It was time to start over. Well, in the era of IP, sorta start over. For Transformers, like professional sports, that means 2 things. Fire the coach (Michael Bay in this case, replaced by Steven Caple Jr.) and get back to basics, like drafting well and leaning on your stars. Bumblebee was probably the best overall film, but Rise of the Beasts is the best one in the canon since the 2007 OG because the franchise rebooted and introduced Beast modes. Robot apes and Falcons? Yes please!
After a mini prequel explaining who the Maximals (beast mode transformers) are, we end up on Earth in 1994. It’s tough times for Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos). Optimus is stuck on Earth with no way home, and Noah’s shaky military history has made getting a real job near impossible. This forces him into a life of crime to help his brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez) and mom Breanna (Luna Lauren Velez) pay for Kris’s medical bills. One fateful night, Noah tries to steal a beautiful silver blue Porsche, which turns out to be the Transformer Mirage (Pete Davidson). Mirage is responding to a beacon left by an artifact being studied at the New York museum by intern Elena (Dominique Fishback). But if an Autobot like Mirage can detect this artifact, you know some Decepticons or Terrorcons like planet sized Unicron (Colman Domingo) and his main lieutenant Scourge (Peter Dinklage) are probably nearby as well.
Mediocre is better than icky. Like in Age of Extinction, which had a 5ish minute backstory explaining why it was ok for a 22 year old to date a 17 year old. EW! Those Michael Bay backstories are gone in Rise of the Beasts, replaced instead with the much better Anthony Ramos and Dominque Fishback. Those two give the movie more charisma and energy and make the best out of their lazily fleshed out backstories. Beasts takes a page out of the Fast and Furious playbook: it comes back to family and being there for each other, even when you make mistakes. Noah, Optimus Prime, and the silly named Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) all share regret at the hurt they’ve caused their friends at not being able to rise to the occasion, and use that hurt to hopefully not mess up again. Not Earth shattering storytelling here, but at least understandable to a mass audience, and an easy way to relate humans to the transformers.
But the key as always are the fight sequences in Transformers movies. Caple Jr. finds a couple new wrinkles into the battles: there’s a couple almost horror sequences in the dark corridors of museums and old burial sites where he was clearly going for something like the Raptor sequence in the first Jurassic Park. Ok, Rise of the Beasts wasn’t going to execute as well as a Spielberg movie, but it’s trying something new which made this Transformers movie a bit more fun. And the final act finds ways to not just have CGI robot battle CGI robot (ok, there’s a LOT of that still). Anthony Ramos really gets to participate in the fighting in fun ways, and even Dominique Fishback gets a moment or two as well. The direction can get a like too shaky at times and the prequel nature sucks the stakes from a couple potential character deaths, but at least Beasts is winking a little more than the deadly serious Bay films, remembering these are movies for kids.
We’ll see how many more of these prequel Transformer movies we can get before I will eventually get tired of them. Rise of the Beasts was a nice little palate cleanser though, changing it up enough to be familiar and a tad new, perfect rebooting language. At least Anthony Ramos will get a 2nd shot at stardom: the dude has it, and he’ll make anything he’s in a little better.