[Note: I do not consider myself a movie critic. What follows is just one fanboy’s opinion based off of a single viewing of the film. Oh, and there are SPOILERS ahead for this movie, so take heed.]

First off, let me apologize for being tardy on this blog post. Posts where I need to see a movie beforehand are dependent on me actually being able to take in a viewing of the movie before I can comment on it. I was delayed in seeing this film. As a result, my Fanboy Review is late. Mea culpa.

So.

Transformers.

Long-time readers of this blog will note that Transformers is perhaps my favorite franchise of all time. When the live-action movie first arrived back in 2007, I saw it opening weekend. It wasn’t anything like what I wanted in a Transformers-themed movie, but it showed promise. We had Peter Cullen reprising his voice role as Optimus Prime, a big budget for special effects, and an absolutely haunting score by Steve Jablonsky. “Arrival to Earth” is one of my favorite cinematic musical cues of all time. I sometimes catch myself humming his “Optimus” theme in my more quiet, contemplative moments.

As the series wore on, however, the cracks began to show. I’m not even talking about the nonsensical storyline; I’m talking about the strange ‘dude-bro-ness’ of it. The overt objectification of women. Needless flag-waving and worship of the military (and this from a guy who writes military sci-fi). There were too many needless human characters and pointless sub-plots, and not enough of the Autobots and Decepticons.

For me, Age of Extinction was my breaking point. I even wrote an open letter to Michael Bay on this very blog. Unfortunately, almost 10 years later, some of the points that I addressed in that open letter are things I find I’m having to dust off for this review. 

First Impressions:

Despite my doom and gloom about the franchise, and the fact that I skipped The Last Knight entirely (I still have never seen it), 2018’s Bumblebee was a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t a perfect film by any means, but it was better than the CGI insanity of the previous entries. The opening sequence of that movie on Cybertron is precisely what I wanted in a Transformers movie. There was a bit of the Bayformers ichor still on the film, but the robot designs were closer to their G1 forms, and the general mood was lighter in tone. The rumor was that it would serve as a soft reboot of the franchise.

When I heard about Rise of the Beasts, I wasn’t super thrilled. I know Transformers fans owe a great deal of in-universe lore to Beast Wars, but I was never a big fan of it. I was even less of a fan of Beast Machines that followed. That said, it appeared that Rise of the Beasts would be a continuation of Bumblebee, so I was willing to give it a chance, though Travis Knight was not returning as the director. I set my expectations to middling and took my seat.

What I Liked:

The landscapes — Visually, this movie has some of the most striking natural landscapes that I can remember seeing in any Transformers movie. It’s an interesting contrast to the cityscape we see in the early part of the story. Plus, thematically, it just makes sense when you have the Maximals and their more ancient, naturalistic vibe front-and-center in the story’s narrative.

PETER FRICKIN’ CULLEN — Any time we get to have the man himself reprise his role as the Autobot Supreme Commander, I’m down for it. Even if I don’t like the story that Prime is in, Cullen always (always, always) turns in a command performance. This is no different, though I wish they had more use of the character in the movie. I always enjoy a heartfelt speech coming from Optimus, and we didn’t really get that this time. Feels like a missed opportunity.

The special effects — It’s almost par for the course for these big-budget blockbuster films, but I think it’s worth calling out. The VFX artists really delivered here, and they should all be proud of what they created. I’m sure it wasn’t easy. Whatever my complaints with the movie, the effects are really beautiful. There was one notable exception, however. See below. 

The search for the Transwarp Key — I know that things started to feel a little like National Treasure in some of these sequences, but I dig the search for clues in symbols from history. That’s what I had originally wanted from Revenge of the Fallen, but we never got there. When you’re dealing with immortal, godlike animal robots, I can see early cultures viewing them as deific figures or spirits.  

The Maximals — Despite not really being a fan of Beast Wars, I thought the Maximals were pretty cool. It’s a pity we don’t get much of a chance to get to know Rhinox and Cheetor a bit better, but I loved Ron Perlman’s gravitas as Optimus Primal, and Airazor nearly steals the show in places, voiced by the incomparable Michelle Yeoh. So, a pleasant surprise.

UNICRON — This is how Unicron should look. Seeing him tear into the Maximal planet was pretty terrifying, as it should be. Orson Welles is a tough act to follow, but Colman Domingo nails the part. I also noted the music playing during his scenes was a nod to Vince DiCola’s “Unicron” theme from the 1986 animated movie. Speaking of the music…

The musical score — I was surprised to learn that Steve Jablonsky didn’t write the score for this movie. Many tracks, particularly “Till All Are One,” definitely carry that cinematic style that Jablonsky delivered. This one is composed by Jongnic Bontemps, and it’s worth checking out.

