Honestly, was going to wait for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts to hit streaming, but a coworker urged me to see it in theaters, and glad I did. I liked Bumblebee a few years ago, but otherwise had grown stale on the whole Transformers franchise; I didn’t even bother seeing The Last Knight and only saw Bumblebee because of good word-of-mouth. But this new film continues down a good path, hopefully with a bright future for the Autobots.
The premise is thus: a planet-eating dark god named Unicron is after an item called the Transwarp Key, which will allow him to travel the galaxy devouring planets at will. Guarding the Key are the Maximals, transformers who change into beasts. They escape the planet with the Key and escape to Earth, thousands of years ago. The Key has been hidden there, until now. From here, the film takes place in 1994, so still a prequel of sorts to the rest of the movies.
In ’94, the key is found inside an ancient artifact, and once unearthed, throws out a signal that attracts Unicron’s forces, the Terrorcons. They come to Earth and start smashing things up, hunting for the key. To face off against them: good old Optimus Prime and a handful of Autobots, including the ever-popular Bumblebee, though Mirage takes a more central role in this film. Mirage becomes buddies with human Noah Diaz, a down-on-his-luck former soldier trying to scrape together money for his family. Noah gets swept up in the war trying to keep the Key out of the bad guys hands, so they can’t open a door to bring Unicron here to destroy Earth. At the same time, Optimus would love to use the Key to return to his home world of Cybertron.
There’s plenty of robot-on-robot action, but a strong human story too, with Noah’s story and his plight. Even putting the whole transformers thing aside, there’s still some pretty big leaps of faith to take here and there in the plot, but it’s still a good time, and I think the film franchise has at least found some solid footing again. ★★★½
Jons Movie Takes 