For ten straight years, Michael Bay directed five Transformers movies, which may have made billions of dollars in the box office, but are also some of the most mind-numbing blockbusters to grace the summer. While Bay’s first outing remains a solid entry in the franchise, none of them have ever reached the 80’s cheesy awesomeness of The Transformers: The Movie, which should not be damned in any way. With the potential of a shared universe as set up in 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight, the next installment Bumblebee may have served as a prequel to Bay’s movies, but feels more like a course correction by setting its own path that will satisfy the decades-long fanbase.
Based on the trailers for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, it seems like a return to the bombastic nature of giant robots hitting each other – following the intimacy of Bumblebee – and since Bay remains a producing credit, what does director Steven Caple Jr. bring to the formula? Looking back at the history of the you-based franchise, Rise of the Beasts is picking and choosing elements from the various periods, whether it is the monster planet Unicron (once voiced by Orson Welles for the 80s animated feature), as well as headlining characters from the Beast Wars storyline (spawned its own toy line and TV series).
Rise of the Beasts’s own storyline takes place in 1994 Brooklyn, ex-military electronics expert Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) struggles to find a job to support his family, and is convinced by his friend to steal a Porsche to sell, only to discover that the car is the Autobot Mirage (voiced by Pete Davidson) in disguise. Along with artifact researcher Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback), Noah finds himself in the company of the Autobots led by Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen), who is determined to return his home planet of Cybertron, only to ally themselves with the animal-transforming Maximals, in a battle against the Terrorcons, sent by Unicron.
With three different factions of Transformers thrown into a running time of two hours, they are essentially duking it out so they can find a certain McGuffin, which is the plot of every Transformers movie. Also, with five screenwriters involved, including Joby Harold who conceived the story, you can hear the gears cranking as the plot progresses, going from one globe-trotting set-piece to the next – even deliberately nodding to Indiana Jones – while delving into the Transformers’ mythology which is both dense and loose. No doubt they are planning more installments in the future, but maybe another pass on the script to give more breathing space would have been helpful.
However, given the cracks in the script, there is some character development along the way, starting with our two human protagonists. As opposed to the human players from Bay’s movies, who are always at each other’s throats, Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback bring a nice chemistry playing two likeable characters with plenty of Brooklyn energy that bounces well with the Autobots. While not every Transformer gets developed, even the headlined Maximals are somewhat sidelined (including Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh voicing a robot peregrine falcon), Optimus Prime has an interesting arc where he is conflicted with an alliance with humanity. While the movie pokes fun at the earlier movies’ weird depiction of Transformers as racial stereotypes, it still does that joke to questionable effect.
Steven Caple Jr. may take advantage of the 90s setting, from evoking the pop culture of the day to featuring hip-hop tracks by Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest, the director is ultimately a Transformers movie, of which the main appeal of giant robots hitting each other. Depending on how much of a fan you are of the whole film series, Rise of the Beasts is one of the better instalments in that the action doesn’t go on for an eternity as the heroes have a clear motivation and you are hoping they will survive the outcome, even if the Terrorcons are really no different than the Decepticons of old.
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