Movie Review: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts 

• Paramount Pictures
• Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

For a hot minute there, I was about to start writing about Transformers: Rise of the Beasts as though it were an actual movie. I was going to complain about how our human protagonist in this prequel installment, Army veteran Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos), is set up at the beginning as a whiz with improvising repairs to technology, only to have that information pay off for exactly nothing at a key moment when it could have. I was going to muse about the significance of a franchise entry like this centering people of color—not just Nuyorican Noah, but Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback), the Black museum intern/archaeologist who figures out key information to help save the world. Then, all of that analysis started to feel deeply ridiculous.

Because Transformers: Rise of the Beasts isn't an actual movie. It's a delivery system for 1990s nostalgia, full stop. And it isn't even particularly shy about saying so.

It's not as though the Transformers cinematic franchise hasn't already been fundamentally connected to nostalgia, in the way that pretty much every cinematic franchise of the 21st century has been—whether for a toy you played with as a kid, or a comic book you read as a teenager, or a movie/TV show you watched as a young adult. Rise of the Beasts takes things to the next level, though, following up on the 1987-set Bumblebee spinoff by setting this story in yep-the-Twin-Towers-are-still-standing 1994 New York City, right around the time that the Transformers spinoff TV series/toy line Beast Wars was emerging.

Thus we get a soundtrack full of the hip-hop hits that were beginning to dominate radio of that era. Noah's younger brother, Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez) sports a Mighty Morphin Power Rangers T-shirt, and laments not being able to "get past Bowser" while playing video games. The two siblings use "Sonic" and "Tails" as their walkie-talkie code names for one another. It's a veritable buffet of name-drops for Millennials, the screenplay equivalent of the "Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood pointing in recognition at the television" meme.

There is, of course, the simple ongoing nostalgia for Transformers in general, including the return of Peter Cullen's commanding rasp as Transformers leader Optimus Prime, which somehow wrestles gravitas out of dumb, declaratory dialogue that's always something like "This ends now!" The premise, such as it is, involves an offshoot race of robot-animal Transformers trying to protect this movie's version of the Very Important Object That Must Not Fall Into the Hands of the Bad Robots—the Trans-Dimensional Key, or the Allspark, or the Everlasting Gobstopper, or whateverthehell. They do their cool change-from-car-form-to-robot-form thing in a variety of cool ways, punch each other repeatedly, and wait for a climactic battle which seems to have ingested the Marvel Cinematic Universe template of "throw at our heroes a bunch of anonymous drone warriors that emerge from a giant sphincter in the sky."

And the truth is, this still isn't a terrible version of this sort of thing. Director Stephen Caple, Jr. (Creed II) isn't nearly as infatuated with the sound of his own filmmaking voice as Transformers franchise guru Michael Bay was, resulting in a much leaner two-hours rather than the sprawling adventures Bay favored. Ramos and Fishback are solid human anchors, and new Transformer character Mirage (Pete Davidson) provides an appropriate level of comic relief without ever becoming deeply irritating (though any given person's "Pete Davidson becoming deeply irritating" mileage may vary).

So, here we are—trying to make backhanded-compliment excuses for these cynically-constructed blockbuster honey traps, targeting adults who want to be reminded of things from when they weren't adults. And sure, it's easier for me to shrug and scoff now that I'm a good 15 – 20 years removed from being the target audience for a "hey, remember that?" exercise like this one. But it seems kind of fitting that, in one of the few character-specific quirks granted to Fishback's Elena, she sings to herself when anxious, warbling period-appropriate tunes like TLC's "Waterfalls." Pop culture exists within the world of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts as something soothing, familiar and non-threatening—and, as it turns out, in the world it's helping to create, as well.