In terms of quality, Transformers has the lowest batting average of any modern film franchise, a record that remains firmly intact thanks to Rise of the Beasts. Where Michael Bay’s five (yes, five) entries in the franchise are all visual soup splashed across the screen, the latest installment – aided by Creed IISteven Caple Jr. — similarly defies comprehensibility, albeit for slightly different reasons. To some extent, each shot is just a little more neatly composed. But they’re all strung together with the most minimal visual and narrative connective tissue, resulting in a mind-boggling film that feels strange not only for a modern blockbuster, but for a Transformers movie too.
Based on the Beast Wars line of comics, games, toys and TV shows, the seventh installment in the extended saga begins with a long prologue about a planet-devouring Transformer, Unicron (Colman Domingo), who forces a number of animal-themed Transformers, the Maximals, from their Earth homeworld. Before their planet is destroyed, a monkey, cheetah and falcon Transformer manage to steal the latest in a series of plot-defining artifacts related to Cybertron, the Transformers’ homeworld.
This time it’s called the “Trans Warp Key,” though its function is similar to that of at least two previous series of McGuffins: it opens a giant portal in the sky. Even before the plot kicks off, this purported relaunch of the franchise is already in familiar territory, a trend that continues for a significant portion of its 127 minutes.
It’s a story as old as time: a human character stumbles upon a group of Transformers, including Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and Bumblebee (again voiceless), and becomes involved in their battle with an evil faction, which inevitably leads to a race for a piece of Transformers technology that has the power to destroy the world.
Image: Paramount Pictures
The year is 1994, marked largely by numerous references to Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, and several other era-specific video games, plus a snippet of OJ Simpson’s ongoing murder trial. There are also a few hip-hop bangers on the soundtrack, courtesy of Notorious BIG and Wu-Tang Clan. If there’s one thing the movie largely gets right in its setting, it’s the aural introduction to mid-’90s Brooklyn, even if a few of these songs are mildly anachronistic and appear a few years before they’re in the real world are released.
Still, the film’s soundtrack is in the right ballpark, making for an energetic introduction to ex-military tech expert Noah Diaz (Hamilton‘s Anthony Ramos), his single mother (Luna Lauren Vélez), and his ailing younger brother (Dean Scott Vazquez). While the characters themselves feel real, from their working-class plight to their interpersonal banter, little in the world around them feels specific to a period nearly 30 years ago. (Sorry, I feel it too.)
The costumes and production design are bland, uninspired, and contemporary enough to accidentally make the movie feel timeless, though the purpose behind the ’90s setting seems to be logistics. In franchise terms, Rise of the Beasts is a follow-up to the one from 2018 Bumblebee, which was set in 1987 and which director Travis Knight assured was the only visually decipherable film in this series.
The Autobots still keep their busy designs from the Bay movies, but this entry continues to rewrite their bizarre continuity. (Unfortunately, once again, we have to settle for a world where Harriet Tubman never teamed up with transforming cars.) But Bumblebee might as well not exist in this continuity, as the Transformers are all back to square one at the top of this story, hiding in plain sight as usual, until they are both the former and somehow the be discovered seventh time.
Photo: Jonathan Wenk/Paramount Pictures
This time around, the mute Bumblebee isn’t the primary human companion – it’s a chatterbox blue-gray Porsche named Mirage, who Noah steals to pay his brother’s medical bills. Mirage, unlike most Bay formers, has the advantage of a recognizable human face, à la the Transformers cartoons, but has the disadvantage of being voiced by Saturday Night Live‘ is Pete Davidson, who was mainly cast for his tendency for aloof snark. That includes him speaking a line that sounds very close Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalkeris notorious “Are they flying now?!” (Even though Transformers have been flying since the first iteration of the franchise in the 1980s.) Mirage’s banter lands about 10% of the time and is excruciatingly youthful for the other 90.
There is also a subplot about museum intern Elena Wallace (Judas and the Black Messiah‘s Dominique Fishback, who deserves better) discovers half of the Trans Warp Key and begins to follow a trail of archaeological breadcrumbs to find the other half. But her investigation is futile: she doesn’t discover the location herself, as the arriving Transformers, armed with whatever knowledge she lacks, invade and take her to the location in Peru.
