Transformers film – Movie Musings

Transformers serves away from the charm of Bumblebee back to the tedious machismo of Bay

Director: Steven Caple Jnr

Cast: Anthony Ramos (Noah Diaz), Dominique Fishback (Elena Wallace), Dean Scott Vazquez (Kris Diaz), Luna Lauren Velez (Breanna Diaz), Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Ron Perlman (Optimus Primal), Peter Dinklage (Scourge), Michelle Yeoh (Airazor), Pete Davidson (Mirage), Liza Koshy (Arcee), Colman Domingo (Unicron)

Somehow the Transformers franchise lucked out and managed to make a film I actually wouldn’t feel awkward showing to a child. Bumblebee avoided the crude sexualisation and graphic violence (hidden by the fact you are watching CGI engine oil and bits of metal flying around, rather than blood and bits of human flesh) of Michael Bay’s films. I really enjoyed it. I can’t really say the same about this follow-up. I’d at least let a child watch it – although it’s the cinematic equivalent of letting them have a Big Mac for dinner.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts could have continued in the tone of Bumblebee, a delightful mix of cartoon and Buster Keaton/Laurel and Hardy. Instead, it takes tiny elements of that, then mashes them up with the throw-it-all-at-the-screen style of Bay. It’s not a happy marriage, and Rise of the Beasts is tired and overly familiar, crammed with crude banter and the sort of mass smackdown we’ve seen done time-and-time again. Give me strength. Rise of the Beasts isn’t really a sequel to Bumblebee – the events of that film are referred to only in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference. The boyish charm of Bumblebee is drenched in audio clip quotes from Scarface and the like. Instead, it’s another “end of the world seconds away from a giant robot monster” flick.

Far in the future Unicorn (voiced with regal indifference by Colman Domingo), the planet eating robot from the 1985 film (when he was voiced by a final pay-cheque collecting Orson Welles) is trapped in another dimension, but wants to break into ours. He sends his minion Scourge (Peter Dinklage, dialling it in big time) to 1990s Earth to hunt down the MacGuffin that will do it. Only Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and his Autobots can stop him, allied with an ex-soldier desperately trying to help his kid brother Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) and Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) a junior archaeologist who can unearth the MacGuffin from where it has been hidden centuries ago by the Maximals, a group of transformers descended from our Autobots who transform into giant mechanical animals (their leader Optimus Primal is a Kong style ape).

It all seems a million miles away from the charm of the first film, with a teenage girl bonding with her first car who just happens to be a clumsy robot. There is precious little charm at all Rise of the Beasts. The human characters are either faintly forgettable, loud and brash or serve only as plot points. Anthony Ramos has to do a lot of digging to find any depth in a character given only a cursory plotline of desperation to provide for his mum and brother. Dominique Fishback’s archaeologist has the faintest of backstories about being cheated out of the credit for her work, before she’s fiddling with MacGuffins with handwave lines. The action zips across two universes and two continents, but never seems to really find firm grounding for itself.

There’s also something rather sad about the film swopping out the fairy tale elements of Bumblebee with a far more conventional Bro-romance. Ramos’ street-wise ex-soldier is paired up with Peter Davidson’s Mirage, a loud-mouthed Autobot who, despite a few witty lines, basically comes across as a street-wise bro with a hot streak of immaturity. There is a streak of laddish banter throughout the film – none of it, thank God, as appallingly sexist or racist as what passes for this sort of chat in Bay’s films – that essentially doubles down on restoring the franchise to something that appeals only to teenage boys and adults who wish they still were teenage boys.

After the broadening out of Bumblebee with a female lead given actual agency, this feels like a retrograde step. Rise of the Beasts does manage to pay this Bros plotline off with a surprisingly effective scene of self-sacrifice – but does so while not shirking on red-blooded (or red-oiled) young men whooping and cheering as they blast stuff out of the sky. It’s a step firmly back towards a territory that places male relationships at a premium – be it bros or actual brothers – and the bonds between men a world that leaves women on the outside looking in.

Not to mention the plot continually readjusts its stakes and characters depending on the requirements from scene to scene. Scourge is an unstoppable killing machine… until the plot requires him not to be. Characters are killed off… until the plot needs them to come back to life. Characters are fixated on their own needs… until the plot needs them to be altruistic. It combines that up with a final battle sequence that feels painfully derivative of the end of Avengers: Endgame, with Scourge mustering an army of rent-a-baddies to slow down the heroes while he slowly plugs a thingamee into a do-hickey.

Even Optimus Prime takes a backward step. While Bumblebee salvaged some likeability out of this hero, Rise of the Beasts very much returns him to Bay form: a deeply flawed leader with anger-management issues, who slices and dices foes with reckless abandon, rips off heads and uses neat kiss-off lines like “Then DIE”. I suppose he doesn’t execute at point-blank range a surrendering foe begging for mercy (Bay did this twice!) but he still hardly feels like an admirable hero. Rise of the Beasts vaguely acknowledges this by having Prime go on a loose arc of learning to put the needs of humans on a level with the Autobots (yup he’s also a proto-racist at the start) but it’s a very loose peg to hang a hero on.

Rise of the Beasts gives up on any pretensions of doing something fresh, engaging or different with the series. Even the beasts, for all their animalistic looks, are basically barely characters, more different looking toys imported into a flagging cinematic universe (Ron Perlman and Michelle Yeoh lazily yawn their way through terminal dialogue). While Bumblebee took the starting principles of the franchise and found the joy in them, Rise of the Beasts is a teenage wet dream of toys hitting each other to no great purpose, that places male relationships at its heart and leaves you with nothing to really care about. It’s a callback to everything bad about this franchise.

