'Transformers: Rise of the Beasts' Is Reason Enough to Return to the Franchise

By TK Burton | Film | June 10, 2023 |

By TK Burton | Film | June 10, 2023 |

In 2017, Michael Bay directed his fifth entry into the Transformers franchise, entitled Transformers: The Last Knight. That film involved King Arthur and his knights, Merlin (played by Stanley Tucci), Ken Watanabe as a samurai Autobot, John Goodman as an Autobot who inexplicably smoked a cigar, Anthony Hopkins looking utterly baffled as to how he got there, and robot dinosaurs. It was arguably the worst entry in the franchise, a deafening, seizure-inducing nightmare that most people thought would sound the death knell for the franchise, a much-needed bullet to the head of a horse with four broken legs.

Somehow, Hollywood surprised us, though. Taking the reins from Bay (mercifully), the franchise was reborn a year later — sort of — with Bumblebee, directed by Travis Knight, a man who had cut his teeth with a series of outstanding animated films such as Kubo and the Two Strings and The Boxtrolls. That film was a completely different style of storytelling — it was heartfelt and sweet and funny, and lacking in awful racial stereotypes and people screaming and sweating while explosions substituted for storytelling. Bumblebee was good, and brought hope back to fans of these weird, shapeshifting robot aliens.

The trend continues with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, this time directed by Steven Caple, Jr. (Creed II). Once again, the film isn’t a direct sequel as much as it’s simply a continuation, another adventure wherein the Transformers, stranded on earth, ally themselves with a small (and this is critical) group of humans in an effort to save the world/galaxy, etc. The story itself is slightly boilerplate Transformers fare that sounds somehow both ridiculous and generic — a massive planet-eating being known as Unicron seeks the mysterious Transwarp Key which will open portals through which he can travel the universe and destroy everything in his path. He has a set of evil robot minions called Terrorcons, led by the nefarious Scourge (Peter Dinklage), who have been scouring the universe to find the Key. They eventually discover it on Earth, where Optimus Prime (the inimitable Peter Cullen, who has voiced Prime for almost 40 years) and his cohorts Bumblebee (still mute and using random collections of recorded voices to communicate), Mirage (Pete Davidson, in a surprisingly effective turn), and Arcee (a motorcycle transformer voiced by Liza Koshy) seek to use the key to return to their home planet, Cybertron. Prime and his gang form an uneasy alliance with two humans - Noah (Anthony Ramos), a down-on-his-luck electronics whiz, and Elena (Dominique Fishback) along the way, and also encounter another race of Transformers known as Maximals, robots who transform into giant animals, led by giant gorilla Optimus Primal (natch), voiced by Ron Perlman, and his lieutenant Airazor, a giant falcon (voiced by Michelle Yeoh).

That’s a lot to take in, and it sounds utterly and unquestionably silly. It is, too, but that’s the hump you’ll have to get over, mostly by remembering that this is a movie about robot aliens that is based on a 1980s cartoon series that itself is literally based on a line of toys. If you can get past that? Rise of the Beasts is fun. It’s not as enjoyable as the quieter, lower stakes Bumblebee, which was more of a buddy flick than anything else, but it’s still got a lot of heart and a story that’s far more coherent than anything Bay ever devised. Sure, that’s damning with faint praise to a certain degree, but again — robots based on toys and cartoons.

I don’t want to belittle the film by using that bit of history too much though. Caple has crafted an energetic and charming adventure film, devoid of the cheap laughs that Bay glorified and instead going for genuinely funny jokes that aren’t at anyone’s expense, with a likable, capable cast that feels like real people, not just stock characters with no personality. Ramos and Fishback both arrive with sophisticated dramatic acumens (him from Hamilton and In The Heights, her from Swarm and Judas and the Black Messiah, just to name a couple examples for each), and they don’t waste their time playing themselves as stereotypes, instead feeling like real people with real dreams and fears and feelings. The action is chaotic and wild, but also not the incomprehensible mess that it often was in the previous films. Instead, the action often actually serves the story as the film travels the world and uses actual cultural touchstones to explain some of its daffy plot points.

Yes, it drags in parts, and yes, you will sometimes tire of Prime and Primal’s solemn intonations about trust and believing in yourself and helping your friends. It’s laid on far thicker than it needs to be, and the constant noble proclamations get boring. Sometimes — particularly in the film’s somewhat excessive final battle — you sort of forget what is supposed to be happening and it takes a couple of minutes to recover and remember why they’re even there. But it works enough, I suppose, to give fans of the genre a reason to return, and a reason to rewatch it, something that can’t be said about its forbearers. Perhaps most importantly, I saw it with my eleven-year-old son and he loved it, and the films emotional beats hit him hard. For a film about giant alien robots befriending humans, I suppose that’s what we should be looking for in the first place.