By now, seven movies of this live-action series, you know exactly what you get from a “Transformers” movie. While the script (attributed to Joby Harold, Darnell Metayer, Josh Peters, Erich Hoeber, and Jon Hoeber) is at least courteous to take forced beam of light into the sky out of the way beginning For a change, most of the story unfolds exactly as you would expect.
Like “The Wasp,” “The Last Knight,” and pretty much every other movie in this series, the movie opens with a statement-heavy prologue set centuries ago that fills with all the lore surrounding beginners and fans alike. creature-like Maximals. It includes Ron Perlman’s ape-like Optimus Primal and Michelle Yeoh’s bird Airazor (no, it’s never been explained why robotic aliens from other galaxies should look like animals native to Earth). There’s also the world-consuming threat of the insatiable “despicable god” Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo, but otherwise has the same space-cloud treatment as Galactus in 2007’s “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer”) and the film’s chief. The MacGuffin contains the key to a trans-warp system that we’re told is the only way Transformers can travel from one star system to another (which I sweet it certainly breaks the established canon, but whatever).
You know how the rest goes: we hop on to 1994 Brooklyn to meet our lovely human lead actors. While it’s time at the end of one of these movies to give up flesh and blood altogether and tell a new story with the entire cast of Transformers – listen to me, what if they made a “Transformers” animated movie – Ramos quickly brings it to his debt-stricken, rising hospital bills and his sick little brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez) is a lived-in-on-screen sense of presence as Noah, a character who makes unsuccessful job interviews without looking. The movie takes an impressive amount of screen time to get us invested in the human side of the story when Noah gets into the wrong car and gets dragged into the Autobot story. The same cannot be said for the tragically shortened co-star Dominique Fishback (“The Hate U Give”, “Judas and the Black Messiah”) as the plot-explanation delivery character with expert knowledge of the relic holding the trans-warp key. activates it.
Unfortunately, “Rise of the Beasts” erodes genuine interest in the plight of its undersized heroes (along with a weak but convincing thread about how hard it is for people of color to get caught up in big adventures like this) versus some invading villains led by the Scourge. mark the overly familiar set pieces coming across (voiced by Peter Dinklage in a heavily modulated performance that renders him unrecognizable, rendering him unrecognizable in a good way) Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), Bumblebee, Primal, and mostly the plot is a new vehicle or against other variants of Autobots/Maximals that spawn when they require a power set.
Hell, after waves of weightless and uninspired fight scenes that reach a climax that echoes the ugly and misshapen VFX work in the finale of “Avengers: Endgame”, you may find yourself nostalgic for the high-flying chaos Michael Bay used. to go crazy with his impeccable approach to such an indulgent show.