Rise Of The Beasts could be the first film to take Transformers seriously
Fans once cared about a robot that turns into a gorilla—Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. is making sure they do again
Film Features Transformers
The original 1984 Transformers cartoon (dubbed “Generation 1” or “G1” by fans) was very clearly and obviously created to sell toys. It was, frankly, a genius scheme to reverse-engineer a way to get kids invested in characters by creating a storyline around existing toys imported from various Japanese lines so they would be easier to sell in America. It never really aspired to be anything else, and any legacy that the cartoon itself has today is mostly due to the continued appeal of the toys or the better-than-it-has-any-right-to-be 1986 animated movie.
But that wasn’t the case for its follow-up show, Beast Wars: Transformers, a CG-animated series from 1996 with aspirations that reached far beyond selling toys to impressionable children. It had story arcs, it had character arcs, and it maintained continuity with the G1 cartoon in a way that actually made it seem like it mattered beyond the toys that it sold. To put it simply, Beast Wars took the Transformers brand seriously, and now—after so many years of making Transformers fans suffer—the big live-action movies might be attempting to do the same thing.
Previous Transformers movies had half-hearted gestures toward G1 continuity—Autobots waging their battles to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons, that sort of thing—but with Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, director Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II), is diving straight into the Beast Wars legacy. His new film, which opens Friday with a cast that includes Anthony Ramos, original Optimus Prime voice actor Peter Cullen, Pete Davidson, and Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh, introduces a faction of robots called Maximals, who turn into animals instead of cars and trucks and whatnot. They’re led by a gorilla robot called Optimus Primal, and the team includes a rhinoceros robot named Rhinox and a cheetah robot named Cheetor.
Those are Beast Wars characters, and though it all definitely seems silly on paper, finally including them in the live-action universe feels like a signal to Transformers fans that they’re actually going to seriously engage with Transformers canon for the first time … just like Beast Wars did in the mid-’90s.
The show, a CG-animated cartoon from Mainframe Entertainment (creators of ReBoot), took place hundreds of years after the ’80s show and centered on a new robot war between a faction of good guys called Maximals and a faction of bad guys called Predacons. In the first episode, their two ships go through some sort of time warp and crash onto a largely barren planet that is gradually revealed to be a prehistoric Earth, and since there aren’t any cars or trucks around to transform into, the robots become gorillas and cheetahs and dinosaurs.
There’s no reason to take any of that any more seriously than the original show, but Beast Wars gradually snuck in themes of pacifism and spirituality and even star-crossed romance alongside its backdrop of robot toys trying to kill each other. Its characters grew and changed as the show went on, most notably a dinosaur robot called Dinobot who started as a bad guy, defected to the good guys, and then learned to empathize with the vulnerable proto-humans that had begun to try and find their place in this prehistoric world. Ask a Beast Wars fan about Dinobot’s death, where he heroically sacrifices himself to defend the early humans—thereby saving the future of our dopey species—and they still might get a tear in their eye.
But the most obvious example of the show taking Transformers seriously came in its second season, when the writers did the math and realized that the first episode of the G1 Transformers cartoon is about them crash-landing on prehistoric Earth and laying dormant in a volcano until the 1980s—meaning that the original Transformers are hanging around, unconscious, somewhere on this same planet during the events of Beast Wars. At the end of that season, the Predacons try to kill Optimus Prime and rewrite all of Transformers continuity so the bad guys win.
And that’s cool! Both because it’s a natural extension of the premise and because the way it’s handled on the show treats Optimus Prime and the other G1 Transformers with actual reverence. The camera hangs on certain characters for a moment, as if to say “check it out, it’s freaking Starscream,” and while it is definitely heavy-handed fan service, it also treats these characters as hugely important within this continuity and not just established names to check off a list.
