While watching Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much it felt like an apology. Within its flat blockbuster sheen, its seemingly benign but incessant Marvel-type quipping, and its flavorless sequences of CG action, all I could see was a product thought up by a room of suits that saw the criticisms lobbed at the previous mainline Transformers entries—all helmed by Michael Bay in his bad-taste maximalist machismo—and decided they had to have a big realignment. Maybe something more along the lines of the agreeable, well-received prequel Bumblebee.
It’s a prudent business move to make if we’re purely looking at critical and audience reception—there were hardly any receptive parties to speak of by Bay’s final entry, The Last Knight. On the other hand, Bumblebee—though the lowest grossing of the series—was welcomed by both parties as a respite from the exhaustive nature of the franchise; Rotten Tomatoes isn’t the infallible arbiter of film criticism, but it is telling that the film is the only one in the franchise to have both a positive critic and audience score. It’s not like everyone didn’t already know that Bay’s vision of Transformers was uniquely trashy and often grotesque. For a decade, it was the rare Hollywood franchise that critics and audiences found some sort of common ground, mostly in unified hope that each installment might be the last. They were Bay’s most unpleasant impulses turned up to the max: Loud, mindless, sophomoric, bloated, offensive, racist, often objectifying of women…the list goes on. Of course the studio was going to want to pivot eventually, and Bay wanted to move on anyway. Time for a board-approved, market-tested soft reboot!
And that’s just what Rise of the Beasts feels like. Set between Bumblebee and the ‘07 Transformers, and with an entirely new cast of human characters, Beasts posits itself as the establishment of a new tone and direction for the series, with new, consistent protagonists in the form of Anthony Ramos’ Noah and Dominique Fishback’s Elena. Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. takes over directing duties, but mostly seems like a hired hand as the film takes on what is sure to be an overarching house style of generality, content to play events as broadly as possible to make sure everyone is on the same page. It’s why the big climactic showdown takes place on the same ugly, gray, CG landscape that so many of these movies do now. It’s not too assaultive, like what the franchise was doing before; you can almost hear the movie saying “It works for the Marvel and DC guys, so why not us?”
The producers seem to have learned the wrong lessons from Bumblebee. It was more palatable, but it also had personality, even if it was aping obvious ‘80s coming-of-age and sci-fi touchstones. Beasts doesn’t have an identity. It’s a nondescript clutter of requisite narrative beats and expensive digital renderings of toys and cartoon characters you recognize, desperate to establish a larger franchise—as the closing cut-to-credits stinger suggests—because that’s what you do now. In a blockbuster landscape propelled by cinematic universes, we’re now being sold the Hasbro Cinematic Universe? For all their faults, Bay’s films lived and died by his filmmaking aptitude. It feels no accident that the antiseptic entry after his tenure is also the one trying most obviously to cash in on an extended universe play. It feels like the producers were actively aware they didn’t have anything else to mine here, but they have to boost their profits somehow—and the market has already proved that the strategy sells tickets.
This total void of a movie fatally omits anything in the way of personality while simultaneously trying to exploit familiarity of IP begs a complicated question: Were Transformers movies better with Michael Bay directing them? “Better” may be too simplistic a term for the query at hand, but they were at least more fascinating to watch and possessed a distinct artistic vision, even if that vision was transmitted straight from the unfiltered psyche of a frenzied madman. Maybe the better question is: Do Bay’s films have more artistic integrity? Resoundingly, yes.
Of course, artistic integrity doesn’t automatically equate to worthwhile art. While the Bay-era Transformers films do have their stretches of genuinely staggering, bravura action sequences with a deft understanding of scope, scale and CG implementation within their environments, they’re just as often odious, ugly reflections of a distinctly American vulgarity. But are such flawed films more worthwhile than the bland nothingness that is Rise of the Beasts?
I don’t know how I could ever forget Optimus Prime ruthlessly decapitating and tearing out the spinal cord of Megatron while he gushes red oil that looks like blood in Dark of the Moon, the same film where Optimus also brutally executes a traitorous Autobot in cold blood as he begs for his life. Or even the smaller bizarre choices, like in Revenge of the Fallen where Julie White trips out on pot brownies. Let’s throw in the scene where Megatron sits upon the wreckage of the Lincoln Memorial like a throne, or the scene with John Turturro in a jockstrap. Bay’s choices are crude and sometimes downright contemptible. They’re also distinct, and fly in the face of the way Beasts conforms to an anonymous visual style and generic blockbuster story beats which, yes, does include the main characters chasing after a McGuffin device that opens up a big portal in the sky for the bad guys to fly through. The plotting of the previous films wasn’t exactly sharper, but they were made memorable in their own, senseless way.
Bay also never seemed satisfied to let the franchise become pure commodification. There’s a level of salesmanship implicit in making a movie franchise based on toys—and as the series progressed, more recognizable elements from the cartoons, like Dinobots, were introduced—but there was a genuine effort from Bay to make the movies he wanted to make without letting the forces of the brand dilute them. These are Transformers movies, but they’re more distinctly Michael Bay movies, a sharp contrast to the focus-grouped feeling of Beasts.
This dynamic is exacerbated by Bay’s work since leaving the franchise. He has gone on to make two wholly original films following his franchise tenure: The ludicrous Ryan Reynolds-fronted Netflix actioner 6 Underground and the back-to-basics, Tony Scott-adjacent big-screen heist thriller Ambulance. The former swindled $150 million out of Netflix (back when they were still occasionally offering carte blanche to prominent filmmakers to beef up the authority of their original library) and with it created what is maybe the most fervently realized and purely concentrated dose of tasteless nonsense the director has made since Bad Boys II. The latter was a refreshing reminder of a time when mid-budget movies were the norm, still punctuated with Bay’s specific preoccupations like pointless digressions and juvenile comedy, that nonetheless felt like a shot in the arm due to its precise, vigorous visual sense and committed performers. Each has its defenders and detractors—I’d probably put myself somewhere straight down the middle for either—but they represent something greater if you look at the trajectory of Bay’s films versus that of the franchise he left behind. Transformers has always played to the cheap seats, but what a visceral experience it was before now!
Does this mean Bay’s Transformers deserve some kind of widespread reclamation? No, not really. They’re universally disliked, with reason. But it is interesting to consider which version of the franchise offers more to the viewer: The one that is unmistakably the work of its creator, or the one that’s indistinguishable from your standard blockbuster fodder. This line of thought pulls in all sorts of ancillary questions. In a world where idiosyncratic, distinctive art is celebrated, what is the role of passionate, bad art? Who decides what bad art is? What even is the demographic of these movies anymore? Just as these feel impossible to answer, so does discerning whether or not I even like the Michael Bay Transformers films. I truly don’t know. But there’s at least something there, a steadfast devotion to creative instincts that I admire. As for Rise of the Beasts, I can only see a devotion to cynical franchising.
Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.