Just the Ticket #126: Transformers (Bumblebee & Rise Of the Beasts)
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
Originally promoted as a prequel to Bay's five-movie series, Bumblebee feels more like a completely fresh start to a new direction. Yes, it serves as an origin for why the titular Volkswagen bot can't speak in the conventional sense and why he looks like a Chevy Camaro in the Bay series. But as mentioned in the intro, the character models are much more cartoon- and toy-authentic than before.
and is attacked by Blitzwing (a Starscream palette swap in the original cartoon, here voiced by frequent Transformers cartoon voice actor, David Sobolov), who damages his memory and vocal interfaces and makes the uncharacteristic villain mistake of...following due process?...which allows B to retaliate and escape, taking his most iconic form in the process.
I was a big fan of the original Transformers cartoon (though I lost interest with the rest of the fanbase after the events of the animated movie "introduced the new toy line"), and the Beast Wars/Beast Machines CGI series when I was in high school, so my hopes were high for Transformers: Rise Of the Beasts. And stop me if you've heard this one:
But also, Transformers/G.I. Joe crossover coming soon‽
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster
Along with the pre-real-pandemic, peak Walking Dead era series, The Last Ship, the last two Transformers films are proof that Michael Bay is at his best when he is let nowhere near a camera.
Gone are the days of over-articulated, barely recognizable, effects-obscured character models; the fetishization of the American military, the female form, and explosions; and the reliance on toilet humor and ethnic stereotypes as "personalities." Oh, and that whole thing where the main character is either a neurotic mess (Shia LeBouf as Sam Witwicky--Spike from the 80s cartoon), a state-government-sanctioned pedophile (Jack Reynor's Shane Dyson), or played by Mark Wahlberg. I stopped watching Bay-directed Transformers films after Dark Of the Moon, but I am aware of the "Romeo & Juliet Law" thing from Age Of Extinction, so I feel bad for those of you who continued to watch beyond that.
The newer films also have their problems (including lingering hints of the Bay style), but are much more enjoyable, and I'll get to those later. For now, please remember to like and comment down below, subscribe to my blog, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook for the latest news on more content than meets the eye.
SPOILERS Ahead!
The movie opens amid the war on Cybertron, with Optimus Prime (still voiced by Peter Cullen after several decades of animated series and films) buying B-127 (later Bumblebee, voiced by Teen Wolf's Dylan O'Brien) some time to escape and establish an outpost on Earth.
Upon...landing...in the middle of a human military exercise, B-127 incites the wrath of the invisible Marine himself,
Fast-forward to 1987 (with a three-disk soundtrack onslaught of musical cues, slang, and pop-culture references to beat the fact into our damaged memory cores throughout the film), and we meet Hawkeye's leading lady as Charlie Watson, a socially outcast food worker and ex-championship diver-turned-mechanic (because these movies are legally required to have a geographically convenient "human does machines" character), whose father died of a heart attack, her mother is the voice of Bobby Hill, and her step-father thinks she'd be a whole lot prettier if she smiled once in awhile.
Everything's gonna be alright, though, because when she visits the local junk shop for parts to fix her dad's old car, she discovers a certain yellow Beetle and brings it home to fix up. After many "keep the giant robot a secret from your family" shenanigans, surrogate family bonding moments, the introduction of the ironically named Memo (the forgettable, nerdy love interest), and acts of terrorism, vandalism, and assault framed as comedy (including a car chase with Sherriff Hunter), Bumblebee...bumbles his way into creating a radio signal skybeam (the trope is not dead, people!) that draws the attention of Cena's Agent Jack Burns, and two Decepticons named Shatter (Critters 4's Angela Bassett) and Dropkick (Bates Motel's Justin Theroux), the latter two of whom trick the sci-fi-blinded head of "Sector 7" (Furious 6's John Ortiz, later forcibly recast as CGI corn syrup) into letting them invent the internet a few years early so they can capture Bumblebee and create their own radio frequency skybeam machine (which is vaguely diamond-shaped and requires the stealth and size of the two human leads to disarm) so they can bring the Decepticon army to conquer Earth.
With the comedy, "comedy," and other human-interest subplots blown to a screeching halt, the fate of the planet is decided in an amazingly creative fight sequence between Bumblebee and the Decepticon duo where he dispatches Dropkick with a Scorpion Fatality and crushes Shatter to pieces with a cargo ship before fake dying to get Hailee Steinfeld over her diving stigma.
The human relationships resolve as you'd expect them to in a coming-of-age romantic dramedy without giant robots, and John Cena's character arc resolves as you'd expect in a military action comedy with giant robots. Also, later on, we see that Optimus made it to Earth and reunited with Bumblebee, and that Bee and Charlie meeting was meant-to-be.
Great action, great comedy (when it was intended to be funny), amazing voice talent (in addition to Cullen, Bassett, and Sobolov, the Cybertron sequence also featured VA legends like Grey Griffin and Steven Blum), by-the-numbers character writing, questionable special effects in a few places, and the music was more than a bit much. But I also appreciated the clear inspirations from things like The Iron Giant, Lilo & Stitch, and Japanese kaiju films, such as the misunderstood, "friendly alien weapon" character, and portraying the military as ambitious but incompetent and ineffective "heroes" in the face of larger-than-life, unconventional threats. If you haven't seen this movie yet, please do. But you'll have more fun if you don't overthink it.
B+
The movie opens amidst a war on a Cybertron-like planet, where the Maximal leader buys his second-in-command time to go to Earth to keep the Ends-with-cons from using a diamond-shaped MacGuffin to create a skybeam that will summon a Universe-level threat. Along the way, a geographically convenient human who does machines befriends an Autobot and encounters a nerdy, potential love interest. Comedy of various levels of comedy and legality ensue, culminating in a battle between robots while humans who survive things that humans cannot survive try to unplug the thing from the thing to keep the other thing from happening.