Steven Caple Jr. definitely knows all of this. Back when Rise Of The Beasts was first announced, he made a point to note that he was a big fan of Beast Wars—he was born in 1988, making him too young to have really seen the original series when it aired but the perfect age to have been watching Beast Wars. He must be aware of the significance of these characters having Transformers continuity and he has to be aware that Beast Wars was good specifically because it respected its audience’s intelligence and their willingness to get on board with character arcs and relatively complex themes and big-swing continuity twists.
Caple Jr. being a Transformers fan, and specifically a Beast Wars fan, hopefully means he came to this movie with some awareness of how to tell a satisfying story about robots in disguise (as opposed to Bay’s complete and total lack of it). And it’s not a moment too soon, either: Transformers fans have already had to put up with their toy movies being bad, but now Barbie is coming out and it looks like a toy movie that will actually be really good, and that’s just heartbreaking. Everyone deserves to have their toy made into a good movie!
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Because if there’s been one consistent problem with this franchise, it’s that no one takes Transformers seriously.
You may not think there’s a lot a depth, but if you look a bit closer at Transformers, you’ll find there’s more than meets the eye.
I’ll transform and roll myself out.
I actually WANT this shirt , and I dont care who knows it.
So do I! Also, if The Onion merch store starts selling this shirt I expect a cut. Let’s say 15%.
the fact that we’re getting this weird piece before we get a review of the movie (which comes out tomorrow) says all that needs to be said.
I’m dealing with a head cold so I’m a little slow, but what is being said here?
it’s gonna be a bad movie
Jesus fuck, does everything on the internet need to be a conspiracy?
what
Dude, it’s your fever dream, not mine.
you’re the one with the head cold.
And you’re the one with the fever. Glad you’re all caught up now.
real freak shit. gotta respect it.
Bruh, you don’t even respect reality.
It’s well known that Hollywood doesn’t give advance showings to critics of movies it thinks critics will hate. Whether or not that means a movie will actually be terrible is a matter for debate (some people love things that get critical scorn), but it’s not a good sign.
“It’s well known that Hollywood doesn’t give advance showings to critics of movies it thinks critics will hate.”Sure. What this has to do with the above article, I have no idea.
If Richard Belzer taught us nothing else, he taught us that everything is a conspiracy.
That sounds just like something One of Them would say!
but maybe it could be like Avatar The Way of Water and make money irregardless? (I finally saw Avatar last night, yikes that was boring, that movie is nothing if the blue elves don’t do anything for you).
it will not be making money like avatar the way of water. it’s way too competitive a summer for it to break through. honestly i wouldn’t be shocked if spider-verse’s second weekend beats it this weekend.
my crystal ball predicts roughly the same box office take as bumblebee.
I think the theme here is “buy a ticket based on its connection to a show you remember liking, not by the movie’s actual quality.” This is some standard Aint It Cool News tactic, and I’d accuse G/O Media of taking payola, but the more likely answer is that there’s always an army of fanboys willing to carry water for substandard content that provides nostalgia. Call it The Germain Lussier Effect.
“This is some standard Aint It Cool News tactic”Wearing your heart on your sleeve? That tracks, actually.
That’s a very kind way to put it – and it’s not wrong – but it’s also only a small part of the whole. The problem wasn’t their hearts on their sleeves, it was their hearts being stapled over everything, obscuring the new movies/shows/whatever for their actual quality, deciding instead to judge them based on the thing they’re referencing. It’s like saying all Star Wars is good because you love “A New Hope.”
I hear they’re bringing Dowd back to drop a C grade on it.
“Everyone deserves to have their toy made into a good movie!”Sure, why not, it’s important that kids use their toys to follow a storyline created by old people instead of using their imaginations to build their own stories.
Which is one of the reasons I’m so fond of The LEGO Movie: it’s literally the story of a kid taking his dad’s LEGO bricks and using his imagination to play with them in ways other than following the rote instructions of the sets.Between this PR puff piece article and the Flamin’ Hot review, though, I get the feeling that the current AV Club doesn’t share my opinion.
A moral slightly damaged by the fact that they made official Lego Movie Lego sets with detailed instructions.
Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that LEGO doesn’t care about that moral, so long as they get to sell more bricks.At least there’s nothing stopping kids from using those official LEGO Movie sets in conjunction with their LEGO Friends sets and LEGO Bionicle sets to tell their own stories.
“It was, frankly, a genius scheme to” do exactly what every single other toy company was doing.
Yeah, Transformers really cracked the code, didn’t they?
“And that’s cool! Because the way it’s handled on the show treats the Transformers with actual reverence.”Yes finally we treat the CGI robot monkey from a Saturday morning cartoon with the solemn dignity that it deserves.
I have fond memories of Beast Wars, because its ambitions managed to elevate what should have been a grade-F show. But it’s worth noting that said elevation still only brought the show to maybe – maybe – a C+ at its best. All the aforementioned character developments were nestled deep within dull plots and typically atrocious Saturday morning cartoon pacing, the kind that stretched 5-minute stories into 22-minute slogs.
Season 1 maybe. Seasons 2-3 not so much.
This worthless fanboy wank is newsworthy at the new AV Club? “Waah Bay movies bad, I need my toy commercials from the 90s canon to be Respected, how dare Bay just make movies?”
Nice article, now watch as I destroy it with a single word: Bumblebee.
Finally someone might make a good Transformers movie (if we pretend the last Transformers movie, which was actually good, didn’t happen)!
“…a cheetah robot named Cheetor.”Quite frankly, it’s amazing that the guy who named all the He-Man characters could still find work after that debacle.
Partial redemption with the Thundercats.
The issue with the Bay-directed Transformers movies wasn’t that they failed to treat the source material with enough “reverence”—they’re a line of children’s toys, for chrissakes. The issue with the Bay-directed Transformers movies is that they’re…movies directed by Michael Bay—loud, incoherent, and exhausting when they’re not also being racist, sexist, and jingoistic. Everyone deserves to have their toy made into a good movie!GHOST OF THEODOR ADORNO: Jesus fucking christ.
yeah if anything the problem was too much reverence, not enough fun. also those movies were violent in a way that was upsetting. he was able to get away with sooo much stuff because they weren’t human.
I don’t think a movie series that has Wheelie humping Megan Fox’s leg and a “wrecking balls” joke can be accused of having too much reverance for the source material.
Meh I don’t think they were any more violent that a typical action movie, certainly not to the point of being upsetting in a way like torture porn, Hostel or Saw movies might be.
they were as violent as something r-rated. there were execution-style headshots and they’d rip each other’s guts out. for a kids movie based on a toyline it was a lot.
Fair enough, but to be honest as far as PG13 has been pushed there is VERY little difference between a violent PG13 movie and a R rated one, many times a little as a single cuss word or 2 being cut.
right, i’m just saying even as someone with a high tolerance for that stuff i was put off by just how gleefully violent it was in a movie that’s supposed to be selling toys to kids, and how they were able to get away with it because they weren’t showing humans.optimus prime, to me, isn’t guy who shoots someone in the face when they’re on their knees surrendering haha.
Fair, but at least to me, I don’t think the Bay Transformer movies were actually aimed at kids, other than having a PG13 rating, and more so at people who grew up with Transformers as kids. At least that’s how I viewed it, since as an actual toy I don’t think Transformers were much of a thing anymore when the first Bay movie dropped, then again I am grown with no kids so I haven’t actually been to a toy aisle in decades.
right, and my point is they’re doing r-rated violence in a pg13 movie either way.
Yeah, one of the movies shows one of the Autobots down on his knees looking for his glasses (FFS) and gets shot in the back of the head, execution style, by one of the bad guys. They’re robots, so that’s OK, right?
This is nu-AV Club after all, the same site that just today is raving about a goddamn feature-length Flamin’ Hot Cheetos commercial.
I agree that was a terrible review that didn’t even seem to know standard terms for techniques like speed ramping. But this film is not a Cheetos commercial. PepsiCo hates it.
Not to mention featured robot characters that were visually incomprehensible. There were so my little fittings and pistons and other moving parts that it seemed like any fight would bend something that rendered them unable to transform into anything.
