Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Review

I recently rewatched the first Transformers movie and found myself dozing off halfway through. After the initial awe of watching cars unroll into Autobot bodies faded, I was lulled by the clangs and clicks of robot battles, by Autobot leader Optimus Prime's droning voice, and the predictable beats of the story. After 18 years and seven more Transformers films, the franchise still rigidly holds on to its aged formula: a troubled person discovers their car is an Autobot and gets pulled into a cosmic battle between good and bad over the possession of some Shiny Thing where the stakes are nothing less than the fate of the world, nay, galaxy!

With the exception of the 2018 release Bumblebee, every Transformer film has been panned by critics. While audiences never seem to tire of its staggering visuals, a "thin, indifferent script" (the Rotten Tomatoes review of Dark Of The Moon) seems to be a hallmark of a Transformer movie. Rise Of The Beasts, a Transformers prequel (like Bumblebee), for better or worse, doesn't stray far from the pack.

Rise Of The Beasts opens with an ancient battle over the Transwarp Key ("Shiny Thing"), a trophy-sized, space-time-unlocking device that enables warp-speed intergalactic travel. Unicron, a planet-eating dark force, wants to use this key to time-jump across the universe and go off on a feeding frenzy. And it spawns an army of sentient robots called Terrorcons to retrieve it from the Maximals, a group of machine-animal hybrids sworn to protect it. But the Maximals ward off the Terrorcon attack and use the key to escape to a distant blue-green planet: Earth. And there the Maximals and the key remain hidden until an unwitting museum intern activates the key's beacon and brings Terrorcons to earth.

That same night, a young, scrappy Bushwick guy named Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is hijacking a slick Porsche 911 Carrera to pay for his sick younger brother's medical costs, when the car suddenly whirrs alive. With him screaming inside, the Porsche sets off a high-octane chase down the highway before stopping in a warehouse and unrolling itself. Petrified, Noah stumbles out and finds himself in the presence of the Autobots: Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Arcee, and Noah's new Porsche friend, Mirage, a humourous, smooth-talking Autobot (voiced by Pete Davidson). With the help of Noah and the museum intern Elena (Dominique Fishback), the Autobots and Maximals take on the Terrorcons.

If you find the premise a patchwork of previous Transformer films, you are not entirely wrong. Beacon-activation-lures-bad-guys-to-Earth is a story beat we've seen in Bumblebee too. Equally recognizable is the main plotline involving an ordinary youngin (Charlie in Bumblebee, Sam in Transformers, and now Noah) being inexorably drawn into cosmic Autobot conflicts, ultimately proving themselves remarkably valuable, even indispensable, to the Autobots' triumph. And as thanks, the Autobots offer a condescending remark or two about how there is "more to humans than meets the eye", and that "they are worth fighting for".

Rise... also explores the theme of the human-robot friendship that we saw in Bumblebee, although with far less impact. Something about the accelerated pace at which the emotional bond between Noah and Mirage builds, and the speed with which a skeptical dude like Noah accepts an Autobot as a "bro", feels spurious.

Noah's arc from a neighborhood kid to the saviour of the world, to say nothing of Elena's paper-thin character, is similarly flimsy. First, Noah is just trying to make some money, but once he learns that the fate of the world may be at stake, he thinks that he might as well help save it. Yet not once do the Autobots make use of his talents as a mechanical engineer. Instead, there is a disappointingly recurring sub-plot where Elena and Noah (on three separate missions) are tasked with retrieving this or that object from secret locations, essentially functioning as "human moles", and used by the Autobots only for their inconspicuous size.

Even though the story drones on, Rise... is still enjoyable in bits and pieces, thanks to the protagonist Anthony Ramos who breathes character and nuance into the thinly-written role. Pete Davidson brings a crackling, if slightly annoying, humour to Mirage. Dominique Fishback plays Elena, the nervy archeologist, with a certain juvenile energy that makes all the Diaz-Elena scenes oddly confusing: are they supposed to be like siblings or lovers?

For a movie named Rise Of The Beasts, the beasts aka the Maximals, a group led by a thundering ape-form robot called Optimus Primal (named after Optimus Prime), get especially short shrift. But the few times that we see them bellowing into action, it is thrilling to behold.

So once again, like its predecessors, Rise... rests its on its slick, breath-taking CGI to propel it to commercial success. For instance, this one chase scene in which Mirage dodges a squad of police cars is so gleeful, I nearly clapped my hands like a toddler in a toy shop. But midway through, as the Transformer Formula of "minimal story, maximal (no pun) graphics" kicked in (and I watched a late-night show), I found myself drifting perilously close to sleep.