Transformers 7: Rise of the B-- Unicron again I guess (Patreon)

Transformers: Beast Wars, for you neophytes, is one of the most beloved products of the whole Transformers franchise, the first of the non-comics media that even adults could look at and go, “Wait, this is actually pretty good.” It had snappy dialogue. It had season-long plot lines. It had a much smaller set of characters with distinct personality traits and relatable motivations. It even had the first major heel-face turn* character with Blackarachnia, who over the course of the series realizes the error of her chosen faction’s ways and changes sides (yes, the face turn is a womz! And she doesn’t die!) Nostalgia for Beast Wars is much more contained to a very specific age group than the franchise at large (namely the thirty six-year-old person I married and people within about an 18-month age range of him), so while at this point it makes sense as a next step for the live action films to take, it probably needed the mainstream characters to anchor it to everyone who wasn’t an American boy born in 1986.

My first take away from Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is that the eponymous Beasts really don't need to be in their own movie--the trailer framed it like it was going to be a sort of 70's era-X-men battle where two good guy factions have a misunderstanding, battle for a single scene, then realize they're on the same side before teaming up to fight the greater evil together (this sums up Black Panther's initial meeting with pretty much everyone). This is not what happens in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. The Beasts are fairly incidental to their own plot, doing an action during the prologue and then showing up again at around the 60% mark to provide a positive example of Cybertronian/human relations. I don’t remember Rhinox and Cheetor having any lines, and fan-favorites Rattrap and Blackarachnia aren’t even here.

No, this is not a Beast Wars movie, this is… a Unicron movie, noteworthy for several reasons: 1) didn't we just do that? Like two movies ago? 2) Unicron is never so much as mentioned in the main body of the Beast Wars cartoon and 3) I thought they were doing the whole "This is a prequel to the Bay movies, totally not a reboot!" thing. As I'm explaining Unicron’s involvement in Transformers5 : The Last Knight to my husband, an avid Transformers collector who has seen maybe ten minutes of the Marky Mark era and missed out on Stanley Tucci’s Merlin and Anthony Hopkins’s “Witwickans”, imagine my confusion when Unicron shows up before any Autobots do. In the Bayverse, Unicron is… Earth. As in our Earth. The plot of Transformers 5 is basically "keep Unicron from transforming, because we are the fleas hitching a ride on this giant beast." How does this square?

Well, it doesn't. Unicron is here and he's the big bad and also he's not only not Earth, he's not even in the same galaxy. It's not only a Unicron movie, it's a Space bridge movie!** The Space bridge, a plot device used with rapturous frequency in the original cartoon, is used in this movie in much the way the Allspark is used in the 2007 film; it is our Macguffin, we have to preserve it or Cybertron is doomed/lost forever, so we spend the entire movie trying to save it. This Macguffin is even broken into two parts (in the 2007 movie the two parts are Sam’s glasses and the Allspark itself) but in the end they are left with no choice but to destroy it to save the dumb, stupid humans who are also our friends, because hey, we aren't that different after all.

This is also the first of the Transformers movies, one of the rare instances in all of Transformers media, when Optimus is not only kind of the main robot character, he also has a character arc; the Optimus of this movie starts out less "we must protect the humans" and more "fuck them kids." He's not an anti-human racist per se, he's just  not yet on board with this whole "protecting the humans" thing that defines him to the point of parody in pretty much every other version of the franchise. Earth is one of just many waypoints in their Forever War against--well, this week it's the Predacons, Decepticons are taking the week off--and the humans are just kind of a minor, if non-hostile, obstacle. Optimus Prime is battle hardened and world-weary, having lost sight of why he is fighting in the first place. It has turned him a bit, shall we say, "fuck you, got mine."

Enter Optimus Primal, woke king and protector of the indigenous of Peru (no, really). It's never explained why the Maximals take animal form as it is in Beast Wars, a problem that could have been solved with a single line***, but whatever; the Maximals don't have a misunderstanding-fight with the Autobots a la Chris Claremont-era Marvel, but immediately team up with them after a millisecond of tension. Optimus Primal is surprised and disappointed at his namesake’s indifference to humans as he's been a protector to this indigenous tribe in Peru for thousands of years. This should in theory perhaps make Optimus Primal all too aware of human barbarity as these are, in his own words, the "last descendants" of the tribe that's been allied with the Maximals for millennia, meaning he would have borne witness to that whole conquistador thing, but best not to think about it too hard. He’s disappointed in Optimus Prime, but what can I say, never meet your heroes.

