Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts (2023)
"Optimus Prime and the Autobots take on their biggest challenge yet. When a new threat capable of destroying the entire planet emerges, they must team up with a powerful faction of Transformers known as the Maximals to save Earth."
This is the 7th outing for the Live Action Transformers and is a sequel to the decently received Bumblebee. Bumblebee was, in itself, a soft reboot of the Transformers franchise that began 16 years ago, and came after the fifth film in Michael Bay's Transformers film series, Transformers: The Last Knight. The franchise had taken some very odd twists before that and a reboot of sorts was very welcome, for me anyway.
Since the beginning of the Michael Bay run the films have had a very spotty reception. The quality of the films stories has swung wildly from really good to simply mystifying while the quality of the visuals (outside of the explosions) has always remained fairly consistent. They have been the very epitome of style over substance. That is until Bumblebee. That was a good looking film that told a fun, coherent, story and the 91% on rotten tomatoes seems to agree.
It has taken 5 years for a sequel to Bumblebee to hit the big screen, and there was always going to be a worry that the quality would drop, that we would be let down once more by the people behind the big robots.
We weren't.....at all.....
This is a really great film. Brilliant visuals and a coherent story with a very clear beginning/middle/end structure give rise to a thoroughly enjoyable romp across the world and, at times, through space. Steven CapleJr.r, the director, has taken all the bits that made parts of the franchise successful and blended them with new characters and threats to create a film that continues the rebooted series brilliantly. Michael Bay is a producer, and his fingerprints are still visible on the end product, but only in the best ways they could be.
One of the main issues I have had with the previous films is the number of human characters they have crammed into the big, chunky robot movies. Personally, I want to see robots mashing robots. The humans are, for the most part, annoying and irrelevant, even Bumblebee had this issue. This film not so much. While there are a good few humans in the movie, there are literally only two who regularly interact with the stars.
Anthony Ramos plays Noah Diaz and Dominique Fishback plays Elena. Noah is an ex soldier, though this isn't central to his personality. He's simply a guy trying to provide for his mum and unwell brother until he gets dragged into a struggle he didn't understand. Having only seen Ramos in the musical "In The Heights" this was a nice change. He handles the action well and his Noah was a believable guy who was making plans of his own behind the Autobots back. Not that he was working against them, just looking to protect his own. It was a solid performance.
Fishback, as Elena, played a nervous yet intelligent woman who broke codes and located artefacts central to the story. I've not seen her onscreen before but I really enjoyed her performance. Her scene trying to convince herself the big robots weren't real was pretty funny and how I think a lot of people would react. I do look forward to seeing her more in time.
The voice cast of the robots was impressive: Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, Ron Perlman as Optimus Primal, Michelle Yeoh as Airazor, Pete Davidson as Mirage and Peter Dinkage as Scourge. They all did really well, but of.course Cullen is the g.o.at. when it comes to these characters.
Overall, for me at least, this is the best of the live action Transformer films, though given some of the previous that wasn't necessarily going to be hard. It's well made, it looks good and it tells a complete story....and yet it leaves it open for the future. In this case that's a future I'm quite excited about. I'm giving it a solid 7/10. It's a long way from perfect but it's a decent film that I really enjoyed. I'd recommend it to everyone, and I'm certainly going back to see it at least once more.