Yeah, Rise Of the Beasts is basically just Bumblebee again, but both more and less of that at the same time, but also worse because it's noticeably more Bay than the last one.
Set in 1994 (seven years after Bumblebee), Rise Of the Beasts dials back on the music (featuring a few tracks by Notorious B.I.G., A Tribe Called Quest, and LL Cool J, among a couple of others I could not identify), as it switches to an urban setting to focus on our geographically-convenient human who does machines, ex-military electronics expert Noah Diaz (In the Heights' Anthony Ramos). We also meet Elena Wallace (Judas and the Black Messiah's Dominique Fishback), a combination of Charlie and Memo from the last film, who is the more knowledgeable assistant to a ditzy blonde museum employee, but doesn't get enough credit for her contributions because W.O.C. in the 90s. They reuse the "clumsy rush with a tray full of drinks" sequence here, with the difference being that Elena doesn't spill them, but Charlie did. There's a lot of racism focus in the early moments considering Noah and Elena, which feels timely for the mid-90s, but also unfortunately contemporary.
Noah also has a kid brother with sickle-cell anemia (this factors into Noah's character motivation much more than Charlie's relationship with her little brother did in Bumblebee), who at one point enters a scene, accompanied by the SMB death melody and complains about not being able to beat Bowser...while playing a GameBoy. I was pretty confident this was wrong, but I Googled "Bowser 1994 GameBoy games" anyway, and yep, the people behind this movie know nothing about retro games. The only thing I could think of is that Noah is so good with military-grade electronics that he made his brother a Super Mario Bros. GameBoy cartridge (which involves not just circuit board swapping--which would not work at all--but full-on assembly code translation from NES to GameBoy architecture for the game to even boot up. Even if he was able to use one of the Super Mario Land games as a base ROM, he would still need to downscale a Bowser sprite from the NES game, import that to the GameBoy files, and program its behavior into the existing code because there is no GameBoy game with Bowser in it!
There are other things in Rise Of the Beasts that don't make sense, such as the Maximals looking like giant, mechanical versions of Earth animals (Beast Machines, if you will), rather than being more faithful in scale and applying holographic skins while in Beast Mode (Bumblebee's projection of Prime in the last movie, Mirage's gimmick in this one, and the Maximals' claims of being more evolved Transformers "from your past and future" could have easily explained this if it were implemented in Rise Of the Beasts).
The movie is also highly derivative in its finale and overall plot. The villain (Unicron, the villain from the animated movie, here voiced by Colman Domingo of the upcoming Color Purple remake) is basically robot Galactus, complete with his own Heralds (one of which is voiced by Game Of Thrones' Peter Dinklage), and the final fight has the Transformers doing an Endgame (with Noah in an Iron Man suit) while Elana does a Die Hard-meets-Star Wars and the title character from the last movie gets used as a skateboard.
The human/robot dynamic is switched here, though, with Optimus taking the "prejudiced military leader who learns the 'other side' isn't that bad" role from John Cena's character, which serves this story well enough.
As for the increased Bay factor, there is a self-deprecating nod to "Marky Mark quitting The Funky Bunch to pursue acting" (Age Of Extinction and The Last Knight, among other Bay films and non-Bay box office duds), a geriatric Scottish plane, a Hispanic VW Bus who accuses Noah of being racist because he doesn't know if alien robots with Hispanic accents can learn Spanish (yes, this is actual dialogue from this movie), and Noah's Transformer companion, the annoyingly quippy Mirage, who is voiced by Pete Davidson, has no problem being stolen or sold off by the right human (LGBTQ+ kidnapping, interspecies trafficking, and slavery references, yay!), and makes jokes about having Noah "inside me" and Noah "not wanting to know what part of me [the hand-blaster] came from." I'm surprised their fist-bumping thing didn't start with Mirage saying, "fist me." The other big sign of more Bay influence (perhaps a byproduct of watching these back-to-back) is that the action felt less original and coherent than in Bumblebee.
On to the good stuff. The Maximals (especially Ron Perlman as Primal and Michelle Yeoh as AirRazor--whom I had a 2D crush on, along with Black Arachnia, when Beast Wars was on the air) had some standout moments and vocal performances, and their transformations were faithful to the show. Peter Cullen goes all out as Optimus Prime here, delivering one of, if not the best, "It's just you and me" face-off lines in the franchise while making a strong case that the Transformers deserve a guest spot in the new Mortal Kombat game. When not "dead" or being used as a skateboard by Noah wearing Pete Davidson, Bumblebee is a two-gunning, entrance theme-spitting, multi-one-liner-spewing, skydiving-without-a-parachute badass, and it was one of the few action scenes I was here for.
Oh, and I was disappointed that instead of some revealed connection between Noah and John Cena's Agent Jack Burns (because passage of time and ex-military), we got an ending scene with Noah and a different Sector 7 (?) agent (Michael Kelly, who gets typecast in villain and shady spy roles because just look at those eyebrows).
Rise Of the Beasts didn't live up to its hype or legacy (neither to the Beast Wars series, nor to Bumblebee), but I would be willing to watch it again to see how it holds up on its own, and that G.I. Joe teaser absolutely popped.
C+
Thanks go out to my store's bakery manager for recommending that I watch these (actually, just Rise Of the Beasts, but I felt compelled to watch Bumblebee first in case I missed anything).
In case you missed anything, please remember to like and comment down below, subscribe to my blog, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook for the latest news on my content.
Ticketmaster,
Unite Or Fall!
Goodnight to all.
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