Review: "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" is technically a movie, but not much else

It ain't no Bumblebee

I wanted to see the new Transformers movie, Rise of the Beasts, because 2018’s Bumblebee was such a thoroughly pleasant surprise after years of Michael Bay-fueled disappointments, and hope springs eternal. If I’d known Pete Davidson voiced the main robot this time around, I probably would have stayed at home.

I kid, I kid – Pete Davidson is fine here, much less insufferable than I generally find him when he’s actually on screen, and basically the least of Rise of the Beasts’ problems. This movie is no Bumblebee, and while it maintains some of the course corrections that film offered over the Michael Bay approach – a smaller, more focused, and more sympathetic human cast, more focus on the Transformers themselves, a clearer and less headache-inducing depiction of action – director Steven Caple Jr. doesn’t have the command of staging and visual effects that Travis Knight, an animator by trade, brought to Bumblebee, and the small army of writers credited on the screenplay lack the personality and heart ace screenwriter Christina Hodson brought to that film. This one is almost a top to bottom dud – never good enough to inspire any enthusiasm, but also never bad or misguided enough to at least be interesting.

The thing is, there’s a lot that’s theoretically good here: The dynamic between new protagonist Noah and his sick little brother is theoretically sweet and heartwarming, but too surface-level and paint-by-numbers to ever connect; Anthony Ramos is theoretically a great leading man for this kind of movie, given what a deep well of charisma he can be, but he’s too stranded amidst awkward effects sequences and bad cookie-cutter dialogue to ever really stretch his legs; the Maximals (the beast robots of the title) are a theoretically cool set of new Transformer characters with interesting lore, and I know the Beast Wars stuff is pretty revered among fans of the broader Transformers univerrse, but they enter the movie too late to make a real impression, and the lore they bring along is just barely scratched at, mostly feeling like another generic “chase the glowing doodad” blockbuster. In the end, this is a film full of parts that could make something special – there’s nothing objectionable or ill-considered here – but nothing ever adds up, and it’s all so bland I could feel myself forgetting the movie while watching.

Where Bumblebee was a very welcome outlier for the series in both quality and scale – it’s a much smaller, simpler personal story, basically E.T. but with, well, Bumblebee – Rise of the Beasts attempts to go back to the universe-in-peril largesse of the Michael Bay movies, with many more transformers, lots more action, and much higher stakes. And I guess it is ‘better’ than the Bay films – which are deeply objectionable and ill-considered, filled as they are with racism, homophobia, and deeply toxic displays of violent, petty, aggrieved masculinity – but those films at least had a pulse, and were capable of memorable moments or images at times. In the sheer scale of chaos Bay embraced, he could sometimes pull off something great, like the Optimus/Megatron fight in the forest in Revenge of the Fallen, or the insane destruction of the Chicago climax in Dark of the Moon, both action sequences I distinctly remember many years later despite never having revisited the films after theaters. Rise of the Beasts has none of the Michael Bay lows – and that is, to be clear, very commendable – but it also has none of the relative highs. There are a few little action beats that work, but never in a super-inspired way, and it says a lot that the best moment of the entire movie – the only one that really made me crack a smile – was centered on Bumblebee, the only transformer character these movies have ever had a particularly distinct and endearing take on. That he was also the center of the only movie that really worked isn’t a surprise.

I was prepared to write a paragraph here about how the special effects are a disappointment this time around, the whole movie looking markedly cheaper than past entries, and that this was probably a result of trying to cram a Michael Bay level of Transformers action into a movie with a smaller budget like Bumblebee (which cost around half the Bay movies). Then I looked up the actual budget of Rise of the Beasts, which is somehow in the vicinity of $200 million – equal to the first four Bay films – and am convinced Rise of the Beasts is some kind of elaborate money laundering scheme, because this is absolutely one of the cheapest-looking blockbusters to bear a price tag this big this side of…well, every recent Marvel movie (which are probably also money laundering schemes). There are attempts at actual location work here, which I appreciate, but it’s all so flat and televisual, and the Transformers themselves only look okay this time around. They still have the complex, intricate designs of the Michael Bay films, but the animation is a few notches less sophisticated; they don’t look as convincingly integrated into their surroundings, and there’s a general lack of weight or impact to their movements. It’s not awful – all jokes aside, this is better CGI than Marvel’s delivered in a long time – but given that is usually a highlight of the series even at its worst, it’s a noticeable step down.

The voice work is also disappointing. Peter Cullen is as good as ever as Optimus, and as he gets older I find it amusing how much he sounds like one-time Transformers guest star Leonard Nimoy, but everyone else is so flatly directed, with their voices overly manipulated by the ‘mechanical’ voice filters, that it’s near impossible to distinguish between, say, Ron Perlman and Peter Dinklage, both voicing major characters here an both largely wasted. The women fare slightly better – I like Michelle Yeoh as a big cool eagle Transformer – but overall, the Transformer characters just don’t pop this time around, visually or vocally.

I also cannot for the life of me understand why they have chosen to go the late-period X-Men route and continue doing Transformers movies as prequels to the Michael Bay films; this one is set in 1994, and makes close to zero interesting use of that setting, and like the post-First Class X-Men films, trying to stitch the continuity of this together with the original 2007 Bay film is just headache-inducing. (They also make a Marky Mark joke early on, even though Mark Wahlberg played the lead in the last two Michael Bay films, leading to the terrifying possibility that the Transformers universe has two Mark Wahlbergs running around, one a criminal-turned-rapper-turned-actor and the other a transformer-befriending hothead).

What we really need from the Transformers movies at this point is a fresh start – hopefully ditching the live-action component altogether and taking some cues from the Spider-Verse films, because an animated Transformers movie with an adventurous visual style could be something special (and given the success of the Spider-Verse films, it would also presumably be much more profitable than the sure-to-bomb Rise of the Beasts). For now, this one falls flat – after I finish typing these words, I doubt I will ever think about it again, and probably only bothered banging out a review to make my $9 ticket feel worth the investment.

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