Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Review
Theatrical Movie Review
When Michael Bay brought the Transformers to the big screen in 2007, it felt like a monumental occasion. It wasn’t met with huge critical success, but audiences, including me, quite enjoyed seeing these iconic toys brought to the big screen. The enthusiasm cooled quickly with the subsequent films, so much that I genuinely can’t remember which ones I’ve seen and which ones I have not. They are just a blur of terrible plots and unwatchable CGI pixels constantly shifting shape. But with a new director in Steven Caple, Jr. at the helm of “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” I thought I would give them another chance.
Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is struggling to find a job to help out his mother Breanna (Luna Lauren Valez) and brother Kris (Dean Scott Vasquez). After being rejected from yet another job opportunity, he turns to theft, where he is tasked with stealing a car. Unfortunately, the car he steals is Mirage (Pete Davidson), an Autobot in disguise. Mirage takes Noah to Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) who is trying to keep a key from Unicron (Colman Domingo), a planet-eating being, and his lackey Scourge (Peter Dinklage). While they are looking for the halves of the key, they team up with Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback), and the Maximals Airazor (Michelle Yeoh) and Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman). Together, they must save the earth.
I tried so hard to like this movie. And genuinely, it does have a lot in common with the original. The animation is much less frantic than it was in movies after the first one, and the story is a bit more grounded in the human characters this time.
The voice acting is fine. Cullen knows his job as Optimus and he executes as always. The rest were certainly adequate. Nothing was distractingly bad, but nothing really had much punch, either. The human cast was also fine. I really enjoyed Fishback as Elena - she’s an actor whose career I’m really enjoying. But overall, nothing really stood out to me, which is likely more a product of the script than anything the actors did.
And there’s nothing really wrong with the script, it’s just really flat. The emotional beats feel seriously manufactured, and the action is without any stakes. There are probably ways to make a prequel movie feel like it has some kind of emotional payoff (2018’s “Bumblebee” had that), but this movie felt like it failed at creating any kind of tension. There was some humor, but little of it landed for me.
As summer blockbusters go, I have definitely seen worse movies. There is nothing offensive or awful about this movie. The performances are fine, the CGI is fine, the story is fine. If you’re a fan of the original, you will likely find this to be a fun watch. But I feel like we’ve reached the bottom of the Transformers toy chest and maybe it’s just time to go outside.
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on June 11, 2023.