I said I was going to see it... So I went to see it.
There were signs that the completed movie wasn't quite so bad as I had expected and/or predicted... Though, even in that, there are caveats. At this point, this whole thing is very much overdue - I saw the movie at the end of June, after all - and I'd started to wonder if I should even bother now.
I had, of course, read the effusive fan praise that appeared throughout the internet immediately after the movie opened and had taken it with a pinch of salt. I had read spoilers and comparisons between the movie shown in test screenings, months ago, and the final theatrical cut. I had read stories of extensive reshoots and disagreements between teams of Editors over what could be salvaged and made watchable from a movie rumoured to be potentially about four hours long. None of what I saw or read gave me any reason to doubt that Rise of the Beasts was an absolute disaster, for Paramount, for Hasbro, and potentially for Steven Caple Jr.'s future career. Given that it's now been almost five years since the Bumblebee solo movie hit the cinemas, I get the impression that some fans must have been suffering from withdrawal symptoms.
Potential spoilers ahead...
I'd originally started writing pretty much a full summary of the events of the film, but that got boring and frustrating, not least because the film just wasn't memorable. It comes across very much like a collection of scenes from a longer film, with much of the connecting narrative and context missing.
Rise of the Beasts begins with its introductory exposition spoken by Ron Perlman's Optimus Primal, and we see a planet under attack by Unicron, with Scourge (Peter Dinklage, though essentially unrecognisable and bringing nothing special to the role, just like Hugo Weaving as Megatron) and a bunch of Scorponok drones sent in to retrieve this movie's McGuffin, the Transwarp Key. We're introduced to Apelinq, leader of the Maximals, and Optimus Primal. The former tasks the latter with escaping the planet with, and using, the Transwarp Key, to keep it out of Unicron's hands. Primal runs off, with Airazor, Cheetor and Rhinox in tow, while Apelinq holds Scourge back just long enough for them to escape via the portal created by the Key.
Now, anyone with any understanding of Beast Wars will have a fair idea of who and what the Maximals are... but for the casual cinemagoer, or those who came to the brand through the Michael Bay movies, these robotic animals would have needed some explanation... and, since the movie doesn't even try to be faithful to the only explanation available - the Beast Wars toy range, TV show and, more recently, comics - it's likely to have been rather confusing for much of the audience. The planet is clearly not Cybertron, though many fans have presented the theory that it's a techno-organic Cybertron from the far-flung future. Ultimately, in the context of the story, it doesn't matter. Unicron devours the planet for its Energon, and it's never even referred to again.
When we next meet the main group of Maximals, toward the end of the movie, it's implied that more of them escaped their home, yet Airazor is the last of her group, while Primal only has Cheetor and Rhinox with him. What happened to the others is never explained, but it's perfectly obvious that there never were any others, because only this core group of four is ever seen. Hell, Airazor never even transforms, making it abundantly clear that the movie hit the limit of its budget before her robot mode - and any additional Maximals - could be created.
What's crazy is that Airazor is technically the audience's gateway character to the Maximals. She's the first Maximal to appear in the main story, coming to the aid of the Autobots as Scourge, Battletrap and Nightbird are trying to acquire the Transwarp Key after some human interference causes it to fire off a sky beam (which turns out to be conveniently invisible to humans and, credit where credit is due, at least it ain't a blue sky beam). In theory, we should be able to identify with and relate to her, yet all she really does is deliver exposition in beast mode, there's no sense of who she is as a character. She remains in beast mode as she accompanies the Autobots through about half the remaining runtime of the movie, regardless of the circumstances... We fans will assume she has a robot mode despite never seeing it, but the part of the audience who aren't familiar with TransFormers, let alone Beast Wars specifically, won't understand what this robotic bird is all about, and what sort of car she turns into. Here, too, fans have been trying to fill in the blanks, suggesting that she needs Optimus Primal's permission to transform... Which might make sense if her beast form was the size of a real, organic eagle of some kind, allowing her to blend in at a distance... but she's bigger in beast mode than some of the Autobots in robot mode.
The other beasts are brought into the story toward the end, only transform into robot mode for the climactic battle, and it's entirely possible (although strongly disputed by some fans) that Rhinox has not a single line of dialogue. Cheetor has perhaps a couple, while Primal has but a handful.
