That thread has run through so many of his movies. In Armageddon, NASA must turn to a private squad of oil drillers to save the world from an impending asteroid. In 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, Bay portrayed America’s intelligence agencies as a nuisance, a bunch of stuffed shirts getting in the way of the hard-scrabble soldiers trying to keep an escalating crisis under control. In the many Transformers movies, the military usually serves as a helpful liaison to the robotic titans doing battle with evil Decepticons on U.S. soil.

Except not now. Transformers: The Last Knight is a movie about a lot of things, including an Illuminati-esque secret society on Earth that has communed with the Transformers for centuries (William Shakespeare and Harriet Tubman are named among its membership). But to me, easily its most arresting image is those military men, now wearing black, bearing patches on their shoulders adorned with robot skulls. Starved for anything better to do during the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time, I immediately started pondering Bay’s intentions. Is this just a cheap screenwriting trick? Or part of a larger storytelling turnaround?

The world of The Last Knight is different, too; while the other Transformers films take place in an America fundamentally unchanged from our own, this one has a much more dystopic feel. The protagonist, Cade Yeager (Wahlberg), lives in a junkyard while on the run from the military; he’s unable to talk to his daughter on the phone for fear that advanced tracking software will ping his voice to a location. A new character, Izabella (Isabela Moner), is a plucky 14-year-old who lives in the wreckage of Chicago, a city abandoned after a huge Transformer battle that’s now prowled by hostile robots and even nastier soldiers.

Bay isn’t much of a world-builder, so he doesn’t really dig into any of the concepts his film (written by Akiva Goldsman, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, and Ken Nolan, and based, of course, on Hasbro toys) presents. He’s so fond of visual overload that it’s hard to keep track of just how ruined America is meant to appear. It’s certainly destroyed enough that when six giant metal horns suddenly sprout from the Earth midway through the film, no one seems that surprised. But there’s a strange pessimism to The Last Knight I haven’t sensed in Bay’s oeuvre before.

He’s always tried to turn stories of catastrophe—like Pearl Harbor and 13 Hours—into tales of jingoistic triumph. He usually idolizes military strength, delivering incredibly involved, near-fetishistic imagery of weapons being fired, explosions going off in detail, and soldiers dashing through hell to protect civilians (even against the threat of giant robots that can turn into sports cars). I’ve long found it remarkable that Bay tried to give Pearl Harbor (a deeply bad film, to be clear), a film about a national tragedy, a happy ending by depicting the Doolittle Raid. It doesn’t exactly work, but it’s easy to admire the effort, just as that film’s star Ben Affleck does in his notorious DVD commentary for Armageddon.