TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS - Mark Reviews Movies

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 8, 2023

Is it even possible to keep up with or simply remember the mythology of these movies about giant robots from an alien world? That's one of the mildly refreshing things about Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which has very little that could be described as refreshing or original or any other word that might suggest this entry does anything different than its predecessors.

Still, this movie is something of a reset for the series, in that it takes place before the events of the previous five mainline installments (but after the surprisingly effective spin-off Bumblebee). Forget the back story of those other entries, which somehow eventually included the wizard Merlin in a move that feels even more surreal in barely-remembered retrospect, and just appreciate that the filmmakers here get to start over more or less from scratch.

It's too bad they basically give us more of the same, despite theoretically having a lot more freedom with this prequel. Here's yet another plot about a search for and chase after some technological whatsit, featuring some sequences of giant robots doing battle against various backdrops and a select number of humans who come across as even more expendable than usual in this franchise. This installment isn't so much a step forward or backward for the series as it is an act of wavering forward, only to stand firmly in place.

The setting is initially New York City in 1994, where Noah (Anthony Ramos, putting on a lot of charm that's eventually overwhelmed by all of the so-much the movie does around him), a military veteran, is struggling to find work to help his family. His younger brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez) has sickle cell disease, and with so much debt toward the kid's health care, neither Noah nor the brothers' mother (played by Luna Lauren Velez) can pay for any more treatment.

None of that really matters, though, because a desperate Noah, looking for some quick cash, decides to steal a car that just happens to be Mirage (voice of Peter Davidson), one of the Autobots stranded on Earth following a war on their home planet. Even more coincidentally, Noah gets into the transforming robot just as the group's leader Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen) calls upon them. At a local museum, archivist intern Elena (Dominique Fishback, a promising actor who's stymied by having nothing to do in this movie) has accidentally awakened half of the plot's MacGuffin: a key that could open a portal to anywhere in the universe. Prime sees it as a way for the Autobots to return to their planet.

It's also, though, a means for the planet-eating Unicron (voice of Colman Domingo), a massive robot with a metallic sphincter for a mouth, to devour every planet in the universe. The makeshift team of humans and robots has to find the key's other half in Peru, while keeping it out of the hands of Unicron's underlings, led by Scourge (voice of Peter Dinklage).

All of this is relatively simple and straightforward, which is somewhat nice after the bloat and increasingly silly nonsense of the previous five movies. That also means the screenplay (somehow requiring five writers) and director Steven Caple Jr. has little time or patience for anything that isn't exposition or action. That includes the introduction of a new group of transforming robots, fashioned after Earth animals (yet originating from a planet in a different galaxy and, oddly, having fur and feathers, too), called Maximals, and whose vocal performances include Ron Perlman, as the leader gorilla, and Michelle Yeoh, as a robotic falcon.

The action is serviceable enough, in that it's visible and generally coherent as the giant robots fight on Ellis Island, while rolling down a mountain, and across the dull gray landscape of the climax. As the sixth example of this franchise focusing so much on the empty spectacle of digital creations pummeling and blasting each other in a way a kid might with the eponymous action figures, though, it comes across as especially hollow and repetitive now.

Some of that isn't the movie's fault, of course, because there's only so much that one can do with this sort of material. Then again, we've seen this franchise attempt and succeed at doing something different with its previous, ancillary prequel. Even if this entry is more competent and streamlined than the worst of its forebears, the fact that Transformers: Rise of the Beasts falls back on the expectations, formula, and patterns of its other predecessors is a disappointment entirely of the movie's own making.

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