Bumblebee takes a back seat in this movie and, rather than speaking in snatches of radio, his dialogue is made up of lines from movies and TV shows, quoted in their entirety, which is substantially less interesting. As seen in the trailers, he's unceremoniously taken out by Scourge in the battle at the museum, and then his corpse is carted around by the Autobots... They even bring him along to Peru for no readily apparent reason, only for him to miraculously return during the final battle. There's supposedly a scene on the cutting room floor in which raw Energon in the earth, activated by either the Transwarp Key or by Unicron's arrival, re-energises him and grants him a slightly upgraded vehicle mode. It's still a Camaro, but now it has offroad tyres and a rollcage over its windscreen... None of which is ever either explained or even referenced.
Similarly, the way the movies have always played fast and loose with the abilities of individual Cybertronians to scan new disguises - sometimes multiple - is taken even further in Rise of the Beasts. Mirage is introduced as a Porsche 911 Carrera RS 3.8 but, when the Autobots first get together, he offers to transform into a variety of cars - including a Lamborghini Countach and a Formula 1 racing car (the film's one and only homage to Mirage's G1 vehicle mode) - as a means to encourage Noah to help the Autobots recover the Transwarp Key. He next disguises himself as a refuse truck - presumably using his holographic powers to project the parts of the vehicle that are in excess of his own mass but, again, this isn't explained, it just happens. Later on, he gifts Noah a part of himself that transforms into a multipurpose gauntlet and then, toward the end of the film, after he's wrecked by Scourge while trying to protect Noah, huge chunks of his body form an Iron Man-style exo-suit around Noah. If that weren't crazy enough, in one of the closing scenes, Noah has rebuilt Mirage back into his original Porsche form, using parts acquired by his dubious friend, Reek. The Bayverse films gave Cybertronians a constantly growing list of extra abilities to the point where, in The Last Knight, Bumblebee was apparently able to rebuild himself, Iron Giant-style, after being literally blown to pieces. The idea that any of the Autobots could reformat themselves as a suit of armour for a human really has no place in TransFormers fiction unless it can be explained. Fans have suggested that Mirage must be somehow 'special'... but there's no precedent other than the Marvel Comics story where Circuit Breaker refashions parts of captured Autobots and Decepticons into a giant robot 'suit' which she pilots or MECH from TransFormers Prime refashioning breakdown into an exo-suit for the injury Silas, and there's certainly no foreshadowing of this ability other than the gauntlet, which itself goes entirely without explanation. Most of the time, Mirage exists to be the rebellious one, and to make stupid jokes... such as his incredulous response to Noah describing him as "a work friend": "You've been inside me!". He's as cocky as the traditional Hot Rod, and even less endearing.
Much has been said about Optimus Prime's character arc in this film, and one of the few positive signs in the run-up to the movie's release was that Peter Cullen felt that Rise of the Beasts presented a version of Optimus that he was more comfortable with, versus the Bayverse psychopath. I can't say that I saw it myself. Prime was just as petulant and violent as the version from the earlier movies and, after Bumblebee was killed off, he stated plainly that he was going to "take off [Scourge's] head". Their final showdown was just like any and all of the final showdowns with Megatron/The Fallen/Sentinel Prime/Galvatron/Lockdown from the earlier movies, and really didn't cast Optimus in a particularly positive light. Many fans have jumped to his defense, saying that, sure, Bayverse Optimus may have been a violent nutcase, but Bumblebee's death at the hands of Scourge gives RotB Prime a very clear reason for wanting to kill Scourge... That's as maybe, but even the philosophy of "an eye for an eye" doesn't cover Prime dismembering, then decapitating Scourge so violently. The throwaway line about showing Scourge "the power of a Prime" was pure fanservice, but fell flat for me, because there was no indication of how Optimus Prime was suddenly able to beat Scourge, after being thoroughly trounced earlier. The scene immediately after the museum battle has Optimus flinging a set of rolling stock wheels as an expression of petulant anger, and he's utterly cynical throughout the movie without explanation or context, and even chastises Bumblebee and Mirage for being more trusting of humans than he is. I'm also a little confused about how Prime's injuries from the museum battle got 'healed': he's shown to be still damaged and sparking from his wounds in the immediate aftermath of the battle but, by the time they're in Peru, he's back to full strength...
