If not quite as satisfying (to old-school Generation 1 fans like myself, at least) as the 2018 Bumblebee prequel movie, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts works well enough in broad terms to prove that the franchise remains better off without Michael Bay at the helm. Sadly, the film continued the series’ downward trajectory at the theatrical box office, which will no doubt be taken badly by the host of production companies funding these very expensive toy commercials.

Both a sequel to Bumblebee and another prequel to the Bay installments, Rise of the Beasts serves as a bridge film in several respects. Evident right from the title, this is clearly an attempt to loop the 1990s-era Beast Wars spinoff into the live-action continuity. The movie also digs back further into 1980s G1 lore while doing so, and teases a crossover with another popular Hasbro toy property for the hell of it. Many of those plot-points are set up as if to pay off in later entries. Given how much this one underperformed, however, the likelihood of those plans actually coming to fruition may be in some jeopardy.

Title:	Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Year of Release:	2023
Director:	Steven Caple, Jr.
Watched On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Also Available On:	Blu-ray Amazon Prime Video MGM+ Paramount+ Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Tying Beast Wars together with the normal cast of Transformers characters is something of a challenge. Originally, the two properties took place in very different timelines and did not interact. Rise of the Beasts fudges those details quite a bit in order to bring everything together.

The film also flagrantly ignores the entire plot of Michael Bay’s 2017 Transformers: The Last Knight, which put forth the cockamamie notion that Earth itself was secretly the robo-planet Unicron (villain of 1986’s The Transformers: The Movie) in hibernation all along. That was a dumb idea that nobody liked, and is best left forgotten – along with the rest of that movie.

After a prologue sequence introducing a new faction of Cybertronian robots called Maximals who transform into animal alt-modes, the main action of Rise of the Beasts starts out in 1994 New York City. Down-on-his-luck former Army vet Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is befriended by street-savvy Mirage (voiced by comedian Pete Davidson) and winds up – against the wishes of disapproving Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, sounding quite elderly these days) – becoming the Autobots’ ally in a mission to retrieve a special thingamabob called the “transwarp key” with the power to open a space bridge across galaxies.

Of course, bad robots also want the key. Rather than Decepticons, the villains this time are called Terrorcons, led by Scourge (Peter Dinklage), and their goal is to use the key to open a space bridge so that their boss Unicron (Colman Domingo) can come gobble up the Earth, and then go anywhere else he wants to do the same to an infinite number of other worlds afterward.

In the race to get to the key first, the Autobots make their way to Peru, where they find it being protected by the Maximals, led by Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) – who, yes, says he was named after Optimus Prime. That may have made some sense originally when he came from a timeline in the distant future, but less so now. In any event, the Terrorcons follow. The Autobots and Maximals will then need to join forces to defeat them, stop Unicron, save the world, and somehow prevent anyone else on Earth from noticing an entirely new planet showing up in orbit right outside our own – because, lest we forget, in the official canon of this franchise, the existence of Transformers or extraterrestrials of any kind won’t be known by the public until around the second or third Bay movie in the early 2000s timeframe.

As directed by Steven Caple, Jr. (Creed II), Rise of the Beasts makes entertaining use of the 1990s setting with a pretty great era-appropriate hip-hop soundtrack and a lot of fun cultural references. (“This car is buggin’!”) Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback (playing a museum intern who also gets roped into the adventure) are appealing as the human leads. Although Pete Davidson’s homeboy street kid shtick is a little annoying, he manages to avoid crossing too far over the line into insufferability.

On the other hand, the screenplay credited to five writers new to the franchise feels like a patchwork concoction. Despite being titled Rise of the Beasts, the movie doesn’t give the Maximals much to do. After the first five minutes, most of them aren’t seen again until the second half, except for the falcon named Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), who’s job essentially just amounts to pointing everyone in the right direction and looking regal while occasionally dropping a line or two of exposition. Frankly, the film never makes a case for why the Beasts of the title are special or necessary. Seriously, what use is a gorilla in a fight against a literal planet coming to eat him?

