‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ or — The Terminal Cost of Responsible Behaviour?
Hosanna! ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ (2023) is a Transformers movie not directed by Michael Bay! This means we are saved from the bum-headed horrors that plague this most adolescent of filmmakers — his crass “humour”, the leering camera-work, the incessant shouting, the rampant jingoism and commercialism, the hyperactive visual aesthetic, the F-bomb needlessly dropped into a kid’s picture or the overwhelming feeling that the movie you’re watching is actually a complete asshole. All these are gone. Glory be!
The only question we need to now ask ourselves is — when you take the Bayhem out of the picture then what, if anything, is left?
‘T:ROFB’ is about the race to find a cosmic MacGuffin that shoots a sky-beam up into the atmosphere where it’ll open a portal thus allowing a massive entity to destroy the planet. So as you can tell, it’s a plot so insulting in its unoriginality the movie might’ve well simply told the audience to go fuck ourselves then rolled its end credits and the overall effect on us would’ve been exactly the same.
Optimus Prime and the Autobots are stuck on Earth (for a highly advanced alien species they’re awfully good at constantly being stuck on Earth which makes me suspect they might be idiots) and so need to find some object or whatever before some naughty robots can get to it first so letting their big round robot boss eat the entire planet so Optimus asks the help of some robot animals, or whatever, who are running away from the big, round robot and are now living on Earth to hide the object from the big, round robot even though the big, round robot knows the object is on Earth which means… shit happens?
The good news is that ‘T:ROTB’ actually plays out as a kid’s film for kids rather than a live-action cartoon for coked-up, Alpha-male dickheads who demand cinema matches their own arrested development. So the Autobots are friendly, if overly sincere, robots instead of highly problematic, jive-talking pricks and the humans are likeable and sweet as opposed to objectionable, screaming nutjobs. The two team-up, set out to find the thingy and, ultimately, fight the baddies in a movie stripped of Bay’s more offensive aspects.
The problem is that with all that gone, with all that egregious insanity taken away, we find there’s almost nothing left other than an unoriginal and predictable plot, a downer of a grey colour palette, unexciting action and the overriding feeling of a lack of stimulation. The film is well behaved but at the expense of that crazed energy that even the worst of the previous Transformers had despite all their many, many issues.
The result is that watching ‘T:ROTB’ is like drinking alcohol- free beer or low-fat yoghurt as with all the highly unhealthy intoxicating ingredients taken out what you’re left with feels, tastes and looks pretty bland and unexciting meaning it’s like watching the cinematic equivalent of a rice cake instead of feeling like Michael Bay shoving a tonne of sherbet and popping candy into a five litre soda bottle, shaking it up then spraying it over your face and laughing maniacally whilst calling you a dick. Sure, it’s a deeply unpleasant experience but it certainly isn’t dull.
This pivot away from the excesses of Bayhem means ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ ends up asking the audience a surprisingly interesting question and one for which there’s no easy answer — would you rather be insulted, or bored?
