To paraphrase Dan Olson’s excellent NFT video essay Line Goes Up, we’re going to have to deal with a lot of vocabulary and a lot of complexity in this review. Some of it will fill some of you with a nostalgic glow and some of it will sound like white noise and make your head hurt. What you do need to know is that you don’t need to know or care about any of it. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is going to rock on regardless so you might as well enjoy the ride.

You wouldn’t like planet-munching big bad Unicron (Colman Domingo) when he’s hangry. He has a tendency to wipe out civilisations. Maximal leader Apelinq fought bravely to protect his home planet from Unicron and his Terrorcon sidekicks but ultimately sacrificed himself in battle with Scourge to allow the other Maximals – Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) at their helm – to escape the surface before Unicron chowed down. The Maximals fled to earth where they kept the Transwarp Key from the Terrorcons’ grasp until pesky human curiosity ruined everything…

Something that studios fail to grasp about the Transformers franchise is quite how little the humans matter in these films. We could happily live without them and enjoy the big robots going crash and smash and making that pleasing whirring sound while we munch popcorn and forget about our lives for a couple of hours. Director Steven Caple Jr. and his five-man writing team clearly didn’t get that memo. Fortunately, these humans are endearing so we can almost forgive the time stolen from the robot on robot fun.

Our Sam Witwicky for 2023 (but existing in 1994) is Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) a former-military electronics whizz who now lives with his mum and little brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez) in a Brooklyn walk-up. Noah is desperate for money to settle a mounting hospital bill so Kris can continue essential sickle cell anaemia treatment. After striking out in his search for legitimate work, he turns to friend and local ‘entrepreneur’ Reek (Tobe Nwigwe) for a riskier way to raise the cash.

Meanwhile, on Ellis Island, museum researcher Elena (Dominique Fishback) – frustrated by her boss continually taking credit for her expertise – takes a risk of her own. Intrigued by a falcon-shaped artefact with distinctive markings and a mysterious provenance, she sneaks a closer look after hours and sets the dominos falling towards an epic intergalactic adventure. We’re on a post-Bumblebee timeline for this prequel so there are giant alien robots hiding among us. And thanks to the beacon Elena accidentally activates, they’re about to reunite.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts takes inspiration from the Beast Wars storyline so we’re treated to some rather lovely looking organic/mech creatures in the form of the Maximals, a stunted backstory and a whole lot of lore which Michelle Yeoh-voiced warrior falcon Airazor explains, with limited success. Bee is discreetly sidelined to allow one particularly zeitgeisty Autobot to roll out with Noah trapped inside rapidly rethinking the criminal way of life and staggered by the shapes that this Porsche Carrera can throw.

Every sci-fi blockbuster needs a mythical object and this time the MacGuffin is that Transwarp Key; a powerful glowing doodad that opens portals through space and time and will be dropped at crucial moments or waved in front of baddies infuriatingly often. But it doesn’t really matter. None of this really matters. The important thing is that our leads are likeable, the daft stakes are entertaining, the soundtrack is rousing and the robots all make those transformy sounds lots of times which, honestly, is always the best bit…

Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) is sceptical about people again but allows Elena’s deductive skills to lead the gang to Peru with Scourge (Peter Dinklage) and the Terrorcons at their heels ready for the inevitable end-of-level boss battle to save the world. The verdant, swooningly beautiful aerial shots in this segment revive a flagging narrative just in time for a conclusion which allows Noah’s purloined Porsche – the crowd-pleasing new bot Mirage (Pete Davidson) – to stop spitting one-liners long enough to show that his tin man has a heart of gold.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a perfectly middling film. It doesn’t quite recapture the charm of 2018’s Bumblebee but it’s not Age of Extinction garbage either. Steven Caple Jr. and the visual effects team manage to realise an amiable action movie with action you can actually follow and enough straightforward lensing to figure out who is who without contorting yourself into a pretzel. The humour is buoyant and the music genuinely uplifting (if a bit familiar) meaning the excessive runtime isn’t too painful. And Bee eventually gets his time to shine so we can even forgive the convoluted plot.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts opens across UK cinemas on June 8

REVIEW OVERVIEW
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
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Emily Breen began writing for HeyUGuys in 2009. She favours pretzels over popcorn and rarely watches trailers as she is working hard to overcome a compulsion to ‘solve’ plots. Her trusty top five films are: Betty Blue, The Red Shoes, The Princess Bride, The Age of Innocence and The Philadelphia Story. She is troubled by people who think Tom Hanks was in The Philadelphia Story and by other human beings existing when she is at the cinema.
transformers-rise-of-the-beasts-reviewWith likable leads, coherent action and the requisite transformery blocks busting, this is a fun film free from the franchise's worst tendencies. However, it lacks the heart and focus of the Bumblebee film.