Flasz On Film

Ever since completing the “Witwicky Trilogy” (comprising of Transformers, Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen and Transformers: Dark of the Moon), Paramount’s ambition became to turn their portfolio of Hasbro-branded properties into a shared universe akin to the wildly successful MCU. They probably hired a good bunch of highly paid creatives and locked them in a room with a sole mission to reverse engineer the Marvel Cinematic Universe and to come up with a formula that would take their already high grossing properties (most Transformers movies earned more than a billion dollars’ worth of box office take) into the stratosphere. They looked at Avengers, the Iron-Man and Captain America movies and decided they wanted to imitate what Marvel had done. 

Congratulations, Paramount! You’ve done it! You have successfully engineered an imitation of what Marvel had – a budding shared universe based on Hasbro-branded toys. Problem is, as Transformers: Rise of the Beasts clearly indicates, everyone will be able to tell that what this movie is, is just that – an imitation. Moreover, it is an imitation of something that is already artistically compromised and culturally unsustainable in the long run.  

Therefore, I believe that anyone who wishes to venture into this movie, should come armed with suitably low expectations because, contrary to what diehard fans and paid-for shills would have you believe, this newest entry into a franchise that suffers from memory loss affecting its sense of artistic identity is – just like its immediate predecessor Bumblebee – a veritable smorgasbord of trite clichés assembled by corporate consensus underpinned by what could easily be a mathematically-derived algorithm aiming for mass cultural appeal. After all, the lesson of The Last Knight was that a movie with a price tag of 200 million dollars with requisite marketing budget needs to make a billion dollars to look profitable and worth investing into what – based on a mid-credit scene at the end of the film – is going to be a Hasbro Shared Universe.  

How exactly does Rise of the Beasts go about increasing the likelihood of making a billion dollars exactly? Logically speaking, you can do that by appealing to as wide an audience as possible and if you know anything about statistics (or maybe just know what a Gaussian bell curve looks like), you can now imagine that what you must do to achieve this goal is to appeal to the average viewer. Problem is that the average viewer doesn’t exist. It’s a statistical construct – a person who laughs at base-level humour, identifies with at least three sub-demographics based on ethnicity, political sway and age and who also happens not to mind sitting in crowded spaces in the dark for extended periods of time looking at wholly animated sequences where robots they most likely won’t recognize engage in battles with other robots they don’t recognize for way longer than is even remotely acceptable.  

That’s what Rise of the Beasts is – a movie engineered to appeal to what Paramount calculated is an average viewer who wouldn’t mind watching robots so much that they would happily come back for more. Unfortunately, this might not happen because the movie is just not good enough. In fact, it is pretty terrible as it offers nothing but a bouquet of worn tropes we have seen in countless other populist branded blockbusters engineered in a similar way, some of which worked better because they arrived at where they were through a more organic narrative progression spanning multiple movies, and most of which were massive financial gambles Paramount wouldn’t be happy to make at all.  

So, what we have is a pair of unlikely heroes – a predictably down-on-his-luck Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) and a sassy artifact researcher Elena (Dominique Fishback – one of whom discovers that a car he wanted to steal is a transformer, whereas the other finds out that a mysterious ancient artifact she was asked to identify is in fact a piece of alien technology. This brings the two into the midst of a conflict between Maximals (robots that look like animals whose last remnants chose to flee to Earth and evade annihilation) and Terrorcons, a horde of robotic minions working for a big baddie Unicron who waltzes around the galaxy eating planets rich in Energon. And because this whole affair takes place on Earth, Autobots who also sought refuge there from Decepticons (as delineated in the previous film in the series) are dragged into the fray. Thus, the stage is set for Earth to become the final stand in the fight between scrappy underdog robots and their human affiliates, against a seemingly unstoppable evil horde led by a sinister trophy hunter Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage). Predictable stuff. In fact, if you can excuse the preposterousness of the Transformers terminology, which may be more difficult than you might think, you should be able to imagine that what you are dealing with here is an archetype reduced to practice without much effort, let alone original thought. It honestly feels as though Paramount, with Steven Caple Jr. (the mastermind behind Creed II) on the hook for this, copied over Warner’s DCEU homework and signed with their name without realizing this homework had been copied already by other people too. 

