Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts

If you're keeping count, we're at the seventh live action Transformers film. A further outpost in the attempt to maintain a merchandising empire. Though as a scene just inside the credits makes clear, the intent is to expand it beyond Transformers to encompass other Hasbro toylines. Battleship and Barbie both suggest they've not got a monopoly interest in forcing everything into one cinematic cupboard, audiences will see a big clue as to where they intend to go.

Set in 1994, it's a prequel to the five Michael Bay directed, chronologically subsequent and reliant upon characterisation created in 2018's Bumblebee, set in 1987. If that seems confusing don't worry, it will get worse. There's a reference to Marky Mark leaving the Funky Bunch which suggests that the films which star Wahlberg take place in a world where he has a doppelganger. Then you start to wonder if it's not only robots that are in disguise.

Would you like to see things you've seen before, slightly re-organised, and often louder? Would you like lines of dialogue you've heard before, re-organised slightly, and often louder? Would you like references to other film franchises where Steven Spielberg has producer credits, only slightly louder, and often re-organised? Would you like character designs, nick-names, and suites of powers from several videogames, only loudly re-organised? Would you like weirdly foregrounded discussions of how the live-action Transformers franchise has borrowed stereotypes to the point of metallic caricature, only, you've guessed it...

I'm not sure it's intentional the Transformers films serve as metaphor for American policy. Concerns about the global war on terror changed the course of the franchise, and its militarism is often more naked than that of Top Gun. Going back in time and using plenty of stock footage of the Manhattan skyline with the World Trade Center towers still standing just serves to highlight that. Plot points based on unaffordable healthcare for chronic conditions and white academics taking credit for minority knowledge just add to the mix. I say I'm not sure because there are some deep questions about responsibility raised by the text, resurrection, redemption, but remember it's a toy commercial masquerading as cinema.

Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback play the human companions to a variety of big metal dudes (and some smaller metal ladies including some out of scale metal cheetahs). That Ron Perlman, Peter Dinklage, and Michelle Yeoh all provide voices is differently a surprise than discovering that what I thought was a dull performance from Jack Black was actually Pete Davidson. I must admit I was more concerned with trying to figure out how access to Ellis Island had been changed in continuity than figuring out who was in the recording booth behind the still inexplicable metal lips of the eponymous robots.

Ramos and Fishback do a good job emoting opposite tennis balls or whatever underpaid artists replace these days, though it does get weird when it appears that many of their scenes weren't shot together either. As generic inspirational kid brother Dean Scott Vazquez shows the same chops that have had him in theatrically musical films In The Heights and Theater Camp, but the trio's charisma isn't why anyone is going to see this.

In the new robots there are nods to Lord Of The Rings and other road horror, Scourge (voiced by Dinklage) is a Nazghul by way of Duel. As tarnished Silver Surfer to Unicron's Galactus he's occasionally summoned by Sauron-calibrated pixels to address his master, before engaging in some dark construction that suggests the derelict on LV-246 parked at Orthanc.

It's heavy on exposition, and it seems that every time it pauses to explain itself it does so more loudly and more slowly. Maybe even slightly re-organised. I'll admit I'm so inured to these festivals of booming bombast that the fact that it's two hours or so seems as justifiable as a bigger box to take up more shelf space.

Five credited writers come from three sets. Joby Harold also contributed to The Flash, but may be better known for other lacklustre genre projects Army Of The Dead and the Obi-Wan Kenobi show. Darnell Metayer and Josh Peters co-wrote true-crime Detroit-based bio-series Black Mafia Family. Erich and Jon Hoeber have adapted comic books to screen several times, 2009's Whiteout, RED and its sequel, though giant-shark-based Staham-up The Meg was based on an actual novel. With decades of comic books and several continuities to base it on, it's perhaps unsurprising that this ends up quite episodic as it attempts to crowbar in everything it can.

This leads to weird moments. When it becomes clear that a silver and blue Porsche is an Autobot and the soundtrack pushes Digable Planets' Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat) it's not unreasonable to think it is, as the song says, "Jazz like that". Except it's Mirage. In the "I can also look like" montage which includes a Lamborghini Countach (in Clampdown's colourway, near enough) he says "Ferrari" but the model appears to be an ahistorical Formula 1 car. Appropriate to the original toy, but not to the colouration that "Dino," as Mirage is allegedly also known, bears in the earlier (later) films where he also (sort of) appears. I told you it'd get worse.

Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead managed to fit a whole set of story into reading between a line. Rise Of The Beasts references a frequency of "4,000 yottahertz" which is apparently invisible to humans. Since 2022 that would be 4 ronnahertz, but it's good that Cybertronians keep current with SI-units as yotta- had only been adopted in 1991. That works out at a wavelength of, um, 75 zeptometers which would be enough to fit ten high-energy neutrinos through. Quite an achievement, especially since these Transformers have eyes so much smaller than their anime counterparts.

There's a reference to a 2017 tumblr meme, dialogue that seems straight cribbed from Thanos and Rise Of Skywalker, and among older thefts past the Megamen and Metroid are moments lifted straight from King Kong. Another is explicitly credited, twice due to rights issues, but referencing They Live in something this crassly commercial is more ironic than any of the metal on screen. When someone says something about Optimus it's genuinely surprising that the response isn't "Which one?"

It's thematically appropriate that a Transformers film look like other things, but much like the toys it's intended to sell, the notion of its motion is often undermined by engineering. Nobody is expecting high art, but in trying to wind a story between and within established continuity we end up with something less than the sum of its parts.