Transformers: Awakening of the Monsters Review – A Disappointing Scrap of a Blockbuster

You know that feeling when you’re standing over an almost empty pan containing, say, Bolognese sauce, and you look with a desperate expression at the remains at the bottom, from which you can scrape out at best half a portion, but you know that you have cooked spaghetti for two and the visitor is already knocking on the door, so you just have to compartmentalize it somehow and pretend that everything is as you planned? That’s exactly how I felt about Transformers: Awakening of the Monsters. It’s such a scrap.

The Transformers series got off to a great start in 2007 and is still one of the funnest classic gimmick blockbusters to date. At the time, Michael Bay was still watching himself, supervised by producer Steven Spielberg, and the result of their collaboration was the best of both their styles. Bay delivered beautiful and modern visuals, slow motion, goofing off with the army and grandeur. Spielberg, on the other hand, used humor, carefully selected actors and humanity, and the result was a great adventure for boys and adults who still had the boys in them. And then it gradually went to hell. Transformers has become a bizarre spectacle over time. Although she looked good, at times she seemed as if she was being filmed by someone who was not in the right frame of mind. And the fall to the bottom was completed in 2017 by the regularly embarrassing and fortunately not very successful The Last Knight. The Bumblebee reboot, which tried on a smaller scale, didn’t shine commercially, so we’re starting over. With monkeys, rhinos and disgusting visuals.

The latter is the biggest and by far the most significant problem for Transformers: The Awakening. Steven Caple Jr., who has a double Creed behind him, simply did not make a good movie. Tricky, except for the finale itself, it is a spectacle that can stand up to the category of summer Hollywood washes without major problems, but the film as such is simply not pretty. Half of the Transformers have no personality and aren’t visually interesting at all, so if you only know Optimus, Bumblebee, and Megatron, you’ll have a hard time getting to know them. Of course, not when transformer gorillas, rhinoceroses and hawks run across the screen, but in their robotic form the heroes are quite difficult to distinguish from one another. And it is impossible to talk about the fact that, with a few exceptions, they have something like a personality.

Much worse, however, is that Caple Jr. will send the heroes to Peru sometime in the middle. It takes the form of one city and one meadow, and there the robots simply cut themselves. At times it looks like a scene that they didn’t have time to finish because there’s just nothing there except for the dry grass and the robots. And even that nothing is pretty gross. Like practically the entire movie. So if you add up the uninteresting looking heroes, the empty environment, pepper it with bland music and overall tiredness of the material (it’s still more or less the same as the first time) and add the bizarre animal newcomers and the not-so-fun human heroes, you’ll get… well, this.

But I will also praise. Although not much and a little carefully. Caple Jr. tried to take Transformers in a slightly different direction. It is not such a wild and often dementedly childish spectacle as Bay filmed. The humor has died down and the new director tries to push his film more into the adventure genre, sometimes almost to the point of Indy. In addition, in the final battle, he surprises with several ideas and a clear and not bad action, but it is not enough in the current summer competition.

The new Transformers are not interesting and attractive enough even as a blockbuster, but in the end not even as another part of this series, which started so nicely in 2007 and ended so undignified a few years later. Saying that the entire Transformers movie saga is average is not meant to be a pat on the back for an ambitious newcomer behind the camera, because we all know where the Transformers average really is. The fact remains that Monsters Awakening may appeal to fans who have been dying to see a five-foot metal gorilla that turns into a robot and is voiced by Ron Perlman, but otherwise it’s hard to find a reason to see Transformers: Monsters Awakening.

Play the trailer The fact that it’s not as bad as Bay’s farewell to the series isn’t really enough to send someone to the theater thinking they’ll enjoy it. The new Transformers probably wanted to reboot the series, give it new blood and appeal to old fans and get a few new ones. But they would have to work really hard for it, in all directions. This is more of a scrap scraper that won’t impress anyone. Definitely not me.