By now, seven films into this live-action franchise, you know exactly what you’re getting from a “Transformers” movie. Although the screenplay (credited to Joby Harold, Darnell Metayer, Josh Peters, Erich Hoeber, and Jon Hoeber) at least has the courtesy to get the obligatory beam of light into the sky out of the way at the beginning of the film for a change, much of the story unfolds precisely as you’d expect it.
Like “Bumblebee,” “The Last Knight,” and, well, pretty much every other movie in this series, the film opens with an exposition-heavy prologue set centuries in the past that fills in newbies and fans alike on all the lore surrounding the creature-like Maximals. They include Ron Perlman’s apelike Optimus Primal and Michelle Yeoh’s avian Airazor (no, it’s never explained why robotic aliens from other galaxies would need to resemble Earth-specific animals). There’s also the world-consuming threat of the insatiable “vile god” Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo, but otherwise given the same space-cloud treatment as Galactus in 2007’s “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer”), and the film’s chief MacGuffin involving a 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’m pretty sure breaks established canon, but whatever).
You know how the rest goes: we jump forward to 1994 Brooklyn so we can meet our lovable human leads. As much as it’s time for one of these movies to finally dispense with flesh and blood altogether and just tell a new story with a whole cast of Transformers — hear me out, what if they just made a “Transformers” animated movie – Ramos immediately brings a lived-in sense of screen presence as the put-upon Noah, a character drowning in debt, mounting hospital bills, and failed job interviews from taking care of his sickly younger brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez). The film dedicates an impressive amount of screen time to getting us invested in the human side of the story by the time Noah steps into the wrong car and is swept along into the Autobot storyline. The same can’t be said for co-lead Dominique Fishback (“The Hate U Give,” “Judas and the Black Messiah”), tragically shortchanged as the plot exposition delivery character whose expert knowledge of the relic holding the trans-warp key wrangles her into the action.
Unfortunately, “Rise of the Beasts” drops any real interest it had in the plight of its pint-sized heroes (along with a faint but compelling thread on how much harder it is for people of color to get whisked away on grand adventures like this than other kinds of protagonists) once the world-ending stakes and globetrotting plot kick in. Cue the overly-familiar set pieces pitting some invading villains led by Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage in a heavily-modulated performance that renders him unrecognizable and not in a good way) against Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), Bumblebee, Primal, and an assortment of other Autobots/Maximals who mostly just show up when the plot requires a new vehicle or power set.
Damningly, after waves of weightless and uninspired fight scenes that build to a climax echoing the ugly and formless VFX work from the finale of “Avengers: Endgame,” you might just find yourself feeling nostalgic for the high-flying chaos of when Michael Bay used to wild out with his unmistakable approach to such indulgent spectacle.
