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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