Review of TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS: Robots on a Rampage

June 14, 2023 

The Maximals were a race of animal-form robots who possessed the powerful Transwarp Key, an artifact which can open portals anywhere in space and time. An evil, planet-eating giant monster robot called Unicron sent his Terrorcons led by Scourge to attack the Maximal planet and steal the key.  As their leader Apelinq sacrificed himself, the other Maximals used the key to escape to Earth as Unicron literally ate up their home planet. 

On Earth, it was 1994 in Brooklyn, New York City. One night, museum intern Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) uncovered half of the Transwarp key inside an ancient bird figurine, which then sent out a signal. Meanwhile desperate ex-soldier Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) found himself trying to steal a car. At that moment, Optimus Prime issued a call for the Autobots to roll out,
and the Porsche 911 he was in transformed into a robot called Mirage. 

The Transformers started in 1984 as a toy robot line designed by Japanese anime creator Shoji Kawamori and rebranded for the West by Hasbro. From there, it had evolved to a wide media franchise that went from TV animation, comic books, video games to feature films. The first five Transformers live action films (2007, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2017) were all directed by Michael Bay, each one noisier than the one before. A sixth film, "Bumblebee" (2018), a spin-off directed by Trevor Knight, received more critical acclaim than any of the Bay films. 

This seventh film, directed by Steven Caple, Jr. (as follow-up to his second film "Creed II" in 2018) followed the same basic formula of the previous films. This time, it was the character of Noah Diaz took over where Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), Cade Jaeger (Mark Wahlberg) and Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld) left off to form a human-robot bond to serve as the film's beating heart. Anthony Ramos (from "Hamilton" and "In the Heights") had the same boy-next-door charm that made Noah a very likable hero audiences will root for.

Some big name actors served to voice the robots -- Peter Dinklage (as the sinister Scourge), Pete Davidson (as the energetic hologram-forming Autobot Mirage), Ron Perlman (as Optimus Primal, head of the Maximals in the form of a great ape) and Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh (as Airazor, an elegant Maximal in the form of a peregrine falcon). The one constant is Peter Cullen who had been the voice of Optimus Prime since the 1980s cartoons through all the films in the franchise up to the present.

Like previous films, humans Noah and Elena were given equal time as the Autobots to shine and save the Earth from the impending catastrophe, which meant that there would be plenty of physics-defying CG-aided stunts and logic-defying close-calls that were laughably absurd, but they work anyhow in the spirit of this franchise's tendency for everything over-the-top. However, Caple did not try to outdo Michael Bay the action scenes, mixing in the humor and drama elements very well, making this quite an entertaining watch.  7/10.