Transformers: Rise of the Beasts review: new director, same mess

When it comes to quality, TransformersIt has the lowest average batting of any movie franchise in modern times, a record maintained 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 — helmed by Creed II’s Steven Caple Jr. — similarly defies comprehensibility, albeit for slightly different reasons. In some ways, the shots are more carefully composed. But they’re all strung together with the barest visual and narrative connective tissue, resulting in a baffling film that feels strange not only for a modern blockbuster, but for a TransformersYou can also watch movies.

This seventh chapter in the extensive saga is based on the Beast Wars series of comics and games. It also includes toys and TV programs. Before their planet is destroyed, an ape, a cheetah, and a falcon Transformer manage to steal the latest in a series of plot-driving artifacts related to the Transformers’ home world of Cybertron.

This time, it’s called the “Trans Warp Key,” though its function is similar to that of at least two previous series McGuffins: It opens up a giant portal in the sky. Before the story begins, we are already familiar with this presumed franchise relaunch.

It’s a tale as old as time: A human character stumbles upon a group of Transformers that includes Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and Bumblebee (voiceless yet again), and gets roped into their battle with an evil faction, which inevitably involves a race for a piece of Transformers tech that has the power to destroy the world.

Paramount Pictures

It’s 1994. This is indicated by the numerous references to Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog as well as other video games from that era. There is also a clip featuring O.J. Simpson’s murder trial in progress. Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang and Notorious B.I.G. have contributed some hip-hop hits to the soundtrack. The soundtrack also features Wu-Tang Clan and Notorious B.I.G. If there’s one thing the film gets mostly right while setting the stage, it’s the aural introduction to mid-’90s Brooklyn, even though a couple of these tracks are mildly anachronistic, appearing a few years before their real-world release.

Still, the film’s soundtrack is in the right ballpark, which makes 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). The characters are believable, and their working class plight, as well as their banter with each other, is believable. However, the surrounding world does not feel like it was set in a time that happened nearly 30 years earlier. (I’m sorry, I feel it too.)

The costumes and production design are bland, uninspired, and contemporary enough that the film feels accidentally timeless, though the purpose behind setting it in the ’90s appears to be logistical. In franchise terms, Rise of the Beasts is a sequel to 2018’s Bumblebee,This movie, which takes place in 1987 and was directed by Travis Knight as the only one in this series that could be read visually.

This entry continues the bizarre continuity of their Autobots, which still have their Bay-inspired designs. We must, once more, accept a world where Harriet Tubman and transforming cars never worked together. But Bumblebee may as well not exist in this continuity either, since the Transformers are all back to square one at the top of this story, hiding in plain sight as usual, until they’re discovered for both the first and somehow seventh time.

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 for his brother’s medical bills. Mirage, unlike most of the Bay-formers, has the advantage of a recognizably human face, à la the Transformers cartoons, but he has the disadvantage of being voiced by Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson, who’s cast primarily for his proclivity for detached snark. He also says a phrase that is eerily similar to Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker’s infamous “They fly now?!” (Even though there have been flying Transformers since the franchise’s first iteration back in the 1980s.) Mirage’s banter lands about 10% of the time, and is excruciatingly juvenile for the other 90.

There’s also a subplot about museum intern Elena Wallace (Judas and Black Messiah’s Dominique Fishback, who deserves better) discovering half of the Trans Warp Key and beginning to follow a trail of archaeological breadcrumbs to find the other half. But her investigation amounts to little: She doesn’t discover its location herself, since the arriving Transformers drop in on her armed with all the knowledge she lacks, and whisk her off to its location in Peru.

And so, with its human pieces all in play — the human scenes aren’t really the problem here — Rise of the Beasts engages in the first of its many battles over a technological somethingorother, in which the Autobots leap and attack Unicron’s acolytes, who look distinctly Decepticon-esque: gray and unremarkable, like the series’ previous villains.

This movie’s fundamental flaw is revealed in its first big action scene set at midnight. Where the Bay films at least — oh God, yes, I’m about to hold them up as a positive example — spewed controlled chaos across the frame, with background and foreground elements hinting at a sense of enormity that’s hard to visually latch on to, Rise of the Beasts Bay could never hide the visual simplicity that exposes its lack of artistry and imagination.

Paramount Pictures

The camera is at an unobtrusive, safe distance. This allows punches to land with little impact. There’s little weight to the CGI of these supposedly clunking machines, and successive shots are seldom related to each other in any meaningful way. It’s all a mess. It’s as if the screen and its geography are changing at random. This makes it feel even more chaotic than Bay.

Even in the midst of his visual chaos, Bay never forgot to maintain a sense scale. This was true for both human eyes as well as contrasting Transformers with human-scaled objects. It’s scraping the bottom of the barrel to praise Bay for that specifically, but Rise of the BeastsIt is a struggle to keep up. Transformers’ relative sizes (to humans and one another) seem to shift dramatically from shot-to-shot. It is hard to keep up with the action when the characters appear at different depths. “giant Dom, tiny Hobbs” (and vice versa)The confusion created by the dialogue in that scene is a good example. Fast & Furious 6. You can get a good idea of what a movie would feel like if you imagine it. Rise of the Beasts.

What about the Maximals? Unfortunately, they don’t feature in this film nearly as much as Optimus, Bumblebee, and the familiar Autobot crew. At least they have more to do than the Dinobots in Transformers Age of Extinction, and they’re also involved in what might be the series’ only actual moral dilemma 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 Maximals’ apelike leader, Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), has the advantage of a face that can actually emote, resulting in a handful of scenes that border on emotionally engaging, even though his comrades — like the avian Airazor, voiced by a bored-sounding Michelle Yeoh — have no such luxury, and have little function or personality beyond delivering plot information.

Paramount Pictures

If there’s one novel action beat in Rise of the Beasts, it’s the way the screenplay (credited to a five-person writing team, including Obi-Wan KenobiJoby (the showrunner) comes up with a clever way of involving humans in Transformer battles, as active participants rather than spectators or victims. Although the scenes featured are boring as dust and totally disconnected, they still manage to be entertaining.

The final battle is mimicked by the climactic scene in Avengers: Endgame. But rather than putting in the legwork to make audiences care about the characters, the film only apes the aspects of Marvel’s shared-universe climax that don’t work in isolation: the nondescript, wide-open setting, and the anonymous legion of faceless enemies that might as well be a sea of metallic goop. Bay was at the helm of the live-action Transformers movie, which has always been a difficult film to look at. But with Bay, the movies felt more like the work of someone who is allowed to be a lunatic with their camera budget and special effects. (He’s made plenty of good films outside the Transformers sandbox.)

Instead, this time around, the experiment appears to be a studio testing the limits of what technically qualifies as a Transformers film — or a film in general. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is haplessly cobbled together from CGI elements that appear to have been created by different departments who weren’t allowed to communicate. There’s even a handful of shots in which Airazor is so poorly rendered that she appears almost two-dimensional, as if the crunch likely foisted on the film’s helpless VFX crews were manifesting as an artistic cry for help.

Alien robot cars and their space battles are concepts with such basic, gee-whiz sci-fi appeal that they’ve worked numerous times across decades of comics and cartoons. And yet there’s little childlike wonder to the Transformers live-action movies, which often stuff their frames with visually oppressive, eyesore conceptions of things that ought to be simple and imaginative. Most of the Transformers movies feel like they’re trying to defeat their audience, but this time, the movie wins.

Transformers Rise of the BeastsOpening in theatres June 9,