Mirage and Chris — For those of you familiar with the G1 cartoon, I got a little of a Tracks and Raoul vibe from the relationship that forms between Mirage and Chris, and I dig it. It’s definitely interesting to see another Autobot besides Bumblebee be the ‘bridge’ character between Cybertronians and humans. I think their scenes were great and just nicely gelled together. I do love that we got the traditional shot of Mirage’s steering wheel bearing the Autobot insignia as Chris climbed in for the first time.

What I DIDN’T Like:

The story — Another ancient MacGuffin, another doomsday scenario. It’s another all-powerful ‘football’ that the characters have to find/retrieve/lose/ then ultimately destroy. Big yawn. This go-round is not as tedious as some of the other times we’ve been down this road, but only just. Yeah, I know, going to a Transformers movie looking for a good story is an exercise in futility. I’m just a glutton for punishment, I guess.

Optimus is still kind of a jerk — Transformers movies just can’t seem to find an arc for Optimus that fits with who he is. I get that the story here wants to show some sort of growth, but a being that’s around nine million years old should have a pretty well-established character. He should not have to be convinced or persuaded to care about other beings, particularly humans. For a brief moment, it looked like they were going for a ‘maybe he isn’t quite the Optimus he will eventually become’ type of moment, but then that goes nowhere. There is no arc, so he’s a jerk for really no reason. Optimus a leader who doesn’t really care about anything or anyone that isn’t in his immediate purview or goal. Anything outside of that is something that might as well not exist. Such a pity.

So, once more for the folk’s in the back: Optimus is the one that people (robots and humans alike) should look to when they feel like they can’t go on or when they call into question the morality of their own decisions. He’s the one to make the inspirational speech to lift your spirits at just the right moment and back up his words with heroic action. If that’s not the role he is destined to play in the story, he has been stripped of his core identity. We had to suffer through this most especially in Age of Extinction, and we’re still struggling with it here when it should be a non-issue.  

Optimus’s new design — This is admittedly a nitpick, but the Bumblebee version of Prime was (IMO) the best Prime has looked in live action. Ever. This new version of him looks more blocky and unwieldy. We are also back to Optimus only deploying his faceplate during combat instead of it being in place all the time. I thought it looked dumb in the Michael Bay movies, and it somehow looks worse here. He’s still more G1 in design, though, and doesn’t have flames. There’s that, at least.  

Bumblebee is KIA — The first real dust-up we see in the movie, and Bee is the sacrificial lamb — the guy who gets killed to prove the situation is dangerous. Practically a redshirt. Of course, there was no way that they were going to kill him off permanently, so his death had no real impact.

Wheel…jack? — In the opening of Bumblebee we see Wheeljack for a brief moment, and he looks more or less like he did in his G1 days. Here we get a version of Wheeljack that is so completely different as to be a whole other character. It leaves me wondering why they didn’t just name this character something else. If this is a continuation of Bumblebee, what’s the point? Plus, besides his initial, super- awkward interaction with Chris, he’s just another Autobot, just another gun on the firing line. He’s not an engineer or a mad scientist type. Like the movie, he’s just sorta…there. 

Scourge versus Optimus — It was hard to see Scourge be able to take Prime in their initial clash, but I was okay with it. Scourge is a Herald of Unicron, and he’s directly channeling the power of a dark god, so it makes sense that Prime wouldn’t be able to stand against him alone. They did a pretty good job of setting the two of them up for an epic confrontation. But when that time comes, Prime is suddenly on par with Scourge for no apparent reason. I kept waiting for Prime to have some sort of epiphany to tap into his inner strength, or deepen his understanding of the Matrix, or something. Prime is just somehow better, and defeats Scourge as though the Terrorcon was just another Decepticon.

Scourge’s corruption bullet — Scourge fires a single shot and is not only able to take Airazor completely out but also corrupt her to a point where she turns on her allies. She seemed like the wisest and most discerning of the Maximals. So, did Scourge only have one of those little doohickeys? Why wouldn’t he immediately try to corrupt the Autobots, especially Prime? If all it takes is one little spider-tracker, that seems like a much better way to neutralize your opposition. If I were him, I would be using that little trick all the time.

The access tunnels — So, let me get this straight…Scourge raises his weird tower as a way of sending the Transwarp Key directly to Unicron. First, I would have thought that he could use the Key to transport himself and his minions to the Chaos-Bringer and give it to him that way. No fuss, no muss. But, assuming the whole tower thing is necessary, why would you want, or need, little access tunnels that go all the way up to your computer console? Tunnels that just so happen to be big enough for humans to run around inside? This was the plot bending over backwards to make itself work and give the human characters something to do.

