The first live-action Transformers movie is nearly 16 years old – meaning that seven-film series has now reached the perfect age to discover its own robot disguised as a first car in need of some tender gearhead attention, only to be thrust into some sort of intergalactic conflict. It’s also more than old enough for the belated realization that these movies are for children much younger than 16. My daughter is seven, owns exactly four Transformers that she has played with occasionally since she was around three and has never watched any of the various TV series, and was still absolutely gobsmacked when I told her that all of the Transformers movies so far (save the 1986 animated feature) were rated PG-13. She’s not the kind of seven-year-old who wants to get away with something by sneaking an illicit peek at a PG-13 movie. She’s the kind of seven-year-old who wants age-based ratings to conform exactly to her interests and expectations. (In other words: an only child.) “Shouldn’t they make them for kids?!” she asked me in disbelief. It’s a topic she returned to repeatedly over the past few months, as she ranted about how Transformers are toys for kids, and therefore the movies should make damn sure that kids can see them without any problems. (I’m paraphrasing; she would never say “damn,” lest the MPAA slap her with a PG-13.) Why would they make those movies with grown-ups in mind? And why wouldn’t they make sure everyone was aware that a movie about giant fighting robots from space that are also cars could be safely watched by kids who played with the toys?
During this time, she answered her own question, as she simultaneously developed a keen interest in seeing Transformers: Rise of the Beasts despite the judgment of the MPAA or the demographic triangulating of the studio. I obliged and brought her to the press screening, which was specifically described as family-friendly. (Was I any less excited about the prospect of free snacks than she was? Difficult and humbling to say!) I prepared her with a home viewing of Bumblebee and no viewings of the other Transformers pictures, just as I strategically avoided showing her the first two Fantastic Beasts movies before taking her to The Secrets of Dumbledore. Why quell her excitement with nonsense, I figured.
Rise of the Beasts is also nonsense, but, like Bumblebee, it is nonsense for children, or at least closer to that than Michael Bay’s vision of the main-line series. In retrospect, it seems a bit odd that Bay held so tightly to the reins of a franchise whose target audiences he seemed likely to regard as weaklings and pissants, as part of his conviction that yelling at people on a movie set qualifies him as a military contractor (who, as we saw in his Benghazi movie, are this country’s truest, purest heroes). As with so many Bay movies, his pyrotechnics are expertly mounted and spectacularly misaimed, as his Transformers movies seem to target as their ideal audience 13-year-old boys dealing with their ruinous levels of horniness by smashing up the Transformers toys they’d passed down to their younger siblings. Later, when the series torch passed from Shia LaBeouf to Mark Wahlberg, Bay seemed to re-envision the audience maturing into feckless teen dads prone to hectoring their own children.
It wasn’t that Bay displayed, as some nerds would have it, insufficient fealty to the mythology of a cartoon series engineered to sell toys. It was that he insisted on reconceiving nonsense into something he could respect: A spectacle of paramilitary might, with Optimus Prime bloviating about his sacred right to enduring occupation. Every Michael Bay Transformers movie was the best and worst one yet, peaking in absurdity and big-budget grandiosity while contempt and hatred surged through its fuel lines. There have been so many action-fantasy-sci-fi movies to happily embrace silly, earnest excess; why did the Transformers movies feel so endlessly and effortfully at war with themselves? It often felt like Bay was wrestling with what has become a dominant Hollywood strategy: Make PG-13 children’s movies, simplistic in their emotions but perhaps envelope-pushing in their violence or smuttiness, claim they’re basically for everyone, and watch the money roll in.
This model has been adopted far more successfully by superhero movies, particularly the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That encompassing nature is why so many people argue that the enduring popularity of the MCU has done the most damage to mid-range movies that used to stand alone, as a number of genres have been largely absorbed by the superhero industrial complex. Want a comedy? Well, most of the Marvel movies have laugh lines, and if you want something with more jokes, they just reacquired Deadpool. In the mood for a thriller? Captain America: The Winter Soldier isn’t actually much of a paranoid political thriller, but its filmmakers and fans have insisted that it is for long enough to make you acquiesce. Love sci-fi? We’ve got some Guardians of the Galaxy for that. Coming-of-age dramedy? That’s Spider-Man’s turf now, baby!
But while other beloved long-running franchises haven’t seemed widely affected by Marvel’s ascension, with some even getting a second lease on life thanks to the insatiable hunger for exploitable IP, it seems plausible that the Transformers movies have also been materially harmed by the Marvel era (albeit with less negative consequences than, say, the death of theatrically released comedies). The first three Transformers were smash-hit fixtures on the annual box office top-three list; Age of Extinction, the first one to emerge following the next-level team-up of The Avengers, drooped by $100 million in domestic grosses. Its follow-up, The Last Knight, released in a year of three MCU movies (plus the super-popular Wonder Woman) lost another $100 million and change from that number. Even the relatively modest charm of semi-spinoff/prequel Bumblebee couldn’t exceed the series’ new normal, directly thrashed by an animated Spider-Man and DC’s Aquaman.
