Monkey vs. Robot
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a little bit sloppy and narratively cluttered, it has unexceptional visuals, I didn't buy either of its lead characters as written and only one of them as performed, and its modestly diverting action setpieces are hindered by how weightless the wall-to-wall CGI bringing them to life is. It is for all these reasons probably the best film with the word Transformers in its title since 1986's The Transformers: The Movie. This is the benefit of existing in a franchise that has managed to produce both 2009's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and 2017's Transformers: The Last Knight: the standard for success is inordinately attainable. Put it another way: Steven Caple, Jr, born in 1988, is the first person to direct a Transformers movie who actually had an age in the single digits during the lifespan of the toy series the movies are based upon, and so at least theoretically might have played with them in his own childhood. So we can suppose that he "gets" playing with Transformers. And Rise of the Beasts routinely feels like it exists at the level of narrative sophistication of children idly mashing their toys together whilst making "pow, screech, aiieeeeeee" noises, which is sincerely better than any of the earlier movies were able to achieve. It is hard to imagine a big-budget film in the whole of 2023 with a lower bar to clear than that, but at least Rise of the Beasts does so without any effort.
The film is sort-of-a-prequel to the five Transformers films directed by Michael Bay between 2007 and 2017, and sort-of-a-sequel to the 2018 Bumblebee, which remains the franchise's solitary "actually good" movie: other than mentioning the 2018 film in a single line of dialogue vague enough that you might not even notice it was there, the film is mostly content to simply not reference any of the others, and as far as I can recall, to avoid doing anything that specifically contradicts them. Which is, in truth, the mode of franchise-extending that I find the most comforting. It's set in the 1990s for absolutely no discernible reason other than that the 1990s are when the Beast Wars sub-series of Transformers toys and cartoons first hit the market, and Rise of the Beasts is an adaptation of that particular branch of the franchise.* Also I imagine it made things cleaner for the five-man writing team if they didn't have to worry about callbacks to the first five movies. Anyway, here in the 1990s - 1994, as the film splashes up in big, proud text, and I definitely don't know why it has to be 1994, especially since there are multiple songs featured in the film released later than that - we meet our humans: Noah (Anthony Ramos), a dirt-poor Brooklynite attempting to support his mother and sick brother by any means necessary, and this may involve stealing a Porsche at the behest of his Obviously Bad News friend, and the Porsche may in fact be a transforming space robot; and Elena (Dominique Fishback), an archaeology intern at a history museum who is alone in realising that the odd new artifact the museum is trying to catalogue cannot be from any known civilisation. At least, not one known... on this Earth. And as is usually true for these movies, both of our humans are mostly there so the camera has something to point at in the shots that they couldn't afford to fill with fussily overdesigned CGI giant robots. But I'll also say that Ramos is pretty comfortably the best male lead that the series has enjoyed thus far. Which is only a slightly higher bar than "be more fun and legible than the Michael Bay films", given that his competition is the openly-hostile Shia LeBeouf and the sleepwalking, confused Mark Wahlberg, but still, Ramos channels a certain earnest naïveté that makes Noah an appropriate vehicle for us to receive complicated cosmic world-building exposition, and then to respond to that exposition with "but don't worry about it, just have a good time". It also helps his performance that Fishback is wildly overplaying things (presumably to compensate for feeling lost in all the green screen and tennis balls on sticks), so it's easy to come across as relatively grounded and humane when you're literally the only ground-level human across the film's entire 127-minute running time.
Which reminds me: 127-minute running time! Another reason to rank this above the lumbering behemoths of the Bay movies.
Anyway, Noah and Elena are just pretexts for the actual movie, which begins hundreds of years ago on a distant planet when the Maximals - robots who transform into Earth megafauna - come under attack by the Terrorcons, whose thing isn't really explained; they're bad guys that turn into cars, which is why I guess they're different than the Autobots (good guys who turn into cars) or the Decepticons (bad guys who turn into aircraft, and who are not featured in this film). The Terrorcons themselves are merely the footsoldiers of Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo), a planet-sized robot that devours other planets, and whose most important cinematic legacy is that Orson Welles's very last job was voicing him for the 1986 movie. The Maximals are the guardians of the Transwarp Key, which allows its holder to warp back and forth across the universe instantaneously, and Unicron's planet-eating would be made much, much simpler if he had it, but before the Terrorcons can acquire it, the Maximal leader Apelinq (David Sobolov), a robot gorilla, is able to send the Key through a dimensional portal along with his second-in-command, Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), also a robot gorilla, and a handful of other Maximals, of whom the only one we really need to worry about is Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), a robot falcon. They end up on Earth, obviously, and Elena discovers the Key in an ancient artifact just a handful of years after a group of Autobots under the command of Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, whose presence is the only actual link this movie has to any of the others) were stranded there. So in short, the Autobots want to find the Key to go back to their lost homeworld, Cybertron, while the Terrorcons want to find it so they can bring Unicron over to eat Earth, the Maximals want nobody to have the Key, but they're willing to ally with the Autobots to make sure that Unicron doesn't get it.
