I Just Saw

Full disclosure time. These are the reasons why I went to see this film:

• I wanted to see how it stacked up in 3D.
• I couldn’t find Michael Bay’s name in the credits on Wikipedia. (Though he is a producer.)
• It’s of an acceptable length at 2 hours. (Still too long really. A film like this should be 90 minutes. But still, acceptable.)
• Robot Harambe. (Okay just kidding, but come on, they HAD to know what they were doing with that robot gorilla on the poster. Filmmakers don’t live in a continuum outside of memes.)

Also, I have an affection for schlock, and Transformers as a concept is the schlockiest of that ignoble genre. (By this point in cinema, “schlock” is definitely a genre with its own context and history.)

To explain my other reasons, although I’m not exactly anti-Bay, I associate Bay-helmed Transformers films with vacuous bombast and adolescent maleness at a nigh-on painful level. Really all his films, but Transformers under his parentage is a neat distillation of his aesthetic.

Women and property framed in much the same way, grating ethnic caricatures, deafening effects, overlong runtimes (Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) is 2 hours and 45 minutes; for context, that’s longer than both The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); for a f*g Hasbro movie), “you’ll be nothing but Sentinel’s bitch”, gay panic jokes… You know, that sort of thing.

And you know what? Some of this counts as good (or at least funny) schlock. To my mind, one of the best bits of unintentional comedy on film is when Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), the last one I saw before Rise of the Beasts, wraps up with Optimus Prime brutally killing an antagonist while he’s panicking and pleading before, stood in the ruins of a city no doubt honeycombed with the dead and dying, he delivers a lecture on being good and honourable and protecting people.

(In a strange way, it could work as a satirical metaphor for the West’s foreign policies. Perhaps Bay is a secret artiste?) Still, sitting through a three-hour, Bay-helmed Transformers film in 2D would have been so antithetical to my own tastes that I might as well have watched Book Club: The Next Chapter (2023) or Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (2023). Rise of the Beasts, I thought, I can manage.

The current debates around artificial intelligence have caused critics in the arts to go into a lather of bon mots about how this or that populist money-spinner could have been made by AI. A theatre critic used it to denounce We Will Rock You’s recent return to the West End, and another has made the same remark about this new Transformers.

And to be fair, Rise of the Beasts may well be the type of film that will one day be outsourced to algorithms (it kind of has been already; no one’s slaving in a garret over the plots of these movies, they’re just putting tropes in a blender). This’ll be a shame for fans of schlock like me since part of what makes the genre so entertaining are the human touches, or rather out-of-touches, those moments of poor artistic judgement that only a human could make.

The story is set in 1994 for no reason that I can discern other than that nostalgia’s in right now. A reference to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch is made seemingly just to remind us of the period setting. A gigantic, sentient interstellar anus that I shall heretofore call Robo Bussy gobbles up planets to feed its core and in the prologue attacks the beasts of the title, robot animals with names like Apelinq, Rhinox, and Cheetor.

He’s assisted by the evil Terrorcons, led by Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage of all people), who end up coming to earth to find a MacGuffin and are opposed by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), Mirage (Pete Davidson), and others. As well as a couple of humans who are of course dragged along for the ride.

Rise of the Beasts is on one level a massive improvement over Bay’s films. If those were dirty-minded and nihilistically violent children’s movies, this new one is a more traditional children’s film. Out are the racist caricatures (the film at one point seems to make an indirect apology for these, via a Mexican-accented robot), the pornographic sensibility regarding cars and women, and the endless scenes of cityscapes reduced to rubble.

Meanwhile, Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos), a Brooklyn mechanic and former soldier, is a much more likeable protagonist than Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky ever was. And although Dominique Fishback is a little flat as archaeologist Elena Wallace, she’s at least a professional actress and not just a catwalk model who can barely deliver the lines but was hired to be leered at.

Really, though, the “human drama” is as irrelevant as it ever was and when the film tries for sincerity it’s just cringeworthy. In retrospect, the prologue is my favourite part of the film simply because there are no humans in it.

That’s what I don’t understand about these live-action Transformers films. I’d be absolutely delighted to watch a 90-minute cartoon about giant mechanical gorillas, hawks, motorbikes, trucks, etcetera engaged in an interplanetary war, not a human in sight. And I think a lot of other people would too.

So why are we fooling around with Sam Witwicky, Noah Diaz, or whomever? What are elements of social realism (the film alludes to racial and class struggles in the vaguest possible manner) doing in a Transformers film, especially when it has nothing to say about them? It almost feels kind of insulting to include authentic New York hip-hop groups like Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest in a toyetic product like this; it’s a bit like having characters in the Bratz movie recite classic feminist poetry.

All in all, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is about as good a film as you can expect from this franchise in 2023. Which I’m sure says it all as to whether or not you want to see it.