Maybe this is simply a natural audience reaction to these movies not being very good – but if that were the case, wouldn’t the nasty, overblown incoherence of Revenge of the Fallen have done that job back in 2009? No, I think the series’ attempted synthesis of childhood nostalgia, contemporary spectacle, kid-friendly heroes and adult-targeted quips was outmoded by a more palatable version of that formula. Say what you will about the MCU, and how so many of their movies have landed in a zone that’s less genuinely adult-oriented than Iron Man, yet still allowed to feature large-scale death and destruction: Even their worst entries tend not to be crassly hateful, with heroes speechifying over extrajudicial killings. As the series fell out of cultural relevance, I kept going back to the Transformers movies, in part because Bay’s sense of scale and sun-kissed color looks great on a big screen, and in part because of course I would like to see a fun movie where car-robots fight dinosaur-robots and lay waste to major American landmarks in the process! But the movies themselves would turn me into a thirtysomething version of my seven-year-old kid, asking why the movies are doing such a lousy job pandering to me, and who, exactly, they were supposed to be pandering to instead.
Rise of the Beasts still isn’t quite sure who to pander to. It lacks the girl-and-her-car-buddy sweetness of Bumblebee, which had the good sense to knock off E.T. and The Iron Giant (and the Bay-like instinct to turn the anti-star story of a giant robot who decides he doesn’t want to be a weapon into the story of a giant robot who doesn’t really mind being weapon, but wants a little downtime to do as he pleases). E.T. is directly name-checked in this ’90s-set follow-up, only now the E.T. figure is a wisecracking Porsche-bot voiced by Pete Davidson. (Bumblebee himself is on hand, too.) Noah (Anthony Ramos) meets Mirage (Davidson) during a desperate car-boosting (undertaken only to help his sickly younger brother) gone wrong, at which point he is, yes, thrust into some sort of intergalactic conflict. In order to keep the planet-devouring Unicron from binge-eating the Earth, Noah and Elena (Dominique Fishback), a young museum intern/researcher, must team up with a bunch of familiar Transformers and a bunch more animal-shaped Transformers from the TV series Beast Wars to keep a magical glowing device away from Unicron’s minions.
So, yeah: Nonsense for children, with occasional ill-advised forays into grit. Some are harmless, like shouting out Noah and Elena’s home borough of Brooklyn every five to ten minutes; some are shameless, like the series-long practice of killing off beloved Transformers before eventually bringing them back to life, a superhero’s predetermined arc of IP permanence compressed into a single movie. (It’s especially insulting to ask audiences to mourn the demise of a character who appears in the many pre-existing series entries set after the timeline of what you’re watching.) Director Steven Caple Jr. streamlines the process into two hours of chases, battles and classic hip-hop soundtrack cues. To show that the series has atoned for Bay’s militaristic aggression, the lead characters Experience Institutional Bias, and Optimus Primal (the gorilla-shaped robot) delivers what I would describe as a land acknowledgment, communing with the Peruvian natives who have assisted his noble guardianship of the glowing power-thingy. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: This may be the first Transformers movie that appears to crib from a bunch of Disney PowerPoints about how to best leverage inclusivity for maximum audience satisfaction.
My satisfaction was not maximized watching Rise of the Beasts, but I did not feel ashamed watching it with my seven-year-old – except when she asked me what a character meant when he made a joke about “bros before hos.” That was a minor hiccup, compared to what could be coming for me; she liked Rise of the Beasts enough that she wants to watch the other entries she hasn’t seen, and I don’t know how to begin to explain the Maxim aesthetics, pot-brownie parent antics, and nonsensical mythos of Revenge of the Fallen. (The screenwriters never had to; the last writers’ strike was supposedly the reason for that movie’s frantic, addled obnoxiousness.)
Surely, children watching movies vaguely/mostly appropriate for them but not explicitly made for them has been a pleasure of young lives for decades upon decades; just as surely, garbage “for kids” is still garbage. What the Transformers movies continue to do is obliterate the line between trash (base, immediate, satisfying) and garbage (base, cynical, disposable). I admit I missed the burnished metallic reds and sunset oranges of Bay’s movies, while also feeling deep relief at the lack of a scene where a character whips out documentation of the age of consent in Texas, hyuck-hyuck. I know there are Bay auteurists who consider this stuff masterful for its sheer, immediate distinctiveness, seeing a brilliant fusion of American commercial and avant-garde filmmaking. Does it matter that it’s all so unrelenting and contemptuous and occasionally reuses the same damn shots? Obviously not. For me, it’s always thrilling for a bit, then exhausting well before the one-hour mark.
Rise of the Beasts is mercifully briefer than most of the previous films, so I was surprised that the exhaustion remained, even after a fun extended final battle, even after a so-dumb-I-laughed franchise teaser to close on. My kid claimed to enjoy herself, and I don’t doubt her, yet I don’t sense that I’ll be experiencing her own pretend-play riffs on this movie in the weeks ahead, which is what happened for a little while after Avatar: The Way of Water. Rise of the Beasts is surely intended to sell toys, and surely will, but even pitched closer to the “right” level, there’s something a little closed-off about this world, something appropriately mechanical about its sense of play. After the movie, my daughter and I killed some time at Five Below, sort of a super-branded dollar store, and we saw a miniature toy of Arcee, the girl-coded pink Transformer from the movie, who she had already admired the ads. I asked her if she wanted to get one. She shrugged and picked out a blind-box cat figurine instead.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.