BASICALLY… Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and his handful of Autobots confront the imminent arrival of a planet-eating menace. They must ally with the secretive Maximals led by Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) against an overwhelming force to save Earth and have a chance of going home.
Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) has a world of problems. He’s been kicked out of the Army for “not being a team player,” despite his impressive skills with electronics, and that bad rep is following him around. It’s gotten so bad that he’s considering joining a lowlife operator in stealing cars. All of this is because of his little brother, Kris (Dean Scott Vasquez), who has a chronic medical condition that needs regular treatment—which neither he nor his mom can afford.
On his first trip out, he comes across a silver Porsche and climbs inside, only to have the car roar off on its own. The car is secretly a robot named Mirage (Pete Davidson), who’s answering a call from his boss with Noah along for the ride. The police chase that follows ends with Noah in the company of Autobots, refugees from the planet Cybertron under the leadership of Optimus Prime. They’ve been stuck on Earth, pretending to be ordinary vehicles, for years but now a relic called the transwarp key has reappeared; this object gives them a hope of getting home.
Noah offers to go after the key, but runs across Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback), who has made an important discovery from the symbols on the key’s reliquary (a shell shaped like the Maltese Falcon). Unfortunately, the key announced itself and now a squad of evil robots is on Earth from Unicron, a world-sized cyber-entity that feeds on planets rich in energon (the mineral the powers the robots).
Like Earth.
A battle erupts between Prime’s squad and Unicron’s, led by the villainous Scourge (Peter Dinklage), which ends with Scourge acquiring the key.
Except… it’s only half of the key. Now Prime and his forces have to team up with the animal-formed Maximals to prevent the villainous Scourge from getting the other half and then bringing Unicron to Earth. Time is running out as heroes and villains race to Peru for a final showdown.
Rise of the Beasts is a prequel to the existing Transformers canon, set in Brooklyn 1984. Sam Witwicky and the rest are a couple of years in the future, so this Prime doesn’t trust humans and wants only to go home. He leads Mirage, Arcee (Liza Koshy), and Bumblebee, and is guilt-stricken that he’s stranded them so far from home. Teaming up with Airazor (Michelle Yeoh) gives him reason to hope; the transwarp key can get them home to Cybertron. But Noah believes the key must be destroyed, so the heroes aren’t entirely on the same page going forward.
Ramos is the quarterback of this movie, shouldering the narrative arc (caring big brother struggling to help his little bro, human amid powerhouse alien robots) and doing a great job with it. He sells Noah as a guy who could be a hero if given the chance, and runs with it when it happens. Fishback is likewise a stand-out as Elena, an intern in a museum whose boss takes credit for her work but provides the key insights to make their missions possible.
Davidson is a gem addition to the cast as Mirage, a smart-aleck Autobot with a carburetor of gold and a strong bond with Noah. Cullen is staunch and steady as always, with Colman Domingo providing some chills as the voice of Unicron (the Transformers’ answer to Galactus). Both groups of actors deliver strong on a story that fits nicely into the Transformer saga.
And a final scene in the movie will have audiences howling, guaranteed. But no spoilers…
You don’t have to be a Transformers fan to enjoy this one—it gives you everything you need to know—and its two-hour runtime goes by fast. So settle back, watch giant robots slug it out for the fate of Earth, and know that summer is here.
