![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Unicron, the Transformers’ “vile god” that likes to consume entire planets, wants the Transwarp key so that he can come and eat Earth. (The Transformers movies have more magic space doo-hickeys than even the Marvel movies.) Humans and good giant robots team up, and they all go to some new locale to fight. (He’s voiced by Pete Davidson, and emits a seemingly endless stream of corny jokes and tired pop cultural references, such as “You know what’s weird? Marky Mark is leaving the Funky Bunch!”) Elena, for her part, has discovered an ancient statuette that holds a part of the Transwarp key, which is a magic space doo-hickey that allows Transformers to open portals to travel through space and time. The desperate Noah agrees to help lift some cars, and winds up accidentally stealing Mirage, a mouthy Autobot Transformer posing as a Porsche. Our human heroes this time are Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos), a young veteran who keeps getting turned away from job opportunities, and Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback), an intern at an Ellis Island natural history museum. It’s just kind of there - ready to be consumed and forgotten. It’s not spectacular enough to impress us, nor intimate enough to move us. That’s not an unwise approach, but alas, the film, directed by Creed II’s Steven Caple, Jr., winds up achieving neither aim. Which brings us to Rise of the Beasts, which attempts to strike a middle ground between the smaller-scale charms of Bumblebee and the more apocalyptic canvas that a series like this probably demands. If the films don’t have size and pomposity, what good are they? These are, after all, ancient aliens made of steel and oil who transform into cars and trucks and planes and make grandiose, almost Shakespearean declarations. Bumblebee had heart, but you also found yourself missing some of that earlier Bayhem, despite how noxious it had all become by the end. So much so that 2018’s Bumblebee, directed by LAIKA animation honcho Travis Knight, felt like a necessary reset - a modest, almost sentimental little movie about a teenage girl and her car that just happened to have some fighting robots in it. (2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight was pretty much pure gibberish.). ![]() Subsequent entries earned plenty of money, but the series eventually devolved to galactic levels of convoluted idiocy. It’s a particular challenge for this desperate-to-revive-itself movie franchise, which began in 2007 as a brazenly silly Michael Bay sci-fi epic about huge fighting robots that turn into vehicles, all crashing metal and rolling bluster.įor all the advance hype, that first Transformers picture felt like an unlikely megahit at the time though based on a line of ‘80s toys from Hasbro, it took itself so seriously that you couldn’t help but admire its perverse bravado, which of course made it an ideal Michael Bay project. Maybe that’s the problem - that there’s little room left nowadays for simple, childish pleasures, and everything has to be stretched out to a feature-length spectacle that shrieks and howls and stomps for your attention. Thoroughly frivolous and yet somehow still exhausting, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts might have worked fine as a Saturday morning cartoon back in the days when Saturday morning cartoons were a thing. ![]()
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