So I have recently taken time out of my busy schedule of life to watch the two post-Michael Bay live action “Transformers” movies, namely “Bumblebee” from 2018 and “Rise of the Beasts” from 2023 (I wanted to watch “Transformers One” on streaming, but I cannot find a way to watch it that does not give money to Biff Jayzus and his giant evil post office). I watched “Bumblebee” on Paramount Plus and “Rise of the Beasts” on Netflix. I enjoyed them both immensely, though I think I got just a little more invested in “Rise of the Beasts” (though that might have just been the fact that I watched RotB on a TV with better sound than the TV on which I watched “Bumblebee”).
And what I Want to talk about in this essay is about one line in “Rise of the Beasts” that really speaks to me both in terms of the film itself and how it relates to both of these films and how they easily outclass the Michael Bay movies of 2007-2017.
Okay, so here’s a quick recap for “Rise of the Beasts”: Our main character is Noah Diaz, a young man in 1990s New York who used to be a Marine for the United States Army before he retired to look after his chronically ill little brother Kris. Basically, he buys a car that turns out to be an Autobot named Mirage and gets drawn into a case where an archaeologist discovers a statue that contains one half of the Trans Warp Key, a Cybertronian Device that can open up gateways and portals across the galaxy and which is currently being sought by a bunch of bad Transformers who want to use it to free their Master Unicron from the galaxy in which he’s been imprisoned so that he can go back to eating planets again, as he is wont to do.
So basically our heroes have one piece of the Trans Warp Key from a statue of Nubian origin (as I have discussed before) and they need to go find the other piece so they can keep it safe from Unicron. And fortunately, Elena (the archaeologist who discovers the statue in the movie) happens to recognise the symbols on the back of the old statue as being from a Peruvian culture in origin. And so they all go to Peru to find the Trans Warp Key’s other half. And because they’re being guided by a Maximal Transformer named Airazor, they are quick to find the Maximal leader Optimus Primal (short version: The Maximals are a group of transformers who can turn into animals rather than into vehicles and who have been hiding out on Earth since their planet was destroyed and devoured by Unicron).
So they start walking along and having a conversation with Optimus Primal and how the Maximals have been hanging out with the indigenous folks of the region for the last few thousand years, and Noah decides to ask Optimus Primal if they played any part in the creation of artefacts such as the Nazca Lines, to which Optimus Primal responds:
“We cannot take credit for human ingenuity”.
Not gonna lie, when I first heard that line in the movie, my jaw dropped just a little. It’s such a masterful little subversion of the standard shallow-ass “Aliens came down to the primitive brown peoples and taught them how to build stuff and wear clothes”, instead depicting a strong state of cooperation and acceptance between Amaru’s people and the Maximals. And of course, this state of peaceful coexistence and mutual cooperation is a strong contrast to how much Unicron in this movie (and in the Transformers Mythology more generally) can be seen as a metaphor for colonialism, particularly in how his whole thing is taking the resources of other worlds for himself and how he uses people from the worlds he has consumed and devoured as his foot soldiers. And of course, this Godlike Personification of Colonialism is opposed by a team led by two Black brothers whom the film explicitly mentions as having experienced intense marginalisation at the hands of White American society. And thus we have a truly excellent thematic and ideological conflict between the Autobots and their allies on one side and the Decepticons and their allies on the other side, with the Autobots symbolising cooperation and mutual connection while the Decepticons represent colonialism and conquest.
And of course, this also ties into the other factor of these two movies simply having much better written and acted and more likeable protagonists than any of the Bay movies. To put it very simply and bluntly, it is much, much easier to care about “How will Charlie Watson be able to deal with and move on from her father’s death and her resultant grief while also helping Bumblebee get the message to Optimus?” and “Can Noah Diaz and Kris Diaz find a way to care for each other and help each other even as the world seems set against them?” than it is to care about “How ever will Sam ‘Shia LaDipshit’ Witwicki ever get to make out with a girl who’s honestly way cooler and more interesting than he is (Thank you, Lindsay Ellis)?’. It is also very important to note how both Charlie and Noah are shown to have mechanical talent as engineers even before they meet the Autobots, while Sam just stumbles into owning things (Again, thank you Dan Olson for this observation). This makes them feel like active participants in the stories of the Autobots and the Decepticons rather than just being dragged into it and then just kind of winning by default.
It's almost like having themes and messages and political ideas (however basic or simple) in your story actually makes things richer and more interesting and meaningful while trying to ‘avoid’ politics and political messages makes a resulting experience that is far more bland and forgettable and also far less interesting as a whole.
Think about that, will you, as you write your own stories.
@sepublic @acephysicskarkat @cynicalclassicist @dachi-chan25
