Yes, there’s a new Transformers movie out. Honestly, I find most of them rather forgettable and bland. Michael Bay’s directorial style and the general look of the robots didn’t help much. It was really hard to tell what was happening. But then the Bumblebee movie was actually a step in the right direction, a movie that was kinda fun, at least for diehard and longtime Transformers fans. Would the new Rise of the Beasts be another step in that direction? Bay wasn’t directing this one either, and it does seem to follow in the footsteps of Bumblebee narratively at the very least.
Of course, I can’t say I was ever a Beast Wars fan.
The giant planet-eating robot planet Unicron (voice of Colman Domingo) is looking for the Transwarp Key, the sort of McGuffin that every Transformers movie has, but this one will allow Unicron to go to any place in time or space. Allowing such a thing, considered a god by Transformers, to go where he sees fit is a bad thing, and the Key is at the movie’s open on the home planet of the Maximals, giant robots that often take the form of robotic animals. Put into the hands of new leader Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), he and the others flee to Earth, leaving Unicron stranded but allowing his loyal servants, led by the empowered Terrorcon Scourge (Peter Dinklage), to continue the search, a search that eventually leads to 1990s Earth.
It’s there that museum intern Elena (Dominique Fishback) finds the Key, immediately setting off a signal visible only to Transformers. Autobot leader Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) sees this as an opportunity to allow the Autobots to return to Cybertron. The Autobots have been hiding on Earth all this time, and Prime, for one, doesn’t really trust the humans. He just wants to get home. But then Mirage (Pete Davidson) manages to pick up a wannabe car thief, Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos), and though Noah has his own goals, having a human or two along can help go places a giant robot can’t, and both Noah and Prime have reasons to find the Key, namely to protect their home planets from Unicron. Too bad Scourge and his associates are too powerful for Prime and his Autobot associates, but when a Maximal in the form of a robotic falcon named Airazor (recent Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh) arrives, that may be the key to victory: getting the humans, the Autobots, and the Maximals to work together. Otherwise, there may be no stopping Scourge from summoning his master to destroy all kinds of planets.
So, was this a good Transformers movie? I suppose. It’s rote, but at least it’s coherent. I could tell what was going on at all times. The script was kinda cliched, and yet again, the characters are searching for some all-powerful artifact to do, well, something. Still, I could more or less tell what was going on, it does at least reference Bumblebee in passing even as it is a good decade later. And unlike many of the Bay movies, this one didn’t focus so much on bland human characters with the robots just hanging in the background. The robots actually were given a prime role (no pun intended). I will say Optimus Prime came across as uncharacteristically harsh for much of this, and Mirage wasn’t as funny as the movie was hoping he would be. That said, Ramos is a charming screen presence if nothing else.
But man, two things kept distracting me. The first was Michelle Yeoh’s voice. There’s not much in a Transformers movie’s dialogue that should be taken all that seriously, and Yeoh’s career has had a lot of genre roles, but the quality of the dialogue here just made me think how far this movie was from Everything Everywhere All at Once. Likewise, there’s a moment in the movie that was just, well, bad timing given something that happened in New York City, near where I call home, just this past week. Beyond that, this is a very average movie.
Grade: C
0 Comments