Review of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) by Vagueshape — 15 Jul 2023

I went to see this movie totally blind. I did not watch a trailer or read anything about it before seeing it in theaters, this would prove to be a huge mistake. I went to see it because I liked the show Beast Wars as a kid. Lets get straight to the point. This movie is bad. Its even more focused on humans than the Michael bay films. The first half of the movie is basically slow woke pandering *ahem* I mean "developing" the two main human characters which are both uninteresting flat racial caricatures. Now that that's out of the way this movie introduces a new type of Transformer, unfortunately they are barely in the movie; in fact Cheetor and Rhinox have like one line each. There is also a lack of Villain Transformers (only 3) who likewise are not fleshed out at all beyond being evil. I couldn't even tell you their names after watching the movie. Perhaps the biggest flaw of all is that there is barely any robot fight scenes in a movie about fighting robots. Instead we get a lot of action scenes that cater to a specific audience and focus on human protagonists. There are realistically only 2 major transformer fight scenes in the movie. One towards the beginning, and one at the end. The second is the finale which is the ONLY TIME the Maximals transform. Their transformations look good too, which leaves you wondering why this was not a bigger focal point of the movie. Yet even in the finale, in the big reveal of their transformations when they finally get to say the iconic line of "Maximize!" they still barely get any screen time. Instead we largely focus on the humans again with a splash of Mirage/Optimus Prime thrown in.

There is also a weird forced representation in the Autobots who now have a female who never does much of anything and one with a latino accent yet doesn't speak Spanish. This accent is used for one joke; other than that this character is totally impotent and irrelevant. A lot could be said about how bad this movie is, and how much wasted potential there was within it. What leaves you feeling jaded is the realization they wasted your time on purpose with the classic bait and switch.