Sexist, violent, crude and deeply disgusting. Transformers continues to make you weep for your childhood memories

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Shia LaBeouf (Sam Witwicky), Josh Duhamel (Colonel William Lennox), John Turturro (Seymour Simmons), Tyrese Gibson (Robert Epps), Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (Carly Spencer), Patrick Dempsey (Dylan Gould), John Malkovich (Bruce Brazos), Frances McDormand (Charlotte Mearing), Kevin Dunn (Ron Witwicky), Julie White (Judy Witwicky), Alan Tudyk (Dutch Gerhardt)

I’m ashamed to say when I saw it in the cinema I sort of enjoyed it. Goes to show how the excitement of a trip out can make the most ghastly, horrible, vile piece of work feel like fun. Even at the time, I recognised enjoying Transformers: Dark of the Moon was like becoming engaged with the story-telling in a porno. Doesn’t change the fact it’s a crude exercise, pandering to your baser instincts.

The plot? Autobots. Decepticons. Blah, blah, blah. Don’t worry if you’ve not seen the previous films: this merrily contradicts them. In the 60s an Autobot ship crashes on the moon, the moon landings were all about exploring the wreckage. In the present day our “hero” Sam (a never more annoying, unlikable Shia LaBeouf) can’t land a job and the Decepticons hatch a plan to destroy the planet by bringing their homeworld Cybertron here. Former Autobot Boss Sentinal Prime betrays everyone. Optimus Prime doubles down on being a psychopath. It’s very loud and makes no sense.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon exposes Michael Bay’s aesthetics as those of a porn director. Everything is crude, huge, brash, obvious, tries to do as much work for you as possible and panders to your worst instincts. Dark of the Moon is shocking in almost every possible sense: from its crude sexism and leering camera, its revoltingly heavy-handed, end-of-the-pier, terminally unfunny comic relief, its overlong, explosive battle sequences (shot with the slavering longing of a pornographic gang-bang). Dark of the Moon is a revolting film, a disgusting perversion of what was a kids cartoon.

Can you imagine letting a child watch this? Let’s deal with its disgusting sexism first. Megan Kelly had been sacked between this and Revenge of the Fallen for denouncing Michael Bay’s working basis (I’ll admit calling him Hitler went too far). Every chance in the film to disparage her character is taken (two appallingly unpleasant tiny Autobots all but call her a bitch). She’s replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, introduced walking up-stairs, the camera starting at her feet and trailing up, lingering on her bottom (she’s wearing just a slightly-too short shirt). Later two characters will discuss “the perfect curves” of a car – while the camera pans up her body. Those are only the most egregious of the deeply uncomfortable sexual objectification of this poor woman.

How about its crude humour? Several actors enter a private competition to give the loudest, least funny comic cameo. Malkovich gurns and rants as Sam’s pointless, kung-fu obsessed boss. John Turturro does whatever he wants as a Transformers obsessed former-agent. Kevin Dunn and Julie White are eat-your-fist levels of unfunny as Sam’s parents. Worst of all is Ken Jeung as a Deep Throat style informer whose every scene is crammed with homophobic jokes about anal and oral sex. Remember, once upon a time this was for kids. All this alleged humour does is add to the already bloated run-time. You’ll suffer through every single word, because you certainly won’t miss it due to laughing. Bay’s idea of funny is if the joke is delivered LOUD by a wild-eyed actor, preferably accompanied by a whip-pan. He’d probably love Roy Chubby Brown.

The film has two of the least likable heroes perhaps ever placed on film. Shia LaBeouf must have genuinely hated himself by the time he made this. Perhaps that’s why he makes no effort to make Sam even one per cent likeable. Sam is a whining, petulant man-child, alternating between bitching about his job to bragging about his trophy girlfriend (whom he spends half the film whiningly chasing). In the first of these films, LaBeouf had a goofy charm. Now the character is just a deeply arrogant little prick, with major entitlement issues. LaBeouf shouts and screams throughout, but mostly just looks really angry at himself for even being there.

Then we come to the pièce de resistance: Optimus Prime. When I was a kid, this noble warrior was like the perfect Dad. Traumatised kids wept when he died in the animated movie. Revenge of the Fallen started turning him into a violent killer. This completes the journey. Bay probably thinks Prime is a bad-ass taking names. He’s actually a violent, psychopathic killer who arrives at a battle with the inspiring words “We will kill them all”. Prime allows the whole of Chicago to be destroyed (at the cost of millions of lives) to prove a point to the stupid humans. At the film’s end he reacts to Megatron’s offer of a truce by ripping out his spine and then executes Sentinel Prime by shooting him point blank in the head while Sentinel pleads for his life. Ladies and gentlemen: our hero.

It’s customary to say the special effects are good, so: the special effects are good. The violence is pornographic, shot often in slow-mo, with explosions, fast editing and huge noise filling the screen. Transformer bodies are mauled, beheaded, eviscerated. There are several rather chilling executions. Prime rips out the equivalent of heart, lungs, eyes and brains. Bay adds a reddish oil to the transformers, which looks like blood spraying up. Just like the humour, the action goes on FOREVER. The final Chicago battle takes up fifty minutes of buildings falling, brutal slaughter and triumphalist flag-waving. After repeated viewings it’s not just boring, it starts getting offensive.

Dark of the Moon is, quite simply, only just (only, only, only just) better than Revenge of the Fallen – and it says it all that it’s because it’s not as racist. In every other sense it’s simply revolting: violent, crude, sexist and homophobic. This is a horrible, horrible film made by a soulless director. It genuinely is like a beautifully shot pornographic film that wants you to respect the craft that’s gone into it while you finish yourself off. For a brief few seconds you might get sucked in – but you’ll certainly not be boasting about it afterwards.