Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Rust and Stardust

I did not expect to care about a giant metallic gorilla. This is, after all, a movie built first and foremost to move plastic toys off shelves. My history with the *Transformers* films has mostly involved the kind of headaches Michael Bay specializes in: sun-bleached chaos, spinning cameras, actors yelling at empty space, explosions that seem to go off because the frame looked too calm for a second. So when I sat down for Steven Caple Jr.’s *Transformers: Rise of the Beasts*, I was ready to endure it. Then the movie did something I was not prepared for. I actually started watching instead of bracing myself.



Caple, coming off *Creed II*, brings a very different physical language to this 1994-set prequel. He pulls everything closer to the ground. Instead of chrome giants blazing under hard daylight like untouchable gods, he puts these machines in shadow. Optimus Prime clanking down a Brooklyn alley has real grime to him, real weight. You can almost smell the fumes. Maybe it helps that the film is steeped in the golden era of East Coast hip-hop, but the editing has an actual pulse this time. It breathes. Caple lingers on metal scraping against concrete instead of hurrying toward the next fireball.

That sense of grounding lives or dies on Anthony Ramos, and he delivers. As Noah Diaz, an ex-military electronics expert scrambling to get medical care for his younger brother, Ramos brings a tired, hustling, street-level energy to a franchise that usually treats human beings like walking explanation machines. With his musical theater background in *Hamilton* and *In the Heights*, he knows exactly how to use his body in a frame. He is not just reacting to CGI noise. He plays against it. You feel it in the droop of his shoulders after a failed job interview, or in the white-knuckled way he grips the steering wheel when he realizes the Porsche he stole has a mind of its own. He moves like someone who actually has rent and hospital bills hanging over him. That weariness lands harder than any cosmic mythology the script keeps trying to pile on.



The film does not fully escape the habits baked into this franchise. In the back half, the scrappy texture of 1990s New York gives way to a huge, anonymous digital battleground in Peru. At that point the story falls into the usual chase for a glowing MacGuffin, here called the Transwarp Key. Charles Bramesco wrote in *The Guardian* that the film's "Transformers have faces, yet lack expressions," and even if that feels a little harsh toward the Autobots, it absolutely fits the villains. The Terrorcons, with Scourge at the front, are basically jagged gray masses of evil who talk about darkness until someone hits them. I checked out during the climax. I suspect plenty of people will. There is only so long you can watch chunks of digital metal batter each other before your brain quietly leaves the room.

Still, I keep thinking about a much smaller scene from early on. Noah is hiding in a dark parking garage, talking to Mirage, voiced with surprising charm by Pete Davidson. The robot shifts his frame, reworking his body just enough to fit under the concrete ceiling. Dust shakes loose. The sound design leans into the heavy mechanical click of gears instead of smoothing it all into a digital hum. For a second, it feels less like spectacle than two kids hiding in a basement and trying to figure out what to do next.



Whether that ridiculous crossover tease in the last scene feels like inspired Saturday-morning nonsense or a naked corporate order probably depends on how much patience you still have for the modern franchise machine. I am still not convinced it works. But Caple managed something I would have called impossible a few years ago. He took a rusty, overinflated property and found a faint but steady pulse under the hood. It is not perfect, but at least it feels alive.