Noah's story is fairly interesting, but underplayed. Supposedly, he's former soldier and a technical whizz, but never really gets to do anything technical... or even soldier-ish, really. The movie shows that his family are important to him - to the extent that he (a) gets involved in carjacking then (b) agrees to help save the world because of them - but I'm undecided as to whether they're too big a feature of the movie, or not big enough... Certainly, they end up being mostly irrelevant, apart from an impromptu pep talk from his younger brother in the final battle. Other than all that, the main problem with Noah is that he spends most of the movie with that iconic Dreamwave look of dull surprise on his face. By all accounts, Anthony Ramos is not a bad actor, and he has claimed to be a TransFormers fan who discovered the brand through Beast Wars, but none of that enthusiasm comes through in his performance because of the way the character was written, and because of the lack of cohesive story progression.
Elena comes off even worse... She's a two-dimensional character who exists purely to move the plot along more swiftly, providing the next waypoint for their travels, provide a bit of historical detail here and there, and 'translate' various glyphs. Her 'codebreaking' skills are ultimately meaningless, however, as the control panel she would have used to save the day ends up getting damaged, so Prime has to destroy the Transwarp Key instead. I'd like to think there's a version of the movie on the cutting room floor where she actually gets to do something significant, but I rather doubt it.
When the action shifts to Peru - thanks to Elena's convenient knowledge of anything and everything pertaining to the plot, and the timely arrival of Stratosphere, another Autobot with neither characterisation (unless you count coughing up one of his parts, similar to Jetfire in RotF) nor dialogue - we get a brief tourism promo followed by a rolling battle on the roads as the Autobots make their escape. After this, we get the full scene - featured in the trailers - in which the Autobots meet up with the Maximals at a small jungle waterfall. From here, the film rushes on to the much-vaunted scenes at Macchu Picchu, and then to the final battle, which is seemingly where most of the movie's CGI budget was wasted.
The battle is slightly more coherent than those of the Bayverse movies, but it's a close-run thing, because it involves the Autobots basically mincing legions of grey cut-and-paste drones - Freezer and Novakane, inexplicably extruded from the walls of Scourge's Transwarp portal structure - against a vast, grey landscape, battling with the remarkably grey beasts, with Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Arcee providing tiny hints of actual colour, while brown-and-beige Wheeljack blends in to the background and the largely grey Mirage tries to tackle Scourge by himself. The other two Terrorcons are swiftly despatched by the Autobots and Maximals, and there's never any sense that the odds are against them, even when Unicron dumps a load of Scorponok drones into the battlefield.
When Prime realises that destroying the key is the only way to save the Earth (and Cybertron), the explosion leads to the entire structure being sucked up into the portal. Optimus starts to get sucked in as well, but is caught by Noah, whose exo-suit is somehow strong enough to hold Prime down until Primal swings in. At this point, all three are suddenly unaffected by the gravity of the portal as they make their escape... even though the road they're travelling along is slowly being sucked into the portal. It's one of those scenes that fans describe as "bad ass", but which make no sense in the context of what's been happening in the movie, let alone in real life... And I gather this was a hastily-rewritten ending, when test screening audiences disapproved of Prime getting sucked into Unicron's grasp.
As I mentioned at the start, there was a great swell of effusive praise broadcast across the internet upon the movie's release... but even that seemed to struggle to really capture and explain why this was "the best TransFormers movie ever". The gaps in the movie - said to be the result of editing what could have been a four hour movie down to a little over two, and the result of more than ten teams of editors trying to create something watchable - are palpable. Footage used in the trailer was not in the movie. The chase scenes which were leaked as behind the scenes videos shot by fortunate tourists were not in the movie. The 'story' - another generic 'Search for the McGuffin', just like every Bayverse movie - had been edited down to the bare bones to keep it to a manageable runtime (the studio's main takeaway from the Bay films being that they were too long, not that they were juvenile, tone-deaf, inconsistent, incoherent trash). Fan chatter slowly started evolving, to the point where my point of view - that the movie was among the worst of the franchise, and a return to the old Bayverse formula of awkward 'humor', McGuffins, and lazy storytelling - became almost the norm. The main problem with the film was that the inclusion of the Maximals - particularly for so short a time and without any Predacons - had no real purpose in the story. The movie is called 'Rise of the Beasts'... but, other than increasing the number of good guys on the final battlefield, they're entirely unnecessary to the story. They add literally nothing. They could have been replaced with more Autobots, or the existing cast of Autobots could have been developed further. Likewise, moving to Peru was pointless other than for sheer spectacle and to boost tourism into the area... But the geography of the movie was typically Hollywoodised nonsense.
