“Grounded.” “Genuine human emotion.” These are not terms one typically associates with a movie about giant robots from space, but with reviews starting to pour in for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, it seems the franchise is taking a new approach in its seventh installment. That approach seems to be meeting the approval of critics, who so far have given the film the second-best Rotten Tomatoes score of the entire franchise after 2018’s Bumblebee.
Director Steven Caple Jr., who comes to the Transformers franchise after directing another notably grounded and character-focused franchise film Creed II, says it was part of the plan from the beginning to make this the most human Transformers movie yet.
“My goal was to create relatable characters even in a film with the craziest scope imaginable,” Caple told For The Win. “I felt like if the characters felt authentic and real, and you were able to relate to them, then I’ve done my job. I think sometimes we get too caught up in the fights and explosions then we kind of lose the essence of something, especially when it comes to a big franchise. With something like Transformers it was always about the relationship between the humans and the robots.”
The team behind the Transformers franchise started making a move toward making the franchise more character-driven and grounded a few years ago with the film Bumblebee, a sort of “soft-reboot” of the franchise set in the 1980s.
“It definitely influenced our approach to this movie,” said producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who has been part of the production team for Transformers since the very first film in the series. “We were really trying to figure out how intimate a movie we could tell with Transformers. We had done scale and now intimacy was our objective. The success of Bumblebee really spurred us to take the intimacy and the character-focused storytelling from that movie and put it into a larger scale story.”
Hiring Caple, a director with a reputation for small-scale, intimate projects was the first step in that process. Hiring human actors that could make viewers care about something other than the giant robots from space in the film was the next step. The producers turned to two highly respected actors fresh off critically acclaimed performances — Hamilton and In The Heights star Anthony Ramos and Judas and the Black Messiah star Dominique Fishback. Seeing either of these actors in a franchise like Transformers is a bit surprising, and both said they were encouraged by Caple to take the same approach they would take in any of their other roles.
“I approach all my characters the same way,” Fishback said. “Sometimes I journal as the character I’m playing just so I can understand why she’s doing the things she’s doing. Ultimately I think it helps the audience trust the characters too. When I’m on set, I’m asking the questions that I think the audience is going to ask.”
Audiences can judge the results for themselves this weekend when Transformers: Rise of the Beasts hits theaters but so far audience scores are the strongest the franchise has ever seen, with some critics saying it represents a fresh and interesting direction for the franchise. Check out the full trailer for the movie below.