Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
“Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” isn't quite as good as “Bumblebee”, but it's still a significant step in the right direction away from the Michael Bay films which I can only properly describe as a “mess”.
The Transformers live action universe has been a source of much anguish for me, as I am a colossal Transformers fan. So getting movie after movie where you can't even see what's going on, mixed with some of the worst written human characters in the history of film...it was a dark time to be a Transformers fan. But with the soft reboot of “Bumblebee”, suddenly it looked like they would light our darkest hour. A human character that actually mattered, a more condensed but better handled cast of Transformers, a better story. “Bumblebee” hit all the marks. ROB tries to follow suit and it somewhat succeeds.
The main character of “Rise of the Beasts” is a human (played excellently by the underrated Anthony Ramos) that largely has an original take for the film, but some definite elements are stripped straight from the series “Transformers: Cybertron”. They need to keep trending in this direction with having good human characters that are well written and interesting first and foremost. Unless the movie is going to only feature Transformers, the humans have to do the heavy lifting when it comes to story and acting. And that being said, even though Ramos does an awesome job in the lead role, he's accompanied by a pseudo-love interest in Dominique Fishback who does a fine acting job, but is worthlessly written. Her character is given meaning in a total throwaway capactiy and she never really develops. It sucks because it's like they spent so much time making Ramos' “Noah Diaz” into an exciting, fun character, that when they came to Fishback the role totally feels wedged in and weak to me.
But now the important part – The Transformers. They look great, the designs are the best they've ever been in live action form. This film introduced Unicron (the big bad of the Transformers universe), and I was really split when I heard they were going this route so early into their reboot. But I'm thrilled to say they handled Unicron amazingly. Visually I couldn't imagine a better live action Unicron, they really knocked it out of the park in that department.
Unicron's “man on the ground” so to speak is Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage), and it's a nice decision to switch up the mythos and continue to give the audience a break from Megatron as the villain (in the original, Megatron is near death and revived and reformatted into Galvatron by Unicron. But in the process becomes a slave to Unicron's will). They do a good job of making Scourge seem like a powerful enemy, and they give him some underlings that are a nice nod to the original series (Nightbird for example is a villain in this film, but in the original series, Nightbird was Transformer created by humans to be a robot ninja, and of course she goes rogue). And there are lots of little nods to the long history of Transformers here and there, even some musical pieces from the original Transformers The Movie.
When it comes to the good guys we have a more common problem that we see in these superhero type movies with huge casts. It's hard to give everyone proper screen time. And that's probably the biggest issue I have with this movie. For a movie called “Rise of Beasts” there is a shockingly small amount of beasts in it. Aside from Optimus Primal and AirRazor, we see almost nothing of the rest of the Maximals (the newly introduced characters for this film). Rhinox doesn't speak a single line as far as I remember, and Cheetor only speaks one line. Their designs are pretty cool, but there just simply isn't enough of them, especially given the premise of the movie. Even Primal doesn't get much time as a robot, and mostly lumbers around in his giant ape mode.
The Transformer we get the most of is Mirage (voiced by Pete Davidson). He kind of takes over the seat Bumblebee had in the previous film. And thankfully Mirage has a ton of character, is funny, and gets to showcase some of the famous character powers from the animated series (like making light clones). It's a good move to showcase Mirage, but it almost would have been better to just focus on him and not feature the Maximals at all. As someone who grew up on Beast Wars (in tandem with VHS reruns of the original series) I really wanted the live action debut of the Maximals to be done well. And they look cool, they're just not nearly showcased enough.
The final battle of the film is thankfully a high point. The action looks great and you can actually tell what you're looking at (take that, Michael Bay). The stakes are high, and we get some really cool fight scenes with Mirage and Optimus Prime. So on the action front the film mostly delivers.
While “Rise of the Beasts” isn't quite a homerun, it's pushing the franchise in the right direction. With good looking action, continually improved human characters and newly showcased Transformers, it's still a good time. I just wish we got 85% more beasts.
7.5/10
