Transformers: Rise of the Beasts movie review: This Transformers film is a pretender: a pulao calling itself pilaf

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts movie review: This Transformers film is a pretender: a pulao calling itself pilaf

What: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts - When you’re serving a khichdi of many movies, it should either be a funny take or a wonderful homage to the films from which you’re borrowing the plot points. But when a film franchise pretends that it’s original, the result is a mish mash: a pulao calling itself pilaf.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts movie review

Let’s examine the borrowed ideas. First, the super villain sending his mean minion is like every James Bond movie. Or perhaps The Avengers. First comes Scourge, then we understand that there’s a bigger villain he answers to: the badly spelt Unicron,

(How many times did I wince with weird spellings in the movie? Mainly for Unicron that sounds like someone misspelt Unicorn. And the second? The big robotic ape is called Optimus Primal. Third, the robot animals are called Maximals… Ugh! Minimum creativity here…)

 

Back to borrowed theme two: We’ve seen so many King Kong movies, and Planet of the Apes movies, it feels weird to see a big robotic ape with feelings.

Whenever movies with an adventure theme take you to Peru and ruins of ancient temples/cities, you can’t help but think of Indiana Jones. This film feels like an Indiana Jones spin-off film because they’re searching for a Time warp Key that has split into two. Remember the joy, the awe on Indy’s face when the crystal skull is placed in its rightful place? Or when he realizes that he’s holding the historical chalice… The same here…

Plus, the hero who looks too gentle and mostly confused - as if he expected this film to be some rom-com and ended up in a crash-bang-boom of autoboots crashing. Also, one has seen him in person in the Broadway play ‘In the heights’, so I kept wondering if he’s going to break into a song and dance thing… That’s not his fault, of course, but still…

I like Hasbro action figures and tales of the Predacons, so it was fun to see the Predacon design on Scourge. But even this is not original. Steven Spielberg has made a film called The Duel which features an evil truck. That truck is made to look evil the way it is shot. Rusty and menacing it follows an unsuspecting chap driving his car. That evil truck also sports the number plates of the cars which he has destroyed…

Speaking of Scourge, Peter Dinklage gives his voice to the villain. Uff! The voice is so deep and creepy, you might have nightmares. Hardly a good move if you want kids to buy toys/action figures of these transformers… Anyway, it is hardly a kiddie film though cars transforming into robots were a super idea.

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