Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

3 outta 5

The 7^th movie in the Transformers live action movie series feels quite a lot like other ones, wherein Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has a lot of mayhem and some shallow lip service human characters. The film series has been a little topsy turvy in terms of quality; the first movie is kind of awesome and the 6^th film Bumblebee was an E.T. inspired reboot and had some solid emotional payoffs. This jettisons the smaller character story from Bumblebee for more wide scale chaos. But there are some interesting Transformer designs here, the voice cast is stacked with impressive talent, and the transforming robots are still more watchable than the melodrama generating humans tagging along. And there’s transforming apes and giant planet-eating threat which is neat.

In the distant past, the Maximal leader Optimus Primal (Ron Pearlman) fought against the evil Scourge (Peter Dinklage), a minion of the planet eating Unicron (Colman Domingo). Primal escaped with a key that Unicron needed to travel through time and space, keeping the planet-eating menace at bay. Fast forward to 1994 and New York resident Noah (Anthony Ramos) is trying to get money to provide for his mother Brenna (Luna Lauren Vélez) and his little brother, Chris (Dean Scott Vazquez). Meanwhile, a museum worker, Elena (Dominique Fishback) has found the ancient key that could transport Unicorn back to Earth. This activates the Autobots while Noah, desperate for cash, tries to boot a car that turns out to be the Transformer, Mirage (Pete Davidson). The Autobots leader, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) reluctantly lets Noah and Elena tag along to retrieve the key, and they meet the animal transforming Maximals. Now the robots in disguise will have to team up and try to stop the arrival of Unicron with Scourge trying to take them all down.

The continuity of the series has always been very nebulous as there’s a whole whack of inconsistencies in the five Michael Bay directed films. Bumblebee was an ‘80s set prequel that fudged the continuity of the Bay films. The Autobots arriving in the 1980s pretty much goes against what happened in the 2007 original film, and that continues here in the ‘90s set Rise of the Beasts. There’s still no Megatron because ostensibly he’s still on ice to get unfrozen for the events of the ’07 film. Although, the designs in these last two movies look more like the original 1980s animated show and less like the Bay films. While Bumblebee had a distinct ‘80s vibe, the origin era for Transformers, the only thing that seems ‘90s in this film is a few songs and Noah fiddling with an illegal cable box. But really, continuity is not a priority in this series, the focus is on battling robots.

And the battling robots are cool. Director Steven Caple Jr. does a decent impression of Bay’s frantic style but doesn’t provide stylistic uniqueness like Travis Knight did for Bumblebee. But the action here is satisfyingly loud and Transformer scenes happen at a decent clip. The movie opens with a prologue that introduces the Maximals and the baddie Scourge that has lots of boom and sets up Ultron as a planet-destroying menace. The Transformers series is always full of planet destroying menaces but by using Ultron as the baddie, the original world eater from the 80s animated film, gives it more import. After that prologue, the film focuses on the working life of Noah and Elena which makes it a drag until the robots show up.  Ramos is a good actor but relegated to mostly mugging at giant CGI transformers and having a cliché sickly brother. Ramos does get in some robot power suit action in the finale which is a neat piece of Transformers lore. Fishback gets even less, mostly providing exposition about the magic gadget.

The film is titled Rise of the Beasts which is inspired by the 90s CGI animated show, Beast Wars. And the Maximals are missing most of the first half as this feels mostly like another Transformers installment about Optimus Prime and his crew. The Maximal enemies of the Predacons from Beast Wars aren’t even in this film. But there is still a significant chunk of Maximals here once they show up. It isn’t the blatant false advertising like the promised Dinobots in the 4^th film, Age of Extinction, that showed up for 5 minutes at the end. Weller as Optimus still has an impressive vocal delivery although Optimus seems a bit more bloodthirsty this time around which is disconcerting. Davidson’s Mirage is amusing with the jokey line delivery as Davidson usually delivers. One of the Maximals is voiced by Michelle Yeoh and even gets in an unexpected character twist which Yeoh sells. The most popular Transformer, Bumblebee, is sidelined for most of the movie. It sort of makes sense because Bumblebee just got his own film, but it’s a shame to see him disappear when his whole speaking with movie and radio songs gimmick is always enjoyable.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a sturdy, if not spectacular, entry in the Transformer franchise. There’s a couple of new robot quirks, bombastic action, and a last minute tease of the next franchise installment trying something different. But if one just wants to see giant robots go boom, this is acceptable.