I feel like any other Transformers sub-team could have been substituted in place of this one without affecting the plot much at all. Call it Transformers: Rise of the Headmasters and you’d get a pretty similar movie.

The visual effects are all first-rate, and Caple stages plenty of big action set-pieces to fill the 127-minute run time – most of them with a better sense of visual coherency than Michael Bay vomited onto the screen. Nonetheless, by the time the film drags out to its last act, the climax turns into an overwrought and kind of tedious CGI-fest spectacle, with an overly convenient last-minute Bumblebee-ex-machina plot twist to tie everything up.

I enjoyed Transformers: Rise of the Beasts enough to have watched it twice already. On the first viewing, my Transformers-obsessed son called it his favorite of the franchise, but he cooled on it the second time around and moved it down a few spots, despite – or perhaps due to – having gotten deeply into the Beast Wars cartoon in the interim.

My own ranking is more stable, solidly in the middle of the pack, below Bumblebee (my favorite) and above most of the Bay entries. The film unfortunately lacks the heart and emotional core that worked so well in the Bumblebee movie, and the plotting is a bit sloppier as well. As action spectacle, it also can’t quite match the scale or audacity of the best of “Bayhem,” as much as Caple tries.

Altogether, Rise of the Beasts is a decent Transformers movie, if imperfect, and I think another step in the right direction in the post-Bay era for the franchise. Yet its poor box office performance may suggest that the wider audience disagrees, or at least is losing interest.

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

After a disappointing run at the theatrical box office in June of 2023, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts moved quickly to streaming on Paramount+ by the end of July, followed by physical media releases on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in early October. More recently, streaming distribution has expanded to Amazon Prime Video and MGM+. I watched the movie first with my son when it premiered on Paramount+, and then later bought the 4K SteelBook edition.

Presented entirely in an aspect ratio of 2.39:1 (no IMAX aspect ratio shenanigans in this one), the 4K disc has an impressively sharp and detailed picture with rich colors and nice contrast. The HDR grade gives the image a pleasing sense of depth and vibrancy, especially in highlights such as the glowing robot eyes and intense explosions.

The Dolby Atmos soundtrack features a fair amount of bass in the score, the many licensed hip-hop songs, and of course sound effects. Some of the action scenes hit loud and hard. However, the dynamics in other scenes seem strangely compressed, without warning or any discernible explanation for why that might happen. The first time I watched the movie, I chalked this up to a streaming compression issue and shrugged it off, then forgot all about it. Considering that it bothered me again months later listening to the lossless track on the physical disc, and I haven’t found any hardware fault or setting problems on my end, I’m inclined to think it’s inherent to the mix. Whatever the case, I have trouble reconciling why some scenes would be so dynamically aggressive while others wimp out in comparison for no reason.

Both the 4K disc and the standard Blu-ray in the case are authored with a comparable set of extras. The packaging boasts of “Over 1 Hour of Exhilarating Special Features,” which should be the first clue that the supplements don’t really add up to as much content as the number of bullet points in the disc menu might suggest. The nine very short featurettes amount to a standard bevy of EPK fluff carved from what probably started as a single making-of documentary that got sliced up into small chunks. After that are a handful of deleted and extended scenes (some extended only by a couple seconds from the theatrical cut), most with unfinished visual effects.

Related

• TV
  • The Transformers (1984) Series Premiere
  • Beast Wars: Transformers (1996) Series Premiere
• Movies
  • The Transformers: The Movie (1986)
  • Transformers (2007)
  • Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
  • Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
  • Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)
  • Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)
  • Bumblebee (2018)
  • Transformers One (2024)
• Reading
  • The Transformers: Issue 1 (1984) Marvel Comic Book
  • Void Rivals: Issue #01 (2023) Skybound Comic Book
  • Transformers: Issue #01 (2023) Skybound Comic Book

Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the standard Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.