Bot Reviews: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (The Movie)!

Everyone’s talking about the new Transformers movie, so why not me, too? I’m writing this in one shot, about 48 hours after watching the movie, so this is going to be a bit rambly. I’ll try and keep the spoilers out. Does that matter? Maybe. Probably. I’ll be nice and keep it non-spoily. I took some pictures, and nothing that’s re-enacted in them isn’t in any trailers.

So, let’s talk about the other live-action movies first. I’ve been in and out of love with the Bay films as I got older, and it’s mostly “out.” The 2007 movie still has a certain something about it, between the music, action, and general gravitas, enough to ignore the shortcomings of the movie. The sequels weren’t quite able to sustain that, largely due to doing everything bigger, and that included the bad bits. Sure, there were a lot of good ideas and interesting experiments, but sticking those in the same films as….all the other stuff kind of negated them.

Meanwhile, I loved Bumblebee. It was a gigantic breath of fresh air after that run of movies, and set a new bar of quality for the franchise. It had its shortcomings, too, but they were stuff like “this movie takes no risks and is a bit derivative” and “most of the side-plots and side-characters are written and acted like, Disney-channel-TV-Movie-basic,” as opposed to “this movie contains unbelievable amounts of sexism and racism, is a military recruiting campaign, and also feels 7000 years long.” Plus, Bumblebee was pleasant! And it had characters with complicated emotional arcs about trauma and depression! Meanwhile, the Bay movies could be profoundly unpleasant, and took place in a world that was aggressively mean. So, coming off of that film, the big question to me is what a mainline Transformers movie would look like going forward, and what tone it would strike, especially with another new director, Steven Caple Jr, though I did really enjoy Creed 2, another one he did.

See, when Bumblebee came out, it was really hard to talk about it without comparing it to the Bay films, and say “it doesn’t do this, it doesn’t do that.” And while I would like to talk about Rise of the Beasts without referencing the Bay films, it’s again impossible, and not just because the Producers doggedly insist this is in continuity with those (it isn’t, it really isn’t, there’s no way.) Instead, Rise of the Beasts invites comparisons with the Bay films, because in terms of its plot, it’s another one of those.

Laid bare, the first five live-action Transformers movies all had the following plot: “Our heroes, a combination of plucky humans and Autobots, are in a race with the villainous robots to put together the clues behind a conspiracy going back to ancient times. This conspiracy has to do with a previously unknown human-Transformer connection, and figuring it all out will point them towards a Plot Device. The bad guys want to use this Plot Device to destroy the Earth, though there’s also some potential for the Autobots to do good with it. Either way, it all spills out into a giant third-act battle for control of said Plot Device.” That’s also the plot of Rise of the Beasts. In this case, the plucky humans are Noah (Anthony Ramos) and Elena (Dominique Fishback), the Bad Robots are Scourge and the Terrorcons, the ancient conspiracy is the Maximals, who have been in hiding around the Earth since primitive times, and the Plot Device is the Transwarp Key, which could either take the Autobots back home to Cybertron, or be used by Scourge to call Unicron to Earth.

So, how was it? In a nutshell, pretty good. I thought the middle kind of dragged, but the first and third acts were aces. In terms of what it doesn’t do, compared to Bay’s takes on this kind of plot, firstly, it doesn’t drag, this movie is lean and tight. In fact, that might be to its detriment, at times the pacing reminds me of the ‘86 film, and it feels like a lot of exposition, and some character development, got left on the cutting room floor. Between the film being delayed a year, and reports of some heavy changes from test screenings, it’s hard not to look at that tight pacing as being a result of late-game patching. I do think that this movie suffered a bit from having A Lot going on, and could have used the smaller-scale focus of Bumblebee. The characters, the mythology, the backstory, the Plot Points, this has the density of a Bay movie, in a much shorter span of time, but it somehow manages to avoid collapsing under its own weight, like some of those previous films, and does so with a shorter runtime, which makes it even more impressive. Speaking of collapsing under its own weight, Caple Jr. and his team also deserves credit for managing to direct a bunch of large-scale Robot Action Scenes, and making them parseable and easy to follow. Okay, there’s an action sequence at night that I didn’t care for, it was a bit too “Bayhem” in terms of being hard to follow, but the rest of the action took place in the daytime, and was clear, crisp, and well-choreographed, beyond the Needle Drops.

