Filmmaker Michael Bay thinks there's something interesting about Japanese samurai that sets them apart from English knights.
"You put a medieval knight in front of the camera and it now looks (a bit) cliched, it looks outdated," he says. "But the samurai look, of course we know it's historical yet it looks so modern."
The "modern samurai" look is evident in "Transformers: Age of Extinction," literally in the character of Drift (voiced by Ken Watanabe) and in a broader sense because the CGI robot cast is based on a line of toys out of Japan that was popular in the 1980s.