Anthony's Film Review - Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023)

The seventh Transformers movie is another fun entry in the series...

It's been a while since we had a live-action Transformers movie, so let's quickly recap the series thus far. You got the first three, all starring Shia LaBeouf as Sam Witwicky: Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The next two, Age of Extinction and The Last Knight, advance the timeline and feature different casts of characters. Then the sixth one, Bumblebee, is a prequel that shows the arrival of the Autobots on Earth for the first time in the year 1987, which is probably a way for the series to be expanded if the fifth movie provided too little of a launching point for another sequel. That's the series so far. Now we have Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, another prequel entry that is set in the year 1994.

The first thing I noticed about this movie is how, compared to the earlier Transformers movies, the main cast of human characters is pretty small. There are really just two major characters. First, you have Noah Diaz (played by Anthony Ramos, hot off his performance in the musicals Hamilton and In the Heights), an American soldier residing in New York with his mother and younger brother. Second, you have Elena Wallace (played by Dominique Fishback), who is a museum researcher examining artifacts. Like in the previous Transformers movies, these are ordinary characters who, due to unexpected events, end up in the middle of a battle between dueling robots from space.

There are three Transformers factions in this movie. You got, of course, the heroic Autobots, the ones that disguise themselves as automobiles. They include the leader Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) who doubles as a trailer truck, Bumblebee doubling as a yellow sports car, and Mirage who is also a sports car in disguise. Interestingly, the evil Decepticons are not among the other two factions here. Rather, the Terrorcons are the villains here, led by a bot named Scourge. The third faction is known as the Maximals, all disguised as various beasts in nature, including Optimus Primal (voiced by Ron Perlman) the gorilla-like Transformer and a bird-like robot named Airazor (voiced by Michelle Yeoh).

The plot revolves around the Transwarp Key, a powerful artifact that can open portals to other worlds. A giant planet-devouring robot named Unicron wants it in order to consume other planets at will. However, Optimus Primal has hidden it in order to prevent Unicron from relentlessly destroying worlds. That key is located on Earth, and that of course is how Noah and Elena enter the fight. While Scourge seeks the Transwarp Key in service to Unicron, the Autobots also see it as a way to return to their home planet of Cybertron.

I shall conclude this review by summing it up this way: the story is good and the action is spectacular, so that this movie ends up being fun to watch. There's not much more I can say about those two elements. I will say that it's interesting to see this movie sort of bridge the prequel movie Bumblebee with the rest of the Transformers film series. The question now is what's next. Perhaps another prequel movie set before 2007. Hard to say. No matter what happens, just enjoy Transformers: Rise of the Beasts for what it is: two hours of eye-popping fun.

Anthony's Rating:

For more information about Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, visit the Internet Movie Database.

In addition, check out my reviews of the following: