Critique: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Most Transformers films are too long, overstuffed with padding whilst dragging out moments and music and dramatic pauses. This one was NOT like that. It wasn’t longer than it needed to be. Really, I can’t express what a relief this was.

 

In this film, Noah and Elena get caught up with the Maximals and Autobots who have to stop a giant space robot from eating Earth. The Maximals are alien robots who transform into animals whilst Autobots transform into cars.

 

*****SPOILERS*****

 

The name of the film is rather misleading. Rise to situation

            ‘Rise’ implies gaining power. They didn’t. All the Maximals did was win a fight and then go on their merry way back to normality. So ‘Rise’ is misleading. There is that saying where people ‘rise to the occasion’. Yet this implies they weren’t worthy or capable before but they are now. This doesn’t describe the Maximals. It describes Noah and Elena, sure, but the title is ‘Rise of the Beasts’, not ‘Rise of the Two Humans who are Assisting the Beasts’.

            Considering the title specifies ‘Beasts’, one would expect the film to be about Beasts. The film started out this way on an alien planet with the Maximals. That was a promising start. But most of the film was bout boring humans and the even more boring Autobots. It’s like how the franchise introduced dinosaur and dragon transformers but these were hardly present, either. This is a disappointment.

 

Noah makes a good point about why an alien has a Mexican accent. Expanding this idea, why does one have a Chinese accent? Why would most have American accents?

This could be justified by saying they learnt English from a specific group with a specific accent so they have that accent. That would make sense.

But most of the Maximals live in the wild, only having contact with a native tribe in Peru. My theory therefore falls apart because the Maximals have American accents and the native tribe most likely don’t even known English in the first place.

 

There were six main positives.

One was that the transformation looked clearer and more precise than in previous movies. The process was thus more convincing than it has been before.

When Noah and Elena are pushing on a heavy stone tomb lid, Elena almost screams. “Are you even pushing?” That cracked me up.

Calling the leader of the Maximals ‘Optimus Primal’ is clever, considering the leader of the Autobots is ‘Optimus Prime’.

Optimus comes out with one of the best lines: “I’m going to take his key and then take off his head.”

At one point, a missile is launched at a van-shaped Autobot. They slide sideways and open up both sliding doors so that the missile passes through. This was a great detail.

When Noah assumes the Mexican Autobot knows Spanish just because of his accent, the Autobot calls him racist. This had me laughing because Noah is Hispanic and even he’s taken aback with confusion by this.

 

There are some problems with consistency.

The Maximals say they moved the second half of the key. This lacks consistency. Considering the cave and passages the key had been in were too small to fit the Maximals, how could they have done this? Yes, they have a bond with a human tribe. But surely then they would have said ‘our tribe moved it’ or at least ‘we had the key moved’. Such a simple fix.

Noah had no bruises. Then the bad robot picked him up, not touching Noah’s face (thus being unable to bruise his face). Then he lands on his face with enough impact to bruise his face. Yet we see Noah’s bruises as he’s being dropped. He has bruises before he’s experienced the only thing in the sequence that could even bruise him. This lacks consistency.

My brother didn’t want to watch this film with me because apparently the timeline doesn’t fit with the original films. This would be quite a severe consistency absence. I don’t remember much of the lore from the previous films (their length distorted my memories) and their too long to rewatch just so I can comment on my brother’s comment. So I have to leave it open.

 

Optimus Prime called the Decepticons evil. I don’t remember him describing the Decepticons as evil in the other films (which take place after this one).

If he doesn’t call them evil (to which I’m convinced), that means something drastic happens between the time this film is set and the rest of the films. If something that drastic happened, why wasn’t it important enough for it to be mentioned in the other films?

Also, Optimus talks about having new allies, even though we see neither Noah nor the Maximals in the other films. That also suggests something drastic happens, important enough to change perceptions but never spoken about?

 

This was a good film. It wasn’t amazing. It’s not something I’d sit down to specifically watch again. I did enjoy it, though, and I’ll anticipate the rest of this series of films.