I am absolutely not a fan of the Michael Bay era of the Transformers movies. I found them over-produced noise with a same-iness to all the monotonous action scenes. They left me bored and mentally drained. But I enjoyed the (Bay-less) Bumblebee movie so I kind of hoped we’d get more like that… but we don’t… but at least it’s not Bayhem all the way down.

In Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Unicron is a giant planet-eating robot who wants to eat planets. He needs a doohickey first so he sends his agents to Earth to get it. The Autobots join forces with previously unknown robot animals to get it first. It’s very Robospearean.

This flick uncomfortably straddles the line between being a sequel to Bumblebee and a continuation of Michael Bay’s flicks. It seems like a sequel in terms of continuity and character design but it’s trying to emulate the look, feel, humor, overuse AND underuse of humans of Bay’s flicks.

But the problem and the benefit of it not actually being a Michael Bay film is that it’s not actually a Michael Bay film. The crash ’em up action is similar… but without Bay’s stylized sheen, slow-mo, and hero shots. Instead, it has a level of restraint that Bay never had. Yeah, an amalgam of barely distinguishable robots smash into each other mindlessly… but these sequences show restraint. They aren’t exhausting marathons of noise… they understand rising and falling action and, more importantly, know when to end (the flick is a good 30 minutes shorter than most of ’em).

Too bad, once again, they focus too much on kind of boring human characters. They are better developed than Michael Bay’s approximation of humans at least.. but they continue to get in the way of the robots (who have little personality of their own).

I know Transformers: Beast Wars was a popular cartoon for a certain demographic. Put a gun to my head though, and I’d tell you they were called beastacons… but I guess they are Maximals and Predacons. Now I know… and knowing is half the battle. Too bad they are underused and underdeveloped (and conceptually weird but I’ll yell at the toy-line and see how far I get).

This is certainly better than all the Michael Bay films but a step down from the more personal and charming Bumblebee. I guess this will be the new direction for the franchise since they are clearly setting up more movies in this timeline. I’m exhausted thinking about it.

Score: 71