Film Review – Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023)

Franchise fatigue is real and it is getting a little out of hand now. If you’d told us a mere few years ago that our collective obsessions with the overbearing power of continued stories in these opposing cinematic universes would become too overwhelming, even for the most ardent of fans of said series? Well, even for the most ardent of fans of said series, we’d probably have agreed with you but still, even saying it out loud fills us with embarrassment in a strange way but you can never have too much of a good thing, can you?

In the last year or two, some of the biggest monoliths in the franchise game have started to strain under the weight of both expectation and diminishing returns – the MCU is floundering somewhat, the Fast & Furious is seemingly only fast and furious outside of the US, and DC’s continued shambolic attempts with their most prized assets, (Batman aside) and Terminator, Wizarding World, and Star Wars (at least on the big screen) are faltering. Even James Bond is in something of flux after Daniel Craig’s departure.

Well, such a franchise that seemingly won’t die off is Transformers, with installment No.7 swinging like a beast into cinemas once again in hopes of regeneration but, if the previous episodes are anything to go by, they should have been powered down before this one. 2018’s superior spin-off Bumblebee should have been the real guiding light to its continued relevance, and while Rise of the Beasts follows some seven years after the events of that film, it’s light years away from it in quality .

Simply put, this will go down as the biggest failure of the summer, and for all the goodwill thrown at it and its creatives and cast, it’s even more of a mess than its predecessors. A loud, nonsensical, exhausting, stagnant mess. Set in 1994 and seemingly making use of some of the all-time best music, Rise of the Beasts sees the Autobots, led as ever by Optimus Prime, having to face their biggest foe: a planet-devouring supervillain known as Unicron, who has sent his robot henchpeople to Earth to recover a relic capable of both destroying the universe but also sending our heroes back to their home on Cybertron.

Directed this time by Steven Caple Jnr (Michael Bay takes a backseat again), a hugely talented filmmaker in his own right, is saddled with the mistakes of the past and is given no room whatsoever to make his own mark here, suffocated by the continued need to be as brash, nauseating and ridiculous in the worst possible way. Indeed, even the winning human pair at the centre of the film, Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback, are left floundering under the CGI debris falling around them, the ridiculous narrative and leaden dialogue they have to spew, so, despite their excellent diverse casting (one of the film’s best decisions), they struggle to make any impact.

Audiences who still get a kick out of such tomfoolery will no doubt be entertained but we just don’t see how: the standard for such films has changed and Transformers, for all the technological wizardry available to it, still fails to do the basics right, a sin that cannot be tolerated, no matter how much money, and Bayhem, you throw at the screen. Autobots! Disband!

★

Action, Sci-Fi | 2023 | 12A | Paramount Pictures | In cinemas June 8th | Dir: Steven Caple Jnr | Anthony Ramos, Dominique Fishback, Toby Nwigwe, voices of Peter Cullen, Ron Perlman, Michelle Yeoh, Pete Davidson, Peter Dinklage, Colman Domingo