The latest Transformers film is a minor upgrade

The latest Transformers film doesn’t stray far from the formula that established the live-action franchise back in 2007. While the change of setting adds a whiff of new car smell, the film ultimately retreats to familiar tropes and feels like a minor upgrade for the franchise rather than a major one.

Rise of the Beasts mostly takes place in 1994 New York and finds Noah (Anthony Ramos), struggling to find work, in part because he received unfavorable reviews after serving in the US Army. Complicating matters is his family’s inability to pay for his brother’s medical care. One night, Noah’s desperation gets the best of him and he joins his friend Reek (Tobe Nwigwe) on a job to steal a car.

While attempting to steal the car, Noah is kidnapped by Pete Davidson’s character Mirage, a wise-cracking transformer that takes the form of a Porsche. After Mirage brings his uninvited guest Noah to a meeting called by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), we are introduced to several other Transformers, including Arcee, a motorcycle transformer (Liza Koshy). We are also reunited with fan favorite Bumblebee. The plot then introduces a MacGuffin (an all powerful artifact/item that drives the plot forward) that the friendly robots must find before a planet-eating robot’s henchmen do.

Dominique Fishback joins the franchise in the role of Elena, a passionate intern at a Natural History Museum. Her role serves the plot, but the character should have been fleshed out more by showing her relationship with her family. Ultimately, I wonder if they should have scrapped the character of Elena and had Noah’s younger brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez) fill that role and tag along for the adventure.

The quest for the MacGuffin ultimately takes the gang to the historic site of Machu Pichu and the city of Cuzco in Peru where they meet the titular “beasts”, another friendly group of robots called the Maximals. Instead of taking the shape of cars, the Maximals take the form of animals such as a Gorilla and a Cheetah.

Most Transformers films involve a young protagonist who has Bumbleebee as their companion and protector. Bumblebee is undoubtedly a fan favorite, but he can only speak in snippets, due to a combat injury. The decision to instead pair Ramos with Davidson’s character Mirage, who can speak, leads to some fun back and forth between the duo. The introduction of Mirage is a great sequence and I wish more of the film had that same energy.

The villains are mostly forgettable. The primary villain is technically a colossal planet-eating robot named Unicron (Colman Domingo), but he is teased more as a talking nuclear level threat than a character. The true antagonist is his servant Scourge, played by Peter Dinklage, though I didn’t realize it until after the movie. That’s because the robot voice mixing makes it tough to make out some of the voice actors (Ron Perlman’s voice for Optimus Primal is also overly obscured). They establish Dinklage’s Scourge as a big bad, but he lacks the charm of fan favorites like Megatron or Starscream.

As a 90s kid myself, I was excited for this film because it’s based on the late 1990s TV show, Beast Wars: Transformers, which I grew up watching with my cousins on the UPN channel on TV. The Beast Wars TV show is set in the future after the Autobots and Decepticons are long gone. Instead, the Maximals and the Predacons are the heroes and villains and both descend from the original factions.

While the film introduces the Maximals, including their leader Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), few, if any, of their counterparts, the Predacons, show up. Instead, the “Terrorcons”, who work for Unicron are the only villains. I get the sense they are planning to introduce the Predacons in a future installment. Why else would you choose NOT to feature a certain robot that transforms into a T-Rex?

Perhaps a spinoff film focusing on the Beast Wars characters, supported by the original Autobot characters would have been a better approach. Instead, we get the opposite and a whole lot of table setting for future films.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the second film in the franchise not directed by Michael Bay and I think it’s for the best. While the Bay films had some sleek action scenes, they also had flimsy scripts and painfully long runtimes. The last Transformers film to hit the big screen was the spin-off, Bumblebee, in 2018. Directed by Travis Knight, it had a smaller-scale conflict and a stronger emphasis on characters. Rise of the Beasts is directed by Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II) and its tone falls somewhere between the Bay films and Bumblebee.

In addition to the change in setting, the decision to take the film’s soundtrack in a different direction – by pumping it full of 1990s hip hop – is a lot of fun.

Another thing that I liked about this movie: the runtime. Two hours and six minutes is a responsible length for this kind of film. The Michael Bay films were painfully long and you were just cringing at bad jokes until a cool action scene came on.

While there aren’t a myriad of cringey jokes in this film, it does fall victim to tired tropes, particularly in the third act when it presents us with a giant light shooting into the sky AND a horde of uninteresting robot critters. Rather than animate this blur of indistinguishable creatures, I would have rather seen fewer robots fighting, with polished choreography. On that front, I wish the creators of this film had taken more inspiration from Bumblebee than the Bay films.

I saw this film on opening weekend in IMAX at the TCL Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, which was a fun experience. Anecdotally, the theater was only about half-full, compared to a packed house when I saw The Little Mermaid there, on its opening weekend. Ultimately, Rise of the Beasts was the ninth-highest grossing film of the summer. Was that lower than expected ranking partly due to the decision to release one week after Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse? Regardless, it’s not ideal for a movie intended to kickstart a new trilogy of films.

Alexander S. Corey is a co-founder of Behemoth Comics Film Club. Some of his favorite films include Amélie and Hot Fuzz. You can follow him on Letterboxd: @whatapicture