Trans­form­ers: Rise Of The Beasts

There’s been a lot of ner­vous chat­ter late­ly about the prospect of artists and arti­sans being usurped by the scourge of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. And right­ly so, as there are peo­ple with a lot of mon­ey who, inevitably, are look­ing to make even more mon­ey, and AI offers an intrigu­ing (albeit high­ly cyn­i­cal) case for human cut­backs and sig­nif­i­cant top-line savings.

Why have a human per­son made of flesh, blood and synaps­es, who can push back on sug­gest­ed changes, use words that don’t con­nect with the intend­ed demo­graph­ic, assert their author­i­ty and jos­tle for more cash, when you can just sit back, spark up a sto­gie and hit F10?

In the face of cre­ative geno­cide (if that’s not too harsh a term for it), we should nei­ther be mak­ing nor see­ing movies like Trans­form­ers: Rise of the Beasts. And by that I mean, films that, per the clos­ing cred­it roll, were craft­ed by huge num­bers of actu­al real peo­ple, but in every aspect feel like they’ve been made as the result of dig­i­tal automa­tion and care­ful exploita­tion of algo­rithms and keywords.

In the film it is the job of Dominique Fishback’s mas­sive­ly-overqual­i­fied research intern, Ele­na Wal­lace, to swift­ly deduce whether a range of arte­facts up for sale are real or fake. In view­ing Trans­form­ers: Rise of the Beasts, we too assume that posi­tion, of try­ing to work out whether this gaudy, unin­spir­ing, soul­less object in front of us is, indeed, the gen­uine arti­cle or the work of computers.

This is the 7^th screen out­ing for Hasbro’s flag­ship toy-to-screen prop­er­ty, and it’s not so much a hard reset from the pre­vi­ous era as it is an attempt to pre­tend the pre­vi­ous films nev­er hap­pened by set­ting the action in 1994. The film opens on a cen­sored ver­sion of Wu-Tang Clan’s C.R.E.A.M., some ref­er­ences to Son­ic and Mario are tossed in, and that’s as far as it goes.

It would be futile to bemoan a tale of good and bad robots fight­ing over a time-trav­el­ling McGuf­fin, as this is the bedrock of clas­sic block­buster sto­ry­telling. Locat­ing the intri­cate vari­a­tions is all part of the fun and the cre­ative jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. Yet in this case, every sor­ry sto­ry beat, every cig­a­rette-paper thin ​“char­ac­ter”, every joke is a cal­lous rehash, made in the under­stand­able hope that our col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of the ear­ly films would’ve fad­ed enough to jus­ti­fy a full-on Xerox rather than a sub­tle retooling.

If this film is suc­cess­ful, it could very well act as the damn­ing evi­dence need­ed to clear out the human col­lat­er­al and fire-up the mech­a­nised pro­duc­tion line. Which is iron­ic con­sid­er­ing it offers a fer­vent, sen­ti­men­tal cel­e­bra­tion of the human fac­tor, where Antho­ny Ramos’ Noah Diaz (inno­cent!) proves to the Auto­bots (vehic­u­lar Trans­form­ers) and Max­i­mals (ani­mal-based Trans­form­ers) that there’s val­ue in the human spir­it, and though we may just be soft tis­sue and messed up emo­tions, that’s what makes us unique and special.

As such, this is a film which swoops in for a big bear hug with one hand, but con­ceals a dag­ger behind its back with the oth­er. It’s ter­ri­fy­ing to think that AI-gen­er­at­ed con­tent will inevitably play to sto­ries about human strength and courage, and if we accept them then we prob­a­bly deserve all we’ve got coming.

Five peo­ple con­tributed to the screen­play for Trans­form­ers: Rise of the Beasts. It is a film which con­tains the line, ​“Did any­one call for back-up?”. We must do bet­ter than this. We must out­smart the machines now, try to be counter-intu­itive and work against the grain of algo­rith­mic cliché. The sound design is, once more, a case of some­one spam­ming a but­ton which plays the noise of a back­wards slow-motion heli­copter rotor-blade start­ing up. These com­fort sounds which con­nect us to the fran­chise are all part of a prob­lem in which we tend to cleave to the famil­iar rather than yearn for the unexpected.

There’s also an insane coda which denounces pay-for-play health­care in the US, lest all the mil­i­taris­tic petrol­head antics, and rit­u­al destruc­tion of vital ancient his­to­ry (any­one who would rather not see Machu Pic­chu ren­dered into a robot bat­tle field, look away now), give off too strong a polit­i­cal mes­sage. At least with the Michael Bay films, you knew where you stood.

And so when AI is final­ly ush­ered in as a block­buster script gen­er­a­tor, lead­ing to the dec­i­ma­tion of one of the most vaunt­ed cre­ative indus­tries in the world, a robot­ic mon­ster will stride toward us clutch­ing the sev­ered head with con­nect­ing, oil-slicked spinal col­umn of Trans­form­ers: Rise of the Beasts and say to us, in vocoder-inflect­ed tones, ​“We warned you.”

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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