The resurrection — Oh look, the big explosion they talked about has ignited all the energon in the valley, and guess whose body is laying on a convenient sheet of it. Bee comes back completely healed and ready to go. So, did Stratosphere just hang around the village while his fellow Autobots and Maximals went off to fight? Dude, it’s the end of the universe. Like, the chips were well and truly down, and he’s just chilling. Also, too bad Airazor got a tight hug from Optimus Maximal and they didn’t take her body to the valley. I guess she’s just dead-dead, instead of being mostly-dead like Bee.

The Iron Man suit — I understand why this happened. One of the big issues with Transformers movies is that the humans have no real hope of fighting in a battle with giant robots wielding weapons of a magnitude we can barely fathom. Usually, human companions like Sam or Charlie have to ‘run the football’ or try to affect things from the sidelines. The solution here was to turn a human into a Transformer. Sort of. Critically damaged in the final fight, Mirage turns himself into a human-sized suit of power armor for Chris, though the scale of the suit sometimes felt inconsistent. Too bad that option wasn’t available to Sam, Charlie, the NEST Teams, or any of the other humans who have helped out the Autobots in previous entries. Also, while the design of the armor wasn’t horrible, the open face bowl has Chris’s obviously CGI’ed face pasted onto it, which was the only effect in the movie that looked bad.

I guess we just destroy the Key, then — Predictably, the bad guys get the MacGuffin and attempt to use it. It apparently takes a while to spin up (and I use that term intentionally). In the end, Optimus is forced to destroy it. I suppose they had already established that it could be destroyed by Chris’s hand-held blaster. I know Prime had hoped to obtain it to get back to Cybertron, but when a portal opens up and you can see Unicron coming through, it seems like you would destroy the Key immediately if that were an option, instead of, you know, waiting until the last minute.

The G.I. Joe connection — Nope. G.I. Joe has had three attempts at a movie franchise and failed in all three, even with big names like the Rock, Bruce Willis, and Channing Tatum attached to them. I know Hasbro is desperately hungry to build a cinematic universe, but I don’t want that chocolate in my peanut butter, thank you very much. Understand that I have a special place in my heart for G.I. Joe as a franchise, but Cobra becomes far less of a threat when they have to contend with giant alien robots from a technologically superior planet that is literally millions of years ahead of anything produced on Earth. So, again…nope!

Unresolved Questions:

In this telling of the story, the Autobots didn’t arrive on Earth aboard the Ark or a ship of any kind. So, what method did they use to get here at the end of Bumblebee? Prime acts like the Transwarp Key is the only way he’ll ever get off of Earth, but clearly he got here by some other means. Why can’t he just reverse that? His plan was always to establish a base for his refugee Autobots so that he could return and fight for his homeworld. Did he not have a plan for getting off of Earth once he got here?

Will we see the Primals again, or will they just fade into the forests of Peru permanently, to be forgotten or ignored in future installments? Are we looking at more Terrorcons being the bad guys from now on, or will we get more Decepticons in the next one?

Will this new continuity openly supersede the old one? Already, the reasons why the Autobots left Cybertron to come to Earth are vastly different than what was established in the 2007 movie. Also, in this telling Unicron is a separate being that’s coming to consume Earth, and is definitely not the Earth itself, which apparently was a thing in The Last Knight. Once again, any sense of cohesion between these movies is spotty at best.

Conclusions:

I know more of this blog post is about what I didn’t like, but I honestly didn’t hate this movie. Nor did I love it. It just sorta exists in a “meh” state for me. Bumblebee attempted to take a movie franchise that felt pretty played out in a new direction. It happened to be in a direction I liked, and I wanted to see more of that.

This movie feels like it wants to be more like the older Transformers movies in terms of tone and design, and, to me, that’s a giant leap backwards. It’s a course correction to a course correction, and that’s a shame. For a moment in late 2018, I thought Transformers was finally on the right track. 

Still, I applaud this movie for excising the worst excesses of the Michael Bay films, but it doesn’t really deliver on what Bay was actually good at, either. The whole thing felt rather bland and a retread of previous entries in the series, but one with a basis in the era of Transformers that I don’t really care for.

Those who really love Airazor, Rhinox, and the Maximal crew might be more invested here, but I just wasn’t. Again, I think this movie is better than most of the Bay films, but it is unfortunately trying its dead-level best to get back to those elements of cinematic Transformers that I would rather see buried and forgotten in the past.

And that’s the way this fanboy sees it.