Secondly, Rise of the Beasts does more than just not include the Bayverse’s rampant racism, misogyny, and military worship, it actually turns it on its head. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this movie was directed by, and stars people of color, and it knows that. Both Noah and Elena are clearly shown dealing with microaggressions in real life, as they struggle to eke out a career, or even have one. Meanwhile, Noah’s an ex-soldier, and the movie makes it clear that his unemployment is at least partially the fault of the US Army. Oh, and this movie includes at least one entire action sequence in which the NYPD are the villains.

Now, in terms of what it does do? Firstly, as I hinted above, this movie’s a masterclass in effectively using music. While I liked Bumblebee’s 80’s-tastic soundtrack, I did think they laid it on a bit thick in terms of how it was used. Meanwhile, Rise of the Beasts is set in 1994, and packs its soundtrack with vintage hip-hop jams. Not only that, this movie really knows how to use its music to frame a scene, whether it’s an action scene, characters skulking about, or just existing in New York, and the movie’s new song, “On my Soul,” was deployed particularly well. In fact, that might be why I thought the middle of the movie dragged a bit, there were no good songs for a long time. I need to grab the soundtrack to this, post-haste. And speaking of the music, Unicron’s theme was in there, a lot more subtly than I was expecting, and sharper eyes than mine have already pointed out Vince Dicola got a shout-out in the credits, which feels great after the Super Mario Bros. movie shafted Grant Kirkhope.

Speaking of just existing, this is probably the most that the Transformers themselves have been allowed to be characters in their own movie, and it’s used to great effect. Pete Davidson’s Mirage could easily have been annoying (my fiancée said he reminded her of Bugs Bunny at times), but he rode the line well, and managed to be not-too-annoying. He’s this movie’s new Bumblebee, or Hot Rod, and he inhabits the role well. You really get the sense he’s gone a bit stir-crazy, and really wants to hang out with someone that isn’t Optimus, Bee, or Arcee.

Speaking of Optimus, I’ve heard a lot of divided opinions about him already. So, I’ll say this: He lapses into the Bayverse “Murder Prime” version of himself a lot, but here’s the thing: Murder Prime was so shocking, because that aggression seemed to come out of nowhere. Here, I really got the sense that he’s Going Through It. Basically, Optimus has gone through the Transformers equivalent of being stuck at an airport for three days, and who hasn’t become the worst version of themselves when confronted with that kind of experience? He’s tired, he’s ticked off, he’s weary, and both the writing and Peter Cullen play this really well. The aggression feels earned, and to be fair, he really does get some raw lines.

Beyond Optimus and Mirage, the rest of the robot cast get to exist, and banter way more than previous films (and said banter isn’t plainly canned offscreen ADR anymore) but are very much secondary characters. Arcee’s a cool warrior, Bumblebee’s the same Sweet Boy he was in the last film, Stratosphere is just a less crass Revenge of the Fallen Jetfire, and for all the complaints about Wheeljack not being “G1 Faithful” (stupid complaints, in my opinion), he isn’t in the movie enough to do much outside of “have an accent and be a little bit adorable.” I’m making them sound like they were underserved, I don’t think they were, they were just “the ensemble” instead of “the leads.” The amount of long dialogue scenes the bots got did expose another odd problem, though: Everyone’s voices are mixed the same way they were in the Bay films, with kind of a blaring, metallic drone to them, and when every voice in a scene sounds like that, it becomes this stifling wall of sound. I get they don’t want them to sound human, but they could have turned down the distortion.

The Maximals are a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, they’re very much “guest stars” in this movie, this isn’t about them. On the other hand, this isn’t an Age of Extinction Dinobots situation, they get to have a role in the film, and be characters. In fact, I’m impressed that they managed to figure out a way to import the main points of the Beast Wars premise (a small group of robots, led by a new, inexperienced leader, cut off from home) into the movie. Heck, I’m pretty sure Airazor actually does more in this entire movie than she does in the whole Beast Wars TV show.

