For a while now, the Transformers franchise has been impenetrable to the point that watching it makes me temporarily question whether I understand or speak English. In the latest entry, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen), head of the Autobots, is in search of something called a “transwarp key”, a vital piece of technology which, in the wrong hands, would allow a planet-gobbling robot Unicron (Colman Domingo) to set his sights on earth.
Among his special abilities, Unicron can possess other robots, including his chief henchman Scourge (Peter Dinklage). Thankfully, Optimus Prime and co find helpful allies in the Maximals, who are also robots, but specifically robots who transform into mecha-versions of various animals. One of these, a very big falcon, is voiced by Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh.
There’s no reason why a franchise based on a children’s toy can’t indulge in a little Herculean worldbuilding (if Greta Gerwig wants to introduce some millennia-old mythology into her forthcoming Barbie film, I’m open to the idea). But the persistent issue with the Transformers saga, whether under Michael Bay’s vision or not, is that it treats all plot and backstory like mandatory history homework viewers must complete before they’re allowed to watch robots punch each other in the head. There’s not a morsel of joy to be found here.
What director Steven Caple Jr, and his five credited screenwriters, do improve upon – at least – is the treatment of the film’s obligatory human characters. Rise of the Beasts, a prequel to the first Transformers outing (starring Megan Fox and Shia LaBeouf) and sequel to its spin-off Bumblebee, is set in 1994. The film introduces Brooklyn veteran Noah (Anthony Ramos) and archaeological researcher Elena (Dominique Fishback, most recently seen in Donald Glover’s Swarm) as its leads. The latter is supposedly paid a full wage just to point out to museum officials that their copy of Vincent Van Gogh’s “A Wheatfield, with Cypresses” is probably a fake considering the real one is, quite notably, housed in The National Gallery in London.
Absurdly, the film attempts to align Noah and Elena’s struggles with racism and economic inequality to those faced by the Autobots, the scrappy, little interplanetary underdogs. Obviously, it doesn’t work, but Ramos and Fishback are talented enough actors that they are able to perforate the chaos with some genuine emotion. Rise of the Beasts is most promising in its opening scenes, which include a well-constructed chase in which Noah is trapped within a car he has no control over, and most nonsensical at its climax, in which the Autobots fight… Marvel’s Ultron? In order to destroy the Tower of Sauron? And close the big portal in the sky? I don’t actually know.
The voices behind these robots – which include Dinklage, Yeoh, Ron Perlman, and Michaela Jaé Rodriguez – are exactly the sort of actors who can convincingly deliver sentences they themselves don’t fully understand. Meanwhile, Pete Davidson, as comic relief bot Mirage, trades in his trademark voice (which is wry and self-aware in a way that may have benefited this film) for lewd sex jokes that fall flat because, as I would presume, Autobots do not have genitals. Sure, it’s a waste of time to demand that a Transformers film follow any kind of logic – but when did we collectively decide that we were OK with that?
Dir: Steven Caple Jr. Starring: Anthony Ramos, Dominique Fishback, Ron Perlman, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh. 12A, 127 minutes.
‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ is in cinemas
