Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) in Google Drive
Very similar to 2018’s Bumblebee, director Steven Caple Jr.’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts plays like a clever course correction in the context of the rest of Paramount’s films. It’s one meant to bring in both a young, new generation of fans and aging millennials with fond memories of cartoons from the ’80s and ’90s. Rise of the Beasts finds quite a bit of time to pay tribute to older, classic pieces of Transformers storytelling from places like the original Transformers animated movie from 1986. But when it comes to maximizing — which is to say capitalizing on and making interesting use of — the Beast Wars mythos Paramount implied would be a large part of its story, Rise of the Beast falls short, which is disappointing but not exactly a surprise.
Though Rise of the Beasts pulls together characters from both the far-flung past and the distant future, it’s primarily set in 1994 and tells — shockingly — the story of how an unsuspecting human ends up becoming one of the most important participants in a longstanding Cybertronian war. As a young army veteran, all Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) really wants is to find a job to be able to support his little brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez) and their mom Breanna (Luna Lauren Velez). With steady work being hard to come by, though, it makes more sense for Noah to get into boosting cars with his buddy Reek (Tobe Nwigwe) than to sit around waiting for recruiter calls that simply aren’t coming in.