As is usually the case with Transformers media, this is a staggering amount of work to get to "some giant robots pummel other giant robots, and in-between the pummeling, they transform into trucks", but I'll say this for Rise of the Beasts: it's not laborious in getting through the story material. Ramos being generally affable company helps with that; so does the generally speedy pace of everything up to the giant action-packed finale, which I did find pretty soggy and meandering, actually. For all of its moving parts, a substantial amount of the movie can be summarised as "a pretty great-looking CGI effect voiced by Peter Cullen talks to a solid-enough CGI effect voiced by Michelle Yeoh", and that's a good time, at any rate. And that points to the other strength of Rise of the Beasts relative to this series, one that I presume it learned from Bumblebee (which is better at it): this has mostly "small" action and thriller setpieces, to go along with a relatively compact cast. There are only really four Autobots we need to actually keep straight (unfortunately the one who gets the most attention after Optimus Prime is Mirage, voiced rather tediously and insincerely by the reliably bothersome Pete Davidson), two Maximals, and one bad guy (not counting Unicron, who by virtue of being a massive robot face filling the entire anamorphic widescreen frame every time we see him is pretty easy to remember across his small number of appearances). Until the last one, the action sequences are all in relatively small spaces with simple, easily graspable goals. It is wild to me, as I write this, that I am surprised and even delighted for a Transformers movie to rise up to the level of "action sequences that are actually legible because they are mostly unambitious".
But the thing is, Rise of the Beasts still isn't "good". It's "not nearly as bad as it could have been", a different category altogether. Still, it's relatively easy to feel good about it: it presents a story of large robots that transform into other things such that you can tell how their parts fit together, and there's a human being present during their loud adventures who is likable company. That makes two films in a row for which that's true, if we count Bumblebee (and we probably should); so it only took a decade a half, but we now have a baseline of unexceptional competence for the Transformers to begin producing a series of modestly enjoyable popcorn movies. Assuming it's not much too late for such a thing.
Reviews in this series
Transformers (Bay, 2007)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Bay, 2009)
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Bay, 2011)
Transformers: Age of Extinction (Bay, 2014)
Transformers: The Last Knight (Bay, 2017)
Bumblebee (Knight, 2018)
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (Caple Jr, 2023)
*I should mention that we are now at the first Transformers movie whose source material was produced after I had aged out of the series' target audience, and so I have not the slightest idea how faithful an adaptation of Beast Wars this is, or even really what Beast Wars consists of, other than "they transform into animals instead of cars now". Which struck me in 1996 and strikes me as well in 2023 as pretty lame.
The film is sort-of-a-prequel to the five Transformers films directed by Michael Bay between 2007 and 2017, and sort-of-a-sequel to the 2018 Bumblebee, which remains the franchise's solitary "actually good" movie: other than mentioning the 2018 film in a single line of dialogue vague enough that you might not even notice it was there, the film is mostly content to simply not reference any of the others, and as far as I can recall, to avoid doing anything that specifically contradicts them. Which is, in truth, the mode of franchise-extending that I find the most comforting. It's set in the 1990s for absolutely no discernible reason other than that the 1990s are when the Beast Wars sub-series of Transformers toys and cartoons first hit the market, and Rise of the Beasts is an adaptation of that particular branch of the franchise.* Also I imagine it made things cleaner for the five-man writing team if they didn't have to worry about callbacks to the first five movies. Anyway, here in the 1990s - 1994, as the film splashes up in big, proud text, and I definitely don't know why it has to be 1994, especially since there are multiple songs featured in the film released later than that - we meet our humans: Noah (Anthony Ramos), a dirt-poor Brooklynite attempting to support his mother and sick brother by any means necessary, and this may involve stealing a Porsche at the behest of his Obviously Bad News friend, and the Porsche may in fact be a transforming space robot; and Elena (Dominique Fishback), an archaeology intern at a history museum who is alone in realising that the odd new artifact the museum is trying to catalogue cannot be from any known civilisation. At least, not one known... on this Earth. And as is usually true for these movies, both of our humans are mostly there so the camera has something to point at in the shots that they couldn't afford to fill with fussily overdesigned CGI giant robots. But I'll also say that Ramos is pretty comfortably the best male lead that the series has enjoyed thus far. Which is only a slightly higher bar than "be more fun and legible than the Michael Bay films", given that his competition is the openly-hostile Shia LeBeouf and the sleepwalking, confused Mark Wahlberg, but still, Ramos channels a certain earnest naïveté that makes Noah an appropriate vehicle for us to receive complicated cosmic world-building exposition, and then to respond to that exposition with "but don't worry about it, just have a good time". It also helps his performance that Fishback is wildly overplaying things (presumably to compensate for feeling lost in all the green screen and tennis balls on sticks), so it's easy to come across as relatively grounded and humane when you're literally the only ground-level human across the film's entire 127-minute running time.
