I loved the Transformers as a kid. I loved the TV cartoon and I remember buying Transformers toys. Then the Michael Bay movies came along and I was excited. Unfortunately, they turned out to be some of my least favorite films ever. Legitimately, I believe Transformers: The Last Knight might be my least favorite movie of all time.

The last Transformers movie was Bumblebee, which was the first one without Michael Bay’s fingerprints all over it, and it was one of the best. Sadly, it did not do well at the box office so I was afraid that the film series would head back to the giant stupidity of the previous films instead of the solid work of Bumblebee.

Here come Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. This included characters from the 1990s animated TV show Beast Wars along with a low number of the Autobots. While I do not think this new Transformers movie was up to the level of Bumblebee, this was way better than any of the first five in the franchise and presented a breath of fresh air for the Robots in Disguise.

Set in 1994 after the events of Bumblebee, Rise of the Beasts featured Noah (Anthony Ramos), a down on his luck former soldier who was struggling to find employment to help his mother and his ill brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez). After failing to get an honest job, Noah succumb to criminal activity and tried to steal a car. Of course, his luck is terrible as he tried to steal the Autobot, Mirage (Pete Davidson).

Meanwhile, Elena (Dominique Fishback), a young museum intern, studied a falcon statue with weird markings on it. When she accidentally broke the statue, it revealed the Transwarp Key, an object that was taken by the group of Maximals, led by Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), years before from their home planet when forces of the planet-sized Unicron, who consumed planets, tried to find the key. The key would open portals around the universe and allow Unicron unfettered access to any planet of his choosing. Unicron’s led henchman was named Scourge (Peter Dinklage), who had been searching for the key since. When Elena activated it, the signal alerted Scourge to its location.

The signal also brought Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and the few other Autobots to it, trying to find the key which would allow them to go home to Cybertron.

Okay, so… that is a lot of synopsis. And I just scratched the surface. Though it feels convoluted when I am writing the plot out, the film does a decent job of explaining things for the audience so they were not lost. At least, I was not lost, though I have a knowledge of the lore so perhaps someone not as familiar with the Transformers may be more confused.

There have been several issues I have had with the previous Transformers movies. The first one is the human characters. In previous movies, the human characters were terrible characters that simply took up time that should have gone to the Transformers. Here, Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback do a very good job of being vital and not ridiculous like in previous films (The film had Mirage make a great joke about Marky Mark…aka Mark Wahlberg, who was in previous Transformers movies).

Second issue I have had before was the fact that I could never tell which giant robot was which. All of the Autobots looked the same except for Optimus Prime and Bumblebee. The rest were dull and poor characters that were undistinguishable from the others. This is much better since they keep the Autobots to a limited number including Prime, Bumblebee, Mirage, Arcee and Wheeljack. The Maximals were much more original in their designs so they stood out better (although when they transformed into their robot forms, they were much less so). Optimus Primal and Michelle Yeoh’s Maximal character Airazor are the two Maximals that standout in this film. However, the villains were absolutely interchangeable, even Scourge not standing out of the crowd.

Previous franchise films had just stupid humor/jokes that were not funny. The humor in this film was kept to a minimum and usually worked well.

The writing has been truly stupid over the previous movies and, while this film’s writing isn’t remarkable, it is much better. There are several cringeworthy moments in the third act though that bothered me. The third act was decent enough as not to have ruined what they were going for, though it did feel like too much of a step back.

The mid-credit scene was great and looks to take the franchise into a very intriguing path that I would be all for. No spoilers here.

As someone who hated the Michael Bay Transformers movies, I am on board with this new path the franchise is on. This movie is not a brilliant film, but it easily clears the bar set by previous entries in the series. While not as good as Bumblebee, keeping the number of Autobots down helped this film and it is always cool to hear Peter Cullen voicing Optimus Prime. This film kept the really stupid things at a minimum and avoided most of the traps that ruined previous movies. I am cautiously optimistic about the future of the Transformers movies.

3.5 stars