason! This climax is like lobster and peppermint chili floating in a glass of champagne, a heap of potentially good things bunged together into a revolting mess by an idiot.

Finally the BAD GUYS are DEFEATED SOMEHOW and EARTH IS SAVED.

PETER CULLENBOT

And at last I know what side I am on. I have come to realize that this world, Earth, is my true home!

MARK WAHLBERG

Ummm, are you sure about that? I kinda doubt they’re gonna repeal the “kill all robots” policy after evil robots nearly ended the world YET AGAIN. What about Jupiter? Jupiter seems nice.

PETER CULLENBOT

Whatever, let’s just do the sequel hook and end this thing.

MARK WAHLBERG

Sequel hook, oy. I promise there is not a single thing they could reveal about the next movie that could make it seem the least bit appealing.

DIRECTOR MICHAEL BAY

ALL RIGHT BYE EVERYBODY I’M LEAVING THIS FRANCHISE FOREVER AND THIS TIME I MEAN IT

MARK WAHLBERG

...I stand corrected!

END.