Here’s an interesting thought: If each subsequent film in the Transformers series has to be a nostalgia-fest for an era in which the viewer might have grown up — Travis Knight’s Bumblebee sported the mismatched ‘80s aesthetic of a Target display stacked with Stranger Things products, and Steven Caple Jr.s’ Transformers: Rise of the Beasts blasts hip-hop classics, coats its walls in Power Rangers posters, and shows off the Twin Towers in a desperate bid to tell you to turn your pages to 1993 / Robots is getting smoked, G / Believe me – would the next film in the series be the 2007 Transformers? Or at least a tribute to it? In just a few years, that movie will be twenty years old (Jesus fucking Christ), and indeed a whole host of young millennials and elder Gen Z kids will want to watch whatever in-vogue ingenue watch Fred videos ripped from YouTube on a click-wheel-sporting iPod before Optimus Prime swoops in to whisk them off to some anonymous adventure sourced from some stupid prophecy or ancient icon. Of course, this won’t lead to Michael Bay coming back to the franchise (and thank God for that, given that we got 6 Underground and Ambulance after he left it), but I do think it will lead people to ask if the Bayformers movies were as bad as they might seem on the surface. On some level, they are, but as Transformers: Rise of the Beasts demonstrates, the flaws weren’t solely Bay’s. Hell, I’m willing to offer up another idea for your consideration: had Bay directed under a pseudonym and made Optimus Prime look just a little more like he did in the classic cartoon, those movies would have had some measure of critical acclaim, or at least more than they did at the time.
If Bumblebee was a pseudo-remake of the 2007 Transformers, Rise of the Beasts is some bastardized amalgamation of Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon if they were stripped of their lunacy. It’s as needlessly complex as both of those movies, but at least they had a single human protagonist, even if he did have a clown car’s worth of comic relief characters surrounding him at all times. We have two here, in the form of Noa (Anthony Ramos), a former Marine tech who’s bumming around Brooklyn in search of a job, preferably one with health insurance so that he can take care of his sickle-cell-stricken brother, and Elena (Dominique Fishback), an intern at “The New York Museum of Archeology,” which is where security guards go if they’d rather have boring nights on the job instead of the cavalcade of historical figures demanding bubble gum that you’d find at the American Museum of National History. They’re roped into the cosmic conflict of Autobots and… well, other robots – they’re not Decepticons, given that they serve the planet-eating Unicron (sadly not voiced by Orson Welles) and his Silver Surfer equivalent, Skurge – in different ways. Elena cracks open a priceless artifact with half of a jewel with wormhole-opening powers, and Noa carjacks a Porsche (yeah) that happens to be Pete Davidson in disguise, which is just an unfathomable nightmare for any automobile owner. You’re just trying to go to work, and your Prius starts talking to you about trying to make Ariana Grande watch Good Time. Yeesh.
Anyhow, it turns out the Autobots, led once again by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), need that half of the crystal to travel back to Cybertron because Prime’s sick of being stuck getting his ass kicked by villains-of-the-week on Earth instead of just kicking ass on his home planet. So, Noa agrees to help them steal that half of the crystal from the museum, but, mid-heist, the gang gets attacked by Skurge and his minions, who need it to bring their master to Earth for him to chow down. It’s here that Caple sets expectations for the rest of the film – the action is incomprehensible but lacks the impact of Bay’s dizzying chaos, and our human characters, who spend the runtime running away from things, reenact a half-assed tribute to the Raptor bit in Jurassic Park – while also serving us our contractually-mandated Autobot death because these things are all ultimately defined by who gets killed in the most melodramatic way possible before coming back in the third act. But as things look their worst, a giant Eagle robot shows up and sprays flame all over the battlefield. This is Razorbeak (Michelle Yeoh), an ancient Maximal who is still from the future (huh?), who can help the group track down the other half of the jewel in Peru. There, they meet Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), who… is named after Optimus Prime. Huh. Maximals, Autobots, and humans will have to work together to stop Unicron from destroying the planet so that George W. Bush can become president.