Look, there is no dancing around it – Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is so poorly conceptualized and so lazily put together that it makes me retroactively like Michael Bay Transformers movies all that much more. And they’re not that great either, if you must know. This entire film is an unbridled mess of committee-agreed tropes assembled in the hope they would all add up to something resembling a successful blockbuster. Well, they don’t. What they amount to is a boring and chaotic mess that looks like a collection of video game cutscenes. In fact, the movie feels as though it was written by people whose only exposure to narrative writing and world-building comes from the world of gaming anyway. It is brutal.  

Quite frankly, there is very little I can say without immediately descending into poop-swinging and name-calling because there is absolutely nothing positive I can say about this movie as a whole and even about its discreet constituent elements. Not because the acting is poor. Not because the special effects are not up to snuff. Not because the story is unengaging. It’s just I have seen it all before. In fact, I have seen it all before when it was new and fresh and then I have seen it time and again as these different shared universes attempted to do the exact same thing as this movie is trying – which is to try to engineer a flash in the pan – and then I have seen it a number of times since when it was already stale and borderline impossible to sit through.  

Hurtful as it may be, Rise of the Beasts encapsulates all the most infuriating and uninspired aspects of what makes a modern blockbuster what it is. There is no escaping the fact that when you are watching this movie, you are interacting with a product specifically engineered to sell toys and make money. It is almost as if nobody even cared about hiding their intentions. And I’m not delusional either. I’m perfectly aware that all blockbusters are put together with the aim to make money at the box office. They are products and I am the consumer. But at least some tentpole releases do tend to smuggle some authorial personality into their DNA, elevate the experience with some artistic conviction, or at the very least offer a modicum of originality that can successfully whisk me away from my reality and inhabit an escapist headspace for two hours at a time.  

Unfortunately, this is not a blockbuster of that kind, but rather a cheap knock-off that looks like one from afar, but upon close inspection you can see immediately where it differs from other more successful movies of similar ilk. Originality. Attention to detail. Directorial conviction. They are all absent without leave and what you get as a result is a movie that doesn’t even try to hide the fact it was manufactured in a factory. This movie is a product whose all fundamental building blocks originate not from a desire to tell a good story or to entertain the viewer in a refreshing or inspired way, but from a base-level desire to sell toys and to build a shared universe at all costs. 

As I said in the opening: congratulations are in order. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is exactly the kind of product I’d expect would come out of a series of Zoom meetings where a dozen of highly paid Paramount producers decided how to make a blockbuster that makes a billion dollars without having a good leading idea to start with. Nobody cared about what this movie was on the inside, but rather what it should accomplish at the box office. Therefore, I also don’t care about its McGuffin. I don’t care about the plight of the Autobots. I don’t care about the scintilla of drama dangling somewhere between the set pieces. And I don’t care about these set pieces either, especially because nobody even tried to hide the fact they all look unfinished, untextured, unlit and unpolished.  

There you have it, dies and gentlemen. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is an imitation of a Marvel movie that sports all its innate shortcomings and doesn’t invest any time into working on its likeability. After all, its creators are not interested in having the film speak for itself, which means they could easily replace genuine character work with stereotypical stencils, construct the villain so uninspired that it made Steppenwolf from Justice League look like Darth Vader in comparison and have everything hinge on the wow factor of set pieces that look rendered on a PC and detached from any form of tactile reality.  

It’s a waste of money, time and effort whose only tangible footprint on the culture at large is that it will make people see the Michael Bay-directed entries in the franchise with rose-tinted glasses. Sure, they too were capitalist products resplendent in rah-rah jingoism and suffused with crass humour. But they at least had more personality than this pathetic excuse of a movie that makes watching a turd flushing in the toilet an exciting cinematic experience in comparison.