During his tenure as chairman of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, industrialist Lee Iacocca declared the small hunk of land off the coast of New Jersey a “symbol of reality” to Lady Liberty’s “symbol of hope”. A fitting gesture, then, that Ellis Island should be obliterated as collateral damage in the first hour of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, in light of its deafening disregard for anything in the general galaxy of real.
As obligatory human Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos, looking like he’s just walked into a party and realized he doesn’t know anyone) stumbles through a cosmic clash between opposing hunks of dinged-up CGI, he briefly questions the need of alien robots to disguise themselves as Earth-faring vehicles. His perfectly valid thoughts are hand-waved away by Mirage – voiced by Pete Davidson, saying things like “yo!” – with the instruction not to worry about it. It behooves a viewer to set their suspension of disbelief at a generously accommodating looseness in dealing with a film featuring Airazor, the extraterrestrial cybernetic eagle that speaks in the voice of Michelle Yeoh. But all parties involved with the production deliver a level of effort suggesting that these Saturday morning implausibilities have been seized as cover and cause to not give a shit.
