Transformers: Aufstieg der Bestien

After the success of 'Bumblebee' I was hoping that this instalment might offer a more rewarding viewing experience than the previous cash grab Transformers outings, but I was sorely mistaken. It is unfortunately a rather drab affair.

Within about 5 minutes every cliche possible is ticked off the list. The dialogue is grating and so corny it hurts. The action is messy and disorienting. The newly introduced 'Maximals' are severely wasted with limited screen time. The plot centres around a silly doohickey that is hard to care about. The human characters are kind of annoying and poorly written. None of the humour really lands and neither do any of the emotional story beats. The story sags a little in the middle. I could go on.

Saying all that, this film is mildly entertaining and does have its moments, although they are too few and far between. I guess it's worth watching if you are into your Transformers films, but the casual movie goer should probably save their money and skip this one.

Where do I start? Let's start with the positive; the CGI was amazing. The bad; the acting, and the casting was terrible. I don't know who wrote the script, but it was awful also. Nothing against the actors, but some of them seem so miscast in their roles. The girls voice was absolutely annoying. Sometimes over acting, sometimes not acting at all. But all in all just terrible. Sometimes great dialogue can say bad acting, in this case, the dialogue was just as bad. Cringe worthy. I was hoping for more as I love the transformers movies. I wanted to stop watching within the first 15 minutes, but I also wanted to give it a chance to see if it would get better. It didn't. If this is the best they've got they should stop now.

"Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" is the new movie based on the Takara toys that Hasbro exploited and have been brought to television, movies and comics. In this new film, the result is kind of almost bad, a soulless and simple script that could have been told in 90 minutes and not in an excessive length of 127 minutes that become slow. The performances are ordinary and the director's work does not stand out. The production is not used, the soundtrack has no essence and the cinematography is quite conventional. The biggest negative point is the costume design and the setting, since the film takes place during 1994 and fails to take us to that year, with the exception of some retro objects and extras that wear 90s costumes, the protagonists really look very 2020's. Another flaw is the digital special effects that fail to be entirely realistic, the green screen and After Effects giving themselves away for much of the length of the film. A totally forgettable production.

I appreciated the fact that this film made Optimus Prime an actual character, and that it found a couple of interesting, believable ways to give the human characters a legitimate use in the story.

Aside from a few moments involving these things, I was bored senseless by this movie.

I struggle to comprehend how a script like this passes so many hands and makes it to production; it has some of the worst dialogue this side of Attack of the Clones.

Everything in this movie is told to us, rather than creatively shown. It's obnoxious, it's lazy, and it's stupid. It treats us, the audience, like we're stupid as it spoon feeds every piece of information to us like we're infants, even though the story is really simple and nothing original or complex happens once.

All this could be saved if the action were entertaining and investing. But it isn't, aside from a handful of stylish shots.

Say what you will about Michael Bay's movies. (They're bad.) But at least they had huge scale to them and the stakes were understood.

This is a bland blockbuster movie, through and through. The action never features any destruction or threat to human life. There isn't a practical, real thing happening on screen.

Artificial, boring, and derivative, with about 5-10 minutes worth of good material.

I thought Bumblebee was a bright spot, but it looks like the good streak has been cut short.

First, I have really enjoyed a number of the Transformers movies despite the usual criticisms. They were, generally, fun, well thought out intl terms of action scenes and had a few key actors to give them a little more appeal. This one seems to have the casting and script all wrong. The supposed academic is barely able to string a sentence together and is wholly unconvincing as someone who could work out how to get out of the bathroom let alone anything else (also the actress is dire but hardly the point). The main actor is uninspiring and deals with the awful script with seeming boredom (I doubt it is genuine boredom as this is presumably his big break) and the cutesy nod to the 90s for the transformers themselves seems, well, meh? Overall, boring, badly acted, shocking casting and a sad epitaph.