Rise of the Beasts is not a continuation from Bumblebee, though it does share the Bumblebee-as-Camaro design from the end of that movie, though it does feature a throwaway line from Optimus Prime to Bumblebee about a human who "was good to you". Setting the movie about ten years after Bumblebee isn't a problem per se, but introducing characters who weren't even seen in the brief Cybertron sequences, changing those that were so dramatically, and making Optimus Prime so cynical without providing any context is a huge failure in storytelling. There was one Decepticon included in an early scene that ended up on the cutting room floor, leaving no real sense of how the Autobots' secret war has been progressing before the Terrorcons arrive. In the final battle, the Autobots and Maximals took on the Terrorcons and legions of drones, outnumbered hundreds to one, and were not only victorious, but got through the battle without any losses, despite being absolutely creamed by the three Terrorcons alone in the museum battle. Here, again, the fans have tried to fill in the blanks, some claiming that there was a deleted scene in which Unicron strips them of their power, so they face the Autobots as equals at the end... yet there's nothing in their attitude in that final battle to suggest that. Probably the biggest mistake in the movie was the introduction of Unicron as the main villain. It'd be like Marvel starting their cinematic universe by making Avengers: Infinity War. Where do you go from there? Any other lead villain they choose to introduce now - Starscream, Megatron, Shockwave, Overlord, Jhiaxus or (heavens forfend) another take on The Fallen - is just filler material before Unicron returns. And, then, much like the animated movie from 1986, where do you go once Unicron is destroyed?
Perhaps even worse, the end of the movie shows Elena has made good progress in here career as a result of the adventure, and Noah is about to embark on a whole new adventure thanks to the implied crossover with GI Joe... However, nothing is said of the utter destruction of the museum that Elena used to work in, and there's a strong implication that Noah's difficulty in gaining employment was because GI Joe have been surveilling him and possibly even slandering him. Then, the fact that Noah was able to rebuild Mirage from the parts that formed his exo-suit and spares acquired by Reek is very much something out of the G1 cartoon.
Things I appreciated about the film..? There really aren't that many. While the CGI looked better on the big screen than it did in the trailers I watched on YouTube, it's still not a patch on the first movie, which is now 16 years old. Better eyes than mine identified robot parts clipping through each other, either due to cut-price CGI, or being last-minute crunch work on rewritten scenes by a beleaguered VFX studio. I noticed that Optimus Prime's transformation follows much the same pattern as the Studio Series 102BB toy, at least until you get to the legs, and it's always nice when the CGI looks and moves somewhat like the toys. However, just about all the others were either too complex in their transformations, or just had robot modes that were too far removed from their vehicle modes. While I didn't find either of the two human leads even remotely engaging, at least they weren't as whiny and entitled as Shia LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky, or as aggressively stupid as Mark Wahlberg's Cade Yeager.
It probably goes without saying that I somewhat regret having watched Rise of the Beasts. That the director stated so plainly that the studio don't care about continuity says everything you need to know about the absolute state of the TransFormers movie franchise. It would honestly be better if Hasbro would approach Paramount with a concept for a toyline already in development, and get them to craft a story to promote it. Letting Paramount come up with stories, sometimes mashing two or more together, has resulted in some of the most worthless, pointless cinematic experiences I've ever had. Seeing Rise of the Beasts was my first trip to the cinema in months, on a free ticket from my best mate... and I genuinely wish it had been more exciting, if only because he spent money on it.
I'd been saying for ages before the movie came out that I had a horrible feeling that Steven Caple Jr. - a relatively new director - would be the scapegoat if RotB turned out to be a dumpster fire. Given that his first couple of movies were so well-received, I'd hate for this misstep to derail his career, but it's clear that this is a job he should never have agreed to take.
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