Aside from providing an example for Optimus to model himself after with regard to that whole “til’ all are one” thing, another popular franchise catchphrase that we hadn’t seen in the movies yet, the Maximals don’t really serve much plot purpose—even the discovery and use of the Macguffins are basically 90% the human characters. Instead Optimus Primal almost functions as a vector through which we correct past mistakes of the franchise; he respects the indigenous, he understands the value of life despite the short lifespans of his human buddies, hell he even goes out of his way to correct the racist ancient aliens conspiracy theory off of which Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen is based. Sure, they saw some incredible feats of Mayan, Incan and Aztec engineering, but Transformers did not build the pyramids. In his words, “We cannot take credit for human ingenuity.” Truly, a woke king. We have no choice but to stan.

There are other big problems besides the too-many-characters-itis that afflicts most of the Transformers films besides Bumblebee; I don’t understand why Wheeljack, still my favorite Autobot, is in this movie. Wheeljack (who was almost sort of in Transformers 3 before he got renamed for some reason) is the crackpot inventor of the Autobots, one of the few from the original cartoon that not only serves a purpose within the ragtag group but has a distinct look and personality. He’s always been a fan favorite, so why he showed up here as a Scooby Doo van sans blinky head ornaments, “glasses” (???) and speaking with a South American Spanish accent so he can have a brief tête-à-tête with Anthony Ramos, Jr. about whether his appropriation of said accent is racist is beyond me. Wheeljack was in Bumblebee with the blinky head things, color scheme and accent; what happened here? For the love of God, can we please just put Wheeljack in a movie, dumb New York accent and all? If there was a movie for it, considering how many times someone went, “That’s for BROOKLYN, baby!” this was it. Also, Pete Davidson’s Mirage is truly awful. He is an abomination unto the Lord and I’m praying for him, but at the same time I can’t hate him, because he serves a purpose that Michael Bay never respected; this franchise is for kids, first and foremost, and kids will love Mirage (and he did get one good line which caused riotous laughter in our screening).

With that in mind I don’t mean to say that I disliked the film; I didn’t. I had a big dumb grin on my face the whole time, and find that the film is receiving mixed-to-bad reviews kind of odd, perhaps a symptom of franchise fatigue. That I empathize with; I still haven’t seen Guardians 3, that’s how sick I am of the MCU. I had worried this would have the stink of Michael Bay’s “this is what I think the Chinese market wants” approach to filmmaking: a bizarre, incoherent mess where the characters spend half the movie expositing to the camera what is happening between action scenes where someone’s going “Oh my gaaaaaahhhd!!” but it didn’t at all. No, it’s not as good as Bumblebee (few things are), but it’s better than any of the Bay films, unless your only metric is, to put it charitably, being memorable (I will forget the names and faces of my entire family before I forget about the Enemy’s Scrotum).

But like Bumblebee, this movie feels nothing like the Michael Bay films, and in that way does feel like a totally different franchise. Perhaps it’s because, as a decades-long devotee of all things Transformers, I’m used to extremely flawed product. With rare exception**** there’s always something in there that’s annoying or extraneous or taking up precious screen time just to sell toys. That’s just a part of the Transformers experience. Embrace it, or go spend your precious, finite moments on this Earth where you’d be happier.*****

These new films, despite their many flaws, still feel to me like what the franchise should have always been: The stakes are clear. The humor is there. You can actually see what’s going on. It’s short. It’s neither hateful nor proudly, gleefully racist. It embraces sincerity, a concept that Michael Bay is violently allergic to. Most importantly, it’s fun; there is a Bumblebee-involved moment in the third act that elicited a cheer from our audience louder than any I can remember since before the Plague. The audience went into the film skeptical, like the film was just something to spend their Cinemark gift cards on before they expired******, yet it ended with rapturous applause. It reminded me of the first time I saw Lord of the Rings: Return of the King or Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, all without  the benefit of an audience that had entered the theater with intense hype.

Simply put, this is a Transformers movie. Leave your ego at the door, and you will have fun. But I still feel like the franchise is tainted with the hateful stink of five Michael Bay movies, each one more hateful than the last, and it just leaves me wishing that this was the tone the live action movies had taken all along.

* Skyfire doesn’t count, he was duped

** They don’t call it that

*** It may have been there, I did go to the bathroom once

**** The IDW comics

***** Watching the MCU

****** By law in California gift cards can’t expire, but most people don’t know that