What’s so funny about the post-Bay Transformers films is that they prove he wasn’t the franchise’s problem. Bumblebee and Rise of the Beasts hew close to the formula he established – they both sport omnipresent comic relief and inconsistent character development (I think this is the seventh film now in which Optimus Prime has to learn how to get along with humans so that he can sate his robo-bloodlust), mild racism (which is to be expected from an adaptation of a cartoon that once set an episode in the Middle Eastern country of “Carbombya”), generic-and-visually-boring interchangeable villains, and a bizarre reliance on “prophecy” and ancient conspiracy to generate the plot’s momentum. But unlike Bay, these films misunderstand the central appeals of the series, which are that we get to see cool human-made vehicles turn into humanoid robots – a cinematic novelty if there ever was one — and that this shit is goofy. For all of his aesthetic bluster, and with the help of Steven Spielberg, Bay at least came as close as one could to finding and articulating that ethos viscerally, with the first Transformers film being as much a tribute to the nuts-and-bolts machinery designed by brilliant engineers all over the world as it was to the creativity of his VFX department. But unlike Rise of the Beasts, Bay also understood that when that novelty ran out, the best move he could make was to go as brassy and weird as possible, which is, on some fundamental level, the answer to the “Why? of this entire series. Anthony Hopkins showing up and revealing to us that giant robots helped out King Arthur and his knights in The Last Knight is more in line with the cartoons’ appeal than any amount of true fidelity to whatever nascent canon that nerds demand fealty to.
Worse, if you were to adapt a Transformers cartoon verbatim to the screen – as in, just reboot the whole damn franchise and start with a brand-new canon – you probably couldn’t do much better than Beast Wars, which was a part of that great ‘90s animation renaissance and also, alongside Jim Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Pixar, and Reboot, helped to bring about the mass acceptance of CGI in storytelling at Blockbuster scales on down. The central conceit is agreeably goofy – the Autobots and Decepticons, rebranded as Maximals and Predicons, transform into animals on prehistoric earth – but it also had something few other Transformers properties had: well-rendered characters who placed a real emphasis on the robots, which is what fans have been begging the folks at Hasbro for over two decades at this point. Here, despite being in the title, the “Beasts” in Rise of the Beasts are barely present, and you’d be forgiven for assuming that they don’t have robot forms at all. Sure, they show up for a bit to shout exposition and participate in some of the battles (which, in Caple Jr and company’s desperate attempts to pivot away from Bay’s militarism, lack that kind of awe-inspiring oomph that human participation, never mind some amount of practical effects work, in the battles has, despite the attempt to provide one character with an Iron Man-like Transformer armor), but they’re almost anonymous, lost in the juggling of post-Bumblebee IP-protection priorities. They are in the film because people recognize the name, much like the omnipresent product placement, not because there’s anything that they can do with them.
Unlike many other high-falootin assholes out there, I don’t think it’s impossible to make good movies from the IP mess we’ve found ourselves in at this point in the 21st Century. There’s a great example of what one can do with time and care out in cinemas now though I know that not every one of these movies can have a full five years of lead-time and prep, especially given that another franchise featuring the same character is helping to write the checks that Spider-Verse cashes on-screen. But these movies have to offer something to the audience: the MCU, at least before Phase 4, offered one the chance to see a well-cast thirty-something-strong series of movies pay off in a grand finale, and its character-centric reward structure meant that they were entertained along the way. The participatory element of those films shouldn’t be forgotten, but it’s almost impossible to imitate in any meaningful fashion. What you have here in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the worst of all possible IP worlds: a lifeless imitation of its predecessors that’s as annoying as it is dull, meant only to lead into an inevitable “shared universe” at some point. It’s just Bay without Bay, and all you can do is miss that old Bay seasoning, even if it was sometimes laid on a little too thickly. So, once again, I reiterate: Bring back Michael Bay.