The only real upside to the latest Transformer movie “Transformers” Rise of the Beasts” is that Michael Bay is not involved with this production in any way. Bay’s last two Transformer movies, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, 2009 and “Transformers: Age of Extinction”, 2014, are generally known to be two of the worst movies ever produced. In 2018, the movie “Bumblebee” was released – again without Michael Bay, and starred Hailee Steinfeld. This version was a good movie with a coherent story and was reviewed in this blog. The problem with too many of these Transformer movies is that the decision-makers were all about huge special effects over any kind of understandable coherent story. Movies like these are created from the top down – CGI and the spectacular effects first, and then write the story around the effects later. The end result is garbage movies that are a nightmare to sit through.

The story with the newest Transformer movie is that it is better than most of the previous versions, but once again, the story is a total disaster and impossible to follow. The best critical review I have seen so far from critic Kevin Carr is “More coherent than the garbage from Michael Bay, but still a noisy, overblown mess.” I 100% agree with this assessment.

Somewhere along the line, with the invention of CGI and special effects movie science, the real reasons for making a movie have been lost. It was always supposed to be about the story first.

I mostly agree with the low 53% rating for this film on Rotten Tomatoes, with my rating around 33%. This movie should be missed by everyone except for kids who have a toy collection of about 100 Transformers.