I might have been able to give the Bay movies a little more of a pass (not much of one, mind you, thanks to all the other issues you mentioned) if the fights hadn’t looked like two drawers of silverware tossed at each other and filmed at the worst angles possible.
Hey guys 32 year old 90s kid here. Um yah this film is the most exciting thing in my life right now. I don’t care if I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses I’m so fucking ready for a Beast Wars film.
So to answer who asked for this – me and everyone else from my grade 1 class in the 90s.
Exactly this. I was pumped for Dinobots. My 6 year old and I are equally excited for Beast Wars.
Hey, 42 year old 80 kid happy to see a transformers movie that I don’t nope out of during the trailer. The only good things to come from bayformers were the numerous essays on why Bay sucks on YT.
I have seen exactly 1 Michael Bay Transformers movie in my life. It sucked and the bits I’ve seen of the others were also bad.When the trailer for the Beast Wars movie came out, I immediately texted my brother to LOOK AT THIS SHIT. We loved this show as a kid. We hated Beast Machines, the follow up to Beast Wars which was terrible and ugly and bastardized the characters we loved from Beast Wars. I am not easily swayed by nostalgia but they got me.
This was embarassing to read
I’m still angry about the flames on Optimus Prime!
Apparently the flames were at least partly necessary due to CGI having issues with the colour red. One of the Transformers videos on the Channel Pointless Hub explains it better than I can.
Why?
Because it’s not exactly like the cartoons.
Pete Davidson in a Beast War? PETA’s definitely not going to like that.
Seriously. He couldn’t have picked a nice Earth creature to adopt instead of going with the alien robot version?
I still don’t care about anything Transformers related but I liked this article. Actual enthusiasm about a pop culture topic? Not full of spelling errors? Reminds me of the AV Club of old.
Commenters in this thread, you know there’s no reason the story of the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos can’t make a good movie. It’s a super compelling rags to riches story of the sort that Americans typically love
The opening of the first of the Bay Transformers films took the Transformers seriously and it was great.Unfortunately the rest of the film and four more afterwards happened.The 1986 animated Transformers movie is still by far the best one.
Eh. So far I’ve read that this film is aggressively mediocre. So far I think the only decent entries in the series are the first one and Bumblebee. But to be fair I don’t think I’ve seen the Walburger films and don’t plan to.
Also, for the longest time, I thought they were singing “Robots in the skies!”They weren’t.
I thought it was “Robots that are guys”
I’d watch it
Must… resist… obvious joke.
I thought it was “Robots kiss this guy.”
And I’d definitely watch this one, too
They’re not “Robots into pies”?!
Is RatTrap in this movie?
He damn well better be and he damn well better be voiced by Steve Buscemi!
Even though he was mostly comic relief, so I’m not sure the movie can really pull it off, the show still managed to give him some real dramatic gravitas when the situation called for it (which is a testament to how good the show was, for a kids show anyway)
Ain’t no sunshine when the Avclub’s goooooooone.Ain’t no sunshine when it’s goooooooooone!And this site just ain’t a hoooooooome.But thanks for telling us that Barbie ‘looks great.’
Ain’t no sunshine when the Avclub’s goooooooone.Ain’t no sunshine when it’s goooooooooone!And this site just ain’t a hoooooooome.But thanks for telling us that Barbie ‘looks great.’
Ain’t no sunshine when the Avclub’s goooooooone.Ain’t no sunshine when it’s goooooooooone!And this site just ain’t a hoooooooome.But thanks for telling us that Barbie ‘looks great.’
Was there a magical negro bot in the original series? Because that’s what this looks like it’s going to be.
“Optimus Primal“?Really?Can’t imagine why no one takes this seriously.
Now I want a live action Mighty Max movie!
would love if hasbro spent money and re-rendered the old show with modern cgi and in HD. I’m sure those assets are lost but fans would pay to have the show in a more watchable state on modern TVS