Which reminds me: 127-minute running time! Another reason to rank this above the lumbering behemoths of the Bay movies.
Anyway, Noah and Elena are just pretexts for the actual movie, which begins hundreds of years ago on a distant planet when the Maximals - robots who transform into Earth megafauna - come under attack by the Terrorcons, whose thing isn't really explained; they're bad guys that turn into cars, which is why I guess they're different than the Autobots (good guys who turn into cars) or the Decepticons (bad guys who turn into aircraft, and who are not featured in this film). The Terrorcons themselves are merely the footsoldiers of Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo), a planet-sized robot that devours other planets, and whose most important cinematic legacy is that Orson Welles's very last job was voicing him for the 1986 movie. The Maximals are the guardians of the Transwarp Key, which allows its holder to warp back and forth across the universe instantaneously, and Unicron's planet-eating would be made much, much simpler if he had it, but before the Terrorcons can acquire it, the Maximal leader Apelinq (David Sobolov), a robot gorilla, is able to send the Key through a dimensional portal along with his second-in-command, Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), also a robot gorilla, and a handful of other Maximals, of whom the only one we really need to worry about is Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), a robot falcon. They end up on Earth, obviously, and Elena discovers the Key in an ancient artifact just a handful of years after a group of Autobots under the command of Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, whose presence is the only actual link this movie has to any of the others) were stranded there. So in short, the Autobots want to find the Key to go back to their lost homeworld, Cybertron, while the Terrorcons want to find it so they can bring Unicron over to eat Earth, the Maximals want nobody to have the Key, but they're willing to ally with the Autobots to make sure that Unicron doesn't get it.
As is usually the case with Transformers media, this is a staggering amount of work to get to "some giant robots pummel other giant robots, and in-between the pummeling, they transform into trucks", but I'll say this for Rise of the Beasts: it's not laborious in getting through the story material. Ramos being generally affable company helps with that; so does the generally speedy pace of everything up to the giant action-packed finale, which I did find pretty soggy and meandering, actually. For all of its moving parts, a substantial amount of the movie can be summarised as "a pretty great-looking CGI effect voiced by Peter Cullen talks to a solid-enough CGI effect voiced by Michelle Yeoh", and that's a good time, at any rate. And that points to the other strength of Rise of the Beasts relative to this series, one that I presume it learned from Bumblebee (which is better at it): this has mostly "small" action and thriller setpieces, to go along with a relatively compact cast. There are only really four Autobots we need to actually keep straight (unfortunately the one who gets the most attention after Optimus Prime is Mirage, voiced rather tediously and insincerely by the reliably bothersome Pete Davidson), two Maximals, and one bad guy (not counting Unicron, who by virtue of being a massive robot face filling the entire anamorphic widescreen frame every time we see him is pretty easy to remember across his small number of appearances). Until the last one, the action sequences are all in relatively small spaces with simple, easily graspable goals. It is wild to me, as I write this, that I am surprised and even delighted for a Transformers movie to rise up to the level of "action sequences that are actually legible because they are mostly unambitious".
But the thing is, Rise of the Beasts still isn't "good". It's "not nearly as bad as it could have been", a different category altogether. Still, it's relatively easy to feel good about it: it presents a story of large robots that transform into other things such that you can tell how their parts fit together, and there's a human being present during their loud adventures who is likable company. That makes two films in a row for which that's true, if we count Bumblebee (and we probably should); so it only took a decade a half, but we now have a baseline of unexceptional competence for the Transformers to begin producing a series of modestly enjoyable popcorn movies. Assuming it's not much too late for such a thing.
Reviews in this series
Transformers (Bay, 2007)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Bay, 2009)
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Bay, 2011)
Transformers: Age of Extinction (Bay, 2014)
Transformers: The Last Knight (Bay, 2017)
Bumblebee (Knight, 2018)
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (Caple Jr, 2023)
*I should mention that we are now at the first Transformers movie whose source material was produced after I had aged out of the series' target audience, and so I have not the slightest idea how faithful an adaptation of Beast Wars this is, or even really what Beast Wars consists of, other than "they transform into animals instead of cars now". Which struck me in 1996 and strikes me as well in 2023 as pretty lame.
