TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Well, congratulations to The Flash. It took less than 24 hours for this month's superhero offering to be unseated as Worst Film So Far of 2023. Awful though The Flash is, the new Transformers instalment is probably worse: I'm just hoping the new record holder lasts a couple of weeks at least. Of course, the Transformers movies have never been the first choice for genuine quality cinema: they're excessively loud, they're excessively stupid, they're excessively long, they're excessively excessive. They're not movies about people, characters or ideas, they're movies about massive robots smashing the living sump oil out of each other and things exploding and city blocks being annihilated and massive great kaboom eruptions of fire and destruction.

To suggest that this seventh trip to the Autobot Cinematic Universe (a prequel - none of the La Boeufs and Wahlbergs have happened yet) isn't the worst of the saga so far is merely to suggest that a punch in the mouth isn't as bad as a kick in the balls: probably objectively true but hardly a recommendation. Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts may be substantially shorter than previous instalments (except for Bumblebee) but all that means is that it's over quicker. It doesn't wipe out the entirety of New York but it does still trash a goodly chunk of it with a massive robot battle and car chase. Its humans may not be Shia La Boeuf and Megan Fox but they're not of any greater depth, and you don't even get high-calibre reliables like Anthony Hopkins or John Malkovich in support. It all concerns another ancient alien artefact of incredible power (yawn) that's wanted by a planet-eating god called Unicron so he (it?) can open a dimensional portal to come through and eat the Earth. All that stands in the way of Unicron and his (its?) legions of evil Terrorcon robots is a couple of New Yorkers and a handful of Autobots and Maximals (robot animals).

Why is all this so dull? Because the last chunk of the movie is one mammoth battle sequence entirely dependent on so much CGI that the eye and the mind simply cannot process it. You're not excited, you're just battered into submission. There's nothing about it that's real, there's nothing about it that even vaguely resembles real; it might as well be a cartoon. You know, like the ink-and-paint TV show for children more than thirty years ago? But the film opts for kaboom kaboom kaboom because that's all it has in its arsenal: bigger, louder, longer. All it can do is try and top the previous movies in terms of jawdropping spectacle because the alternative would be to work on actual character, narrative and emotion and that's not in their skillset: there's none of that here beyond the bare minimum of soap opera backstories (he's desperate for cash, she's unappreciated at work). So you end up watching two hundred million dollars' worth of artificial fireworks because that's all there is on offer. And it's not enough.

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THE FLASH

CONTAINS SOME LARGE SPOILERS

This is where we've come to, is it? This is the end result of however many years of bellends in spandex repeatedly punching space monsters, mythical demons and occasionally each other into ever more spectacular orgasms of CGI destruction? Coherent storytelling and involving characterisation have been sacrificed on the multiple altars of incoherent computer effects, gibberish writing and bowing and scraping to the hardcore comicbook nerd audience who frankly should have grown out of this thudding drivel by now. (I speak as a semi-hardcore horror movie nerd, but even I have long since wearied of nudge-wink references to An American Werewolf In London and movies that name their supporting characters Romero or Carpenter.)

The big thing now is the Multiverse, allowing alternate versions of characters to turn up in each other's universes. Star Trek, Doctor Who and Red Dwarf have all given their casts opportunities to encounter wildly different versions of themselves: young/old, good/evil, male/female. Marvel have been doing it for a while: the last live-action Spiderman did this, dragging Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire's versions into Tom Holland's world, along with their respective villains for a multi-dimensional supermegasmackdown, and the last Doctor Strange whizzed through a whole series of possible other realities. Then there are the two (so far) Spider-verse animations, which I haven't bothered with. And Everything Everywhere All At Once sought to bring the possibilities of interdimensional travel into some kind of comprehensible comedic focus, with some measure of success.

Let's ignore the numerous offscreen controversies surrounding star Ezra Miller: suffice to say that a brief skim through Wikipedia reveals way more than you ever want or need to know. The problems start with Barry Allen/The Flash: most superheroes are more interesting in their human guises than in their secret identity but he's profoundly annoying in both hats and if that wasn't enough there are two of him because he's tried to go back in time to prevent his mother's murder. Instead he's ended up in a parallel timeline where General Zod (the one from the Zack Snyder Superman movies) is about to attack Earth and The Flashes have to team up with Batman (the one from the Tim Burton movies) and Supergirl and they all go off and fight in the desert to save the world or something.

