Transformers: Rise of Beasts is the newest Transformers movie. Set in Brooklyn, New York in 1994 (7 years after Transformers: Bumblebee but 13 years before the first Transformers movie), we follow older brother, Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) who tries to help out his single mom and sick younger brother. They don’t have enough money to pay for his brother’s medical bills, so he turns to car stealing for some quick cash. At that moment, Noah meets the Transformers. In order to get home, they need the help of museum employee Elena (Dominique Fishback) and Noah. Noah and Elena have to team up with the Transformers to defeat another evil power, Unicron. The Transformers and their human allies team up with a new species (the Maximals) to save each other’s worlds. 

This movie was overall pretty great. I sat in the theater rooting on the protagonists, my mouth was left gaping open and I laughed at a good amount of the jokes there. I managed to jump right into this movie despite not having watched the last four movies of the franchise. In fact, my friend has never seen a single Transformers movie until now, but we both still enjoyed this movie immensely. It was super fun and had good tension, good jokes, and was really immersing.

Transformers: Rise of Beasts stars Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback; the human allies. They were wonderful and really enjoyed watching them throughout the movie but I really wish they had more interaction so they could create a deeper bond. I also wish that the movie was longer as I didn’t feel like there was enough time for all the characters. There were some that I wish had more screen time and interactions. If you were to watch the movies in chronological order, there would be a good amount of characters you would wonder about after. I barely have any information on newly introduced characters. The movie only gives you a good surface view of who the characters are but doesn’t go deep into depth or show you who they really are. However, that would be the only thing that I would improve despite the movie already being two hours long. If the movie was longer, I don’t think I would have minded. 

The plot of the movie, character developments, and new characters were really good. The only thing I could have wished for was more character bonding. I would definitely recommend this movie to others, whether they’ve seen previous Transformers movies or not. I did enjoy the movie and I can’t wait to see what comes next in the franchise.

-Nicole R.