transformers: rise of the beasts

The Transformers franchise finds itself at a bit of a crossroads. The series grew increasingly steroidal and overwrought under Michael Bay’s stewardship, but the original remains a bona fide popcorn gem; a creative cross-splicing of Bay and executive producer Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking DNA (well… maybe 80% Bay and 20% Spielberg). Exhausted audiences had largely checked out by the time Bay released his aggressively nonsensical fifth outing, The Last Knight… and Paramount elected to pivot smartly to the scaled-down, Travis-Knight directed spin-off Bumblebee. Critics and old-school Transformers fans were largely delighted with the result… but the film failed to reignite the brand at the box office. 

Which brings us to Rise of the Beasts. Don’t even bother trying to disentangle the Transformers timeline at this point… the new movie seems to build directly on Bumblebee but also appears to diverge from the Bay films, even though Bumblebee was more-or-less positioned as a prequel to them? Who knows. Who cares? At any rate, the story takes place in 1994 (which is a good excuse to pack the soundtrack with iconic hip-hop, such as Wu-Tang’s CREAM and Biggie’s Hypnotize) and follows ex-soldier Noah (Anthony Ramos of Hamilton fame), who’s doing his best to care for his sick brother (they refer to each other as Sonic and Tails - another appreciable nod to 90s nostalgia). But Noah can’t seem to catch a break… and after a security job falls through thanks to his commanding officer claiming he’s not a team player (a charge that has… oddly little bearing on the movie, or his actual character arc), he’s forced to turn to a life of crime. Unfortunately, his attempt to steal a vintage Porsche quickly goes sideways when it turns out to be the Autobot Mirage (voiced by Pete Davidson).

Better buckle up. Noah is brought before Optimus Prime (played, as always, by Peter Cullen, whose voice still instantly elicits nostalgic shivers) - less noble, burdened by leadership, distrustful of humans (a fresh, fascinating conceit one wishes the movie had actually pushed further). He seeks the Transwarp Key, which the Autobots can use to return to Cybertron (wasn’t it destroyed??)… but it’s also coveted by the planet-devouring Unicron (villain of 1986’s animated Transformers movie, who was voiced by a literally near-death Orson Welles), who dispatches his legions of Terrorcons (led by Peter Dinklage’s Scourge - basically invincible until the plot requires him not to be) to obtain it. This in turn aligns the Autobots with the Maximals - an advanced race of Transformers who hid the key on Earth centuries ago and seemingly took the form of the local wildlife… even though they already maintained those same beast-like appearances on their home planet, so… uh…

The point is, the Maximals are led by a giant mecha-gorilla named Optimus Primal, he’s voiced by Ron Perlman, and there’s also a falcon (played by newly-minted Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh, no less), a rhinoceros, and a cheetah. Moving along…

Rise of the Beasts led many to revisit the original films in anticipation, and one of the most frequent observations was how incredible Bay was at the apparent lost art of integrating large-scale CGI into real-world locations and cityscapes. Not surprisingly, the new film contrives to shift the action onto the wide-open, unpopulated tundras of Peru in the second half, which lend themselves more readily to homogenized green screen compositions. Directing duties were entrusted to Creed II’s Steven Caple Jr. and while he can’t come close to Bay’s unparalleled flair for destruction or blown-out image sculpting, he has a clean, muscular style of his own. In some ways, Caple Jr’s relatively decaffeinated approach is an asset - the narrative baloney is swallowed a lot more easily when the movie isn’t actively attempting to batter you into a state of numb, sensory acceptance (as was the case with, say, Age of Extinction). In a way, Rise of the Beasts is actually the entry that best captures the feel of a Saturday morning cartoon. The Bay films, at their best, were juggernauts of awe-inspiring spectacle; watching an Autobot ride into battle on the backside of a Maximal, on the other hand, makes you feel eight-years-old again. ​

Still, Rise of the Beasts can’t fully shake the fatigue of a franchise laboring seven films deep - it would need a jolt from the AllSpark itself to fully juice its flickering power cells. As was the case with Jurassic World Dominion and its CGI dinos, the inherent thrill of watching vehicles transform into robots (and vice-versa) amidst a fluid flurry of shifting metal has largely dissipated. Ramos and Swarm’s Dominque Fishback are fine as the nominal human leads - both will no doubt accept the paycheck and go on to better things. Davidson’s casting, meanwhile, feels like a recipe for disaster… but his Mirage proves surprisingly endearing (it might be leftover trauma from the prior films - outside of the original, Bay’s handling of the comedy was often akin to a monkey playing with a set of cymbals). The movie ends with Paramount taking a wild creative swing that’s potentially very exciting (like crack-cocaine to anyone who grew up in the 80s - no exaggeration)… but there’s a nagging feeling of the gambit being too little too late as the studio attempts to fully maximize its Hasbro properties. It was probably the last viable card there was left to play for this once incredibly lucrative franchise, however. Let’s just say the film’s tagline of “Unite or Fall” is a lot more prophetic than it was likely intended.