Multiverse logic also means we don't really care: why should we? It's all happening in an alternate reality where some things are slightly different (Eric Stoltz was the star of Back To The Future) and some things are radically different (there's no Superman) but crucially it isn't happening in ours. So what if that world gets destroyed? Ours doesn't: Zod's already been defeated in this one. The timeline crossover is a device for disregarding continuity completely while at the same time giving you more continuity than you know what to do with. So: walk-on cameos from Helen Slater's Supergirl and Adam West's Batman (among others) through the dubious miracle of CGI as multiple realities and unrealities collide and explode around them, while The Two Barries conspire to be four times as tiresome as when there's only one of them.

DC and Warners apparently coughed up somewhere in the region of Two Hundred Million Dollars for The Flash, which makes you wonder just how terrible Batgirl was that they wrote it off at half that price and put all their weight behind this rubbish. I refuse to believe it's worse, if only because I don't see how it could be. The end result of all the computer-generated whizzbang isn't excitement or exhilaration, it's just bludgeoning exhaustion as the plot strives ever more frantically to get back to where it started in as loud a fashion as possible. The opening action sequence feels like a nightmare that piles mayhem upon chaos upon disaster, but at no point are we invited or expected to care about the "drama" that follows. It's crushingly dull and part of me, not altogether mean-spiritedly, hopes that Warners and DC lose an absolute ton of money on this and maybe, just maybe, start making halfway decent films instead.  What happened to cinema that this tedious stodge is regarded as borderline acceptable even as a summer blockbuster entertainment?

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CATS

SPOILERS, KIND OF...

Confession: I don't generally like musicals. There's something I've never really understood about people suddenly bursting into song, backed by a full orchestra, while simultaneously launching into intricate dance routines. Certainly there are a few exceptions, maybe four or five of them, where I've been able to either buy into the form or overlook it, but as a rule it's not a genre I seek out. But man cannot live by eighties slashers and whizzbang superheroes alone and it does one good to occasionally try something else, something different. Well, it's different all right. Say what you like: you've never seen anything like this before. And you'll most likely never see anything like it again. Fortunately.

There isn't a plot so much: a bunch of cats in London's glittering West End compete, through the medium of song and dance, to be granted a new life, and we get a series of showstopping (if only!) musical numbers in which the star cast (Rebel Wilson, Idris Elba, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen) cavort about in digitally applied cat costumes in a motion capture hellscape. Which one will it be? The railway cat, the thieving cats, the old theatrical cat, the villainous cat, the magician cat, the Thames barge cat? Oh, the suspense... Except that there is no suspense because the lucky winner is blindingly obvious from first appearance so why are we wasting our time with all these others?

It's not just that Cats is unremittingly terrible: it's that there's no conceivable way that Cats could have ever been anything else but unremittingly terrible, and they knew that but went ahead and did it anyway. Every number goes on for at least one verse and chorus too long, and most of them aren't that great to start with, including the one major hit Memory. The whole thing is shot in mocap and slathered in CGI to the extent that it looks less like a live-action film augmented by computer effects, and more like a full-on Pixar nightmare that's got actual humans weirdly cut-and-pasted into it: even real things don't look real and it wouldn't have looked that much out of place if Buzz Lightyear had turned up.

But deep down, did I find a few tiny morsels of perverse pleasure lurking somewhere in this cataclysmic, catastrophic catalogue of wrong? No, no I didn't. It's an eye-opener, no matter how hard you struggle: you wonder what the hell possessed people you like and respect, proper A-list stars and James Corden to get involved (and then stay involved) in this high-budget monstrosity. Maybe it works on the stage in leotards and frightwigs: I haven't seen it and wouldn't care to guess but there are clips online to give you a clue, and they might well have got away with it if they'd done that here. But they didn't and the result is a rampagingly bad idea that so many people had the power to stop but failed to do so. This is on their conscience and I hope they can sleep at nights. And Andrew Lloyd Webber should have his lordhood taken away from him.

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