And so, with all its human pieces in play – the human scenes aren’t really the issue here – Rise of the Beasts takes part in the first of his many battles over some technological thing, in which the Autobots jump and attack Unicron’s Acolytes, who look distinctly Decepticon-esque: gray and nondescript, just like the series’ previous villains.
In that first big action scene, set in the middle of the night, something fundamental breaks about this movie. Where the Bay movies at least – oh God, yes, I’m about to mention them as a positive example – spewed controlled chaos across the frame, with background and foreground elements alluding to a sense of enormity that’s hard to capture visually. is , Rise of the Beasts has a visual simplicity that exposes his failures of imagination and artistry in a way that Bay has always been able to disguise.
Image: Paramount Pictures
With the camera at a safe, unobtrusive distance, land punches and melee attacks without much impact. There’s little weight to the CGI of these supposedly clunky machines, and successive takes are rarely linked together in any meaningful way. Nothing stays together. Screen direction and geography seem to change randomly, so while the individual shots are decipherable for once, they exist outside of space and time, pieced together in a way that somehow feels even more kaleidoscopic than Bay ever managed.
The one thing Bay always cared about, even amid its dizzying visual pandemonium, was a sense of scale, both through human eyes and the size contrast between Transformer characters and human-scale objects. It scrapes the bottom of the barrel to specifically praise Bay for that, but Rise of the Beasts hardly manages that much. The relative size of the Transformers (to humans and to each other) seems to change dramatically from shot to shot. Not only does this make the action hard to follow, but when certain characters are blocked at various lows, the combination of this shifting scale and an unsophisticated sense of relief delivers a constant feel. “giant Dom, little Hobbs” (and vice versa) effect of that one confusingly staged dialogue scene in it Fast and furious 6. Imagine an entire movie that feels like this, and you have a pretty good feel for it Rise of the Beasts.
But what about the Maximals, the actual beasts of the title? Unfortunately, they don’t appear nearly as often in this movie as Optimus, Bumblebee, and the well-known Autobot crew. Admittedly, at least they play more of a role than the thoroughly wasted Dinobots of Transformers: era of extinctionand they’re also involved in what may be the series’ only real moral quandary to date, involving sacrifice for the greater good, even though the lack of physical weight often results in a lack of emotional weight as well.
Like Mirage, the ape-like leader of the Maximals, Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), has the advantage of a face that can be truly emote, resulting in a handful of scenes that border on emotionally engaging, though his comrades – like the avian Airazor, voiced by a bored-sounding Michelle Yeoh – don’t have that luxury, and have little function or personality beyond providing plot information.
Image: Paramount Pictures
If there is one new action Rise of the Beastsit’s the way the screenplay (attributed to a five-person writing team, inclusive Obi Wan Kenobi showrunner Joby Harold) finds a fun way for the people to be actively involved in the Transformer battles as equal participants, rather than panicked spectators or victims. Even though the scenes in question are boring as dirt and completely disconnected from shot to shot.
The climactic action set piece recreates the final battle Avengers: endgame. But instead of putting in the legwork to get audiences to care about the characters, the film only apes the aspects of Marvel’s shared universe climax that don’t work in isolation: the low-key, wide-open setting and the faceless legion of faceless enemies. that might as well be a sea of metallic junk. The live-action Transformers movies have always been hard to watch, but with Bay at the helm, at least they felt like the work of a deranged lunatic given free rein with a camera and VFX budget to experiment . (He’s made a lot of good movies outside of the Transformers sandbox.)
Instead, this time the experiment seems to be a studio testing the boundaries of what technically qualifies as a Transformers movie – or a movie in general. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is haphazardly cobbled together from CGI elements that appear to have been created by different departments that weren’t allowed to communicate. There’s even a handful of shots where Airazor is so poorly rendered that she appears almost two-dimensional, as if the crunch that was probably foisted on the film’s helpless VFX crew manifested itself as an artistic cry for help.
Alien robot cars and their space combat are concepts with such basic, gee-whiz sci-fi appeal that they’ve featured countless times in dozens of comics and cartoons. And yet there’s little childish wonder in Transformers’ live-action movies, which often fill their frames with visually oppressive, eyesore views on things that should be simple and imaginative. Virtually all Transformers movies feel like they are trying to beat their audience, but this time the movie wins.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts will be in cinemas from June 9.