Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Review: The Meeting Between Mirage and The Baby Smacks of Spielberg
Cast: Anthony Ramos, Dominique Fishback
Director: Steven Caple Jr.
Where We Watched: In Theaters
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts takes up the story of the restart, showing a new story arc, and continues to give off the essence of the 80s animated series. It was in that decade when the Hasbro toy company launched this collection, becoming a referent of popular culture. Forty years later Transformers is synonymous with blockbusters Thanks to its cinematographic trajectory and in this sense, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts fulfills what was promised and will not disappoint its followers. The Transformers franchise recovers its name in the title to offer the second installment of this new saga, after Bumblebee (2018). Before going to the movies, it should be remembered that these Autobots have little to do with the five films directed by Michael Bay.
A breathtaking sunset, the return home of Captain Lennox, Sam, and Mikhaela finally together after the crazy adventure they had, Optimus Prime’s powerful voiceover, and Linkin Park introducing the end credits. “What have I done?” Michael Bay probably wondered that June sixteen years ago, after delivering the first chapter of Transformers to the world. It was 2007, it was Shia Labeouf with Megan Fox, Optimus vs. Megatron, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe had yet to enter the postmodern cinematic landscape. Today, while Hollywood is witnessing the dawn of a fifth phase of the MCU, Bay’s robots – although orphaned by their creator – are back in force on the scene. A prequel/reboot awakening (?) which, entrusted to the hands of Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II), follows the successful Bumblebee of 2018.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Review: The Story Plot
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts picks up the story of Bumblebee seven years later, in 1994. Like its predecessor, the film is full of references to the popular culture of the decade. In addition to the nods to Sonic and Super Mario, its excellent soundtrack will be in charge of placing us on the map. Hip-hop legends like the Wu-Tang Clan draw the Brooklyn of the nineties through their music. One of its songs sounds at the beginning to start strong and introduce us to its protagonist, Noah Díaz (Anthony Ramos).
Noah is an electronics expert and a former soldier in the United States Army. He is unemployed and must take care of his little brother, who suffers from a disease that he cannot afford to treat. Desperate to make money, he ends up taking a job from a neighborhood friend, Reek (Tobe Nwigwe), and they plan to steal a high-end Porsche, which naturally turns out to be the Transformer Mirage. On the other hand, we have the co-star, Elena (Dominique Fishback), an anthropologist who works as an intern in a laboratory for the conservation of historical pieces. Unlike the human characters in the old Transformers, this latest installment strives to give them a meaning within the film’s narrative, beyond running from one place to another while the battle between the aliens occurs. In this sense, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts follows the line of Bumblebee, but with a lower result.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is set after the events of Bumblebee. After a prologue set in the mists of time, which serves to make us understand how robots have inhabited our planet for thousands of years, we find ourselves in New York in 1994. Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos), a boy of South American origins, listens to De Soul and the Wu-Tang Clan. He is a former army soldier, lives with his mother and brother, sick and in need of care, and is looking for a job that he can’t find. So, he tries to give himself up to theft. And one evening, while he is trying to break into a Porsche, he finds himself inside a robot, a Transformer, the likable and gascon Mirage. Meanwhile, Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback), who works in an archaeological museum on Ellis Island, finds herself dealing with a find that seems to come from Egyptian art but has signs that are not hieroglyphics. She too will be brought to know the Transformers…
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Review and Analysis
It all started as a game. A great game by Hasbro and Takara Tomy, almost forty years ago. It all started when we were kids; when wandering around the house, we loved handling toy cars, trucks, small airplanes, and miniature helicopters, to observe them transform before our eyes, with sincere amazement and hunger for “magic”. It began in 1984, and the great Transformers game has evolved ever since. Over time it has changed shape and size, transmigrating from the physicality of the playful object to that of manga comics, to then flow into the audiovisual sector assuming a serial (Beast Wars, Transformers Car Robots) and cinematographic guise. It all started as a game and ultimately never really stopped being one.
At first glance, after all, even Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the usual trademark toy. And the first and main element of custom lies in its plot. Inserted perfectly within the typical franchise dynamics – MCU at the forefront – also the feature film by Steven Caple Jr.in fact, it provides for a remodeling/updating of the “Lore” to which it belongs; frame of a picture already predisposed to ancient legends, lost artifacts and more or less daring encounters between a young human and an Autobot, ready to embark on amazing adventures. Sam Witwicky and Noah Diaz, Bumblebee and Mirage, AllSpark and Chiave Transcurvatura are then elements which, beyond archetypal labels, are in effect at the limits of interchangeability; symbols of an apparent narrative static which is instead a functional affiliation mechanism. The beam of light charged with guiding the audience to true home.
Transformers, however, as the mantra of the saga likes to repeat, has always hidden “more than what we saw”. The operation itself is the fruit of a vision, of the combined illumination of two authors such as Bay and Spielberg; with the first table from the very first moments to grasp part of the intuitions of the second and convert them into a personal, robotic war of the worlds. Today, although stripped of the direction of the explosive US filmmaker now producer, the franchise has not lost its Spielbergian inspiration. And if Bumblebee “personified”, not too covertly, an ET of the XXI century, the adventurous contaminations à la Indiana Jones the awakening is explicitly “denounced” by the protagonist of the work himself.
However, the scene is once again dominated by Bay‘s poetics/legacy, which, revisited in retrospect, still retains the inspiration of the year 0 of the Transformers. A poetic aimed at the mechanization of the imaginary; within a universe in which, given the reciprocal permeability between men and robots – merged into the (for now) integral transhumanism of the Noah-cyborg of the awakening, even the cinematographic image can only undergo the same process. Just as man does not create the machine, but merges with it according to a harmonious and almost inevitable complementarity, the same does the image. Into an indivisible whole. For Bay everything is machine and everything is human. And in a world that she thinks more and more artificially, all that remains is to wonder if Cybertron is not by now something more than a remote celestial body evoked by the imagination of a narrator.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts does not disappoint. After six films are released in theaters, the viewer who goes to the theaters to see Transformers knows the dish that they are going to be served. Director Steven Caple Jr. offers more fun and emotion to the saga while maintaining the unbridled action offered by Michael Bay. The special effects look more fluid than in previous installments and the robots transmit a soul that their previous versions lacked, a job that beyond the CGI has been achieved thanks to the great cast of voices that interpret them. Narratively, it continues to make the same mistakes, but this new restart is committed to giving humans value beyond being simple drivers. The repeated structure and the predictable script prevent me from giving this installment more note, but it is an entertaining feature film, full of action and surely the best adaptation of the Autobots that has been made on the big screen. The Transformers franchise continues to move in the right direction after Bumblebee and is back to stay.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts Review: Final Words
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts does not disappoint. Director Steven Caple Jr. offers more fun and emotion while maintaining the unbridled action that Michael Bay offered. The special effects look more fluid than in previous installments and the robots transmit a soul that their previous versions lacked, a job that beyond the CGI has been achieved thanks to the great cast of voices that interpret them. Narratively, it continues to make the same mistakes, but this new restart is committed to giving humans value beyond being simple drivers. In the new film, a reboot but not really, all of this comes back only in fits and starts. There are new characters, a new tone, slightly more comical but also more moving, but the film is mostly made up of long robot fights, sometimes way too long.