And despite the marketing implying this version of Optimus Primal would be a Fierce Warrior, Ron Perlman’s take on him turned out to be a surprisingly reserved, level-leaded guy, a lot more like the TV show leader than I expected. Which makes it a damn shame they didn’t bring Garry Chalk back, because my inner child would’ve very much liked to see him and Peter Cullen in the same project together, for once.

The big losers here in terms of focus are Cheetor and Rhinox, who only get a couple lines between them (and I’m not entirely sure Rhinox actually spoke), and basically get no characterization at all. My fiancée, who’s seen Beast Wars, even pointed out how odd it was that none of the science banter went to Rhinox, who’s usually the Science Guy. At least the pair of them got to transform, and everyone got properly named. Oh, and the question of “who are the Maximals and where did they come from” is strangely vague, and feels a bit like a combination of “we left some material on the cutting room floor,” and “the people in the audience who care will remember the Beast Wars show and fill in the blanks.”

I kind of feel like if there was any actual weak link here, it was the bad guys. Scourge has a really cool design, but in terms of his character, he’s kind of a generic, flat, doom-bringing bad guy, with anything Peter Dinklage could have brought to him getting lost between his thin writing, and that aforementioned metallic drone his voice was processed with. Nightbird and Battletrap are similar, there’s not much to them aside from being cruel, sneering 80’s cartoon villains. Then again, this is Transformers, one of the primo places to be that, and they did, again, get to have an impressive amount of banter. Oh, and while Unicron is presented well, he’s more of an abstract threat than a character, though there were some genuinely thrilling visuals with him.

Finally, the human cast, which is surprisingly thin on the ground, and might be the smallest it’s been in a live-action Transformers film. Now, I’ve never lived in New York, I was about 5 or 6 when this movie was set, and I am extremely, extremely white, so I can’t comment on authenticity, but I will say, the human characters, the world they inhabit, it all feels very authentic, and textured. Anthony Ramos’s Noah is instantly likable, and you feel for his struggle, and his relationship with his family has that same good energy and emotional authenticity as the Bumblebee movie. Plus, on a practical level, Noah being ex-military means he’s more believable as a Man of Action than either Shia or Markey Mark were.

Elena, meanwhile, gets to directly combat the Problems with Women that the Bay films had by being the brains of the operation, as the Ancient Ruins Knower, on top of, again, generally feeling real. As an example, there’s this great scene where the two leads discuss what parts of New York they’re from, and locations they both know, and it feels more human than even the Bumblebee movie’s cast did.

But the most important thing about this movie was how I felt during and after the finale: Happy. Hell, the theater clapped several times in this, including the end. I don’t remember that happening in any other Transformers movie I’ve seen in the theaters, and that’s a really good sign. The Bay movies always left me feeling tired, head-achy, and drained. This one didn’t, it made me feel *good.* If they imported anything from Bumblebee, it was that sense of upbeat optimism, and I’m happy to see it here. And that’s what I want to really emphasize here: This movie made me feel good, both as a general viewer, and especially as a Transformers fan, and that’s the most important part of it.

And speaking of general viewers, my group had a couple casual non-fans in it, who loved it, which I’d almost say is more important than what I think. Which is great, because my biggest worry going forward is that this is too little, too late, and won’t have much appeal outside of the Transformers sphere. It’s a Bay Plot done well, but I don’t know if a general audience wants to see that these days, and I also don’t know if “this is an actual good one” is enough of a hook, especially when several Bay movies have tried to market themselves as that in the past (remember when The Last Knight was marketed with “we have a writer’s room now?”). Speaking of The Last Knight, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say this, but Rise of the Beasts resisted the siren-song of too much Franchise Building (there’s a liiiitle bit of that at the end though), and made itself fairly self-contained, so if it were to flop and end here (which I hope it doesn’t), we’re not leaving things hanging, like The Last Knight did.

So, if for some reason you haven’t watched this yet, definitely do so. Fan, non-fan, casual fan, it’s a surprisingly good time. Me, I’m busier than I was five years ago (when I’m pretty sure I saw Bumblebee three times in theaters), but I’m going to see if I can sneak in a second trip to the theater for this one before it goes to home video.

Rattrap should have been in this, though.

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