The Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah is one of the most interesting things I have ever seen. The first time I drove through it, I didn’t even realize I was there. At roughly twelve miles long and five miles wide, it is literally one straight road with no turns and completely flat, so there is no limit to how far you can see. While it is an amazing thing to behold, it’s also kind of a boring area, and we will come back to that in a bit.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the latest film directed by Steven Caple, Jr. (Creed II) with Anthony Ramos, Dominique Fishback, Dean Scott Vazquez and Luna Lauren Velez in live action alongside the voice talents of Peter Cullen, Pete Davidson, Ron Perlman, Michelle Yeoh and Peter Dinklage. It’s after the events of Bumblebee in 1994 with Noah Diaz (Ramos) trying to find employment to help out at home provide with his single mother (Velez). After a number of events, he winds up working with the Autobots lead by Optimus Prime (Cullen) and a museum researcher named Elena Wallace (Fishback) to find a relic that may help he and his fellow Transformers get to their home on Cybertron, but also could also bring the world-killing Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo) to destroy the earth, led there by Scourge (Dinklage).
Let me start with the positives: this film has some very good visuals and clocks in at under two hours.
Now to the negatives: it’s still about twenty minutes too long and has that same flat feeling that you can get from seeing The Bonneville Salt Flats. To help you understand how I truly felt here: the plot felt flat like the Salt Flats in its predictability, the voice acting was as flat as the Salt Flats in a way that they all just sounded like a speaker at a fast-food drive-thru, the emotional beats of the script fell as flat as Bonneville… and this went all the way through this film for me. It didn’t work on ANY level.
The live-action performances were also not impressive. In what were supposed to be emotional moments, I could not be in those moments with the characters, all of which reminded me of Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons when she pleaded with the residents of Springfield to “think of the children”. This film is a waste of time, I got nothing out of it, and if there are future films with no improvement, they need to go straight to the junkyard. Please do not waste your time or money on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts because I am giving it my “Un-Coveted The Maze Runner Promise”.
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