Where I Watched It: Paramount Plus

English Audio Description?: Yes

I just want my readers to know, I’m really not trying to take the absurdity of your Transformers extension too much in mind in my grading. But, when I hear “Maximals” and “Optimus Primal”, lets just say my boundaries are tested. And I’ve watched a lot of bizarre things on paper. There’s a show where a giant talking shake, a giant box of fries, and a giant wad of meat live together and have silly adventures, and that franchise has led to two films. So, I really don’t want to giggle at Optimus Primal, but… come on now.

In my video I basically said that this is like when the Care Bears needed help from the Care Bear Cousins. Stay with me on this. Transformers are limited seemingly in what they can transform into. Basically, either giant freaking robot or some automobile. Just like with the Care Bears that are all…. Bears. Then, shit hits the fan, and both groups need to call on things that are like them, but are just representative of random animals, making us ask the question of why they can change into all these versions of animals we have on earth, and the Transformers are cars.

I know we had The Last Knight, but I still feel like we haven’t adequately explored what Optimus Prime would be before Henry Ford. And, why are the Maximals all different, and some can even fly? Like the Care Bear Cousins don’t ever double. They’re all different. Tons of bears, but one lion.

Anyway, back to the plot of the 7th Transformers live action, and 8th to be released theatrically. in this film, from director Steven Cable jr, we are trapped in the 90’s, so this is a sequel to Bumblebee, but also seems to retcon the rest of teh films. Our humans this time around are Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback. Ramos plays a former soldier who is having a hell of a time getting a job, and also supporting his brothers apparent sickle cell anemia. He does consider a life of crime, which leads him to Mirage (voiced by Pete Davidson), and that’s how Ramos becomes the token human for the gang. Fishback works in a museum on Ellis island where her boss just keeps handing her dry cleaning, but Dominique is really good at history and runes, and figures something out. The macGuffin is inside her museum!

The rest of the film is your typical Transformer adventure where humans for some reason have to tag along, despite the obvious possibility of being stepped on. I will say, for the first time in the series, Mirage does something with Ramos we haven’t tackled yet, and that was pretty cool.

For what it is, and considering all the films in the franchise, it’s way better than 4 and 5. It isn’t as good as Bumblebee or the first Transformers. But it sits around the same level as 2 and 3, depending on how you’d rank them. This is a film that really forces this idea that Ramos and Fishback are being kept down by the white bosses. Ramos is denied a job by a rich ass, and Fishback’s boss is an unfortunate human as well. We’ve seen this trope a lot, and I’m a white critic and don’t mind it. I do mind it when it goes nowhere. At the end of the film, it’s not like these people find themselves in positions above those who thoughts they were trash before. usually, the point of introducing this is to turn it around at the end.

And while Pete Davidson’s voice work was average, we also got Peter Dinklage as Scourge, and he’s fantastic. Also, Michelle yeoh and Ron Perlman were solid entries to the series. So, it’s a mixed bag.

But yeah, it’s a MacGuffin movie where the gang is searching for an ancient artifact before it falls in the wrong hands. Like we haven’t been there before.

The audio description here is really solid, taking advantage of describing all the new Transformers and Maximals, as well as making sense of their combat sequences. The movie has many different locations, and we continue to get descriptions of where we are as the gang travels the world. i was shocked at the deaths, but the audio description handled that well.

We definitely have gotten worse, and I tried analyzing this film without the inherited nonsense of the Maximals. I may think they are silly, but they also debuted a little later than me, and I was kinda done with Transformers by then. But Beast Wars fans I know are super excited.

The Last Knight lowered the bar so much, this one had such a good chance of passing it.

Final Grade: B-