‘Rise of the Beasts’ Being Damned With Faint Praise Underlines Just How Badly Michael Bay Dropped the Ball

Jul 18, 2023

The sheer amount of work and collaboration that goes into making movies should never be downplayed, but there's no denying that Transformers: Rise of the Beasts was tasked with one of the least-challenging goals in the history of cinema.

Armed with superfan director Steven Caple Jr., the latest plight of the Autobots had the rather enviable mission of one-upping the Michael Bay era; an objective they seem to have completed not quite with flying colors, but colors that at least know how to swim.

Indeed, one needn't look past the Rotten Tomatoes critical score (a 56 percent approval rating at the time of writing) and accompanying consensus (which all but praises the film in spite of the rotten score) to know just how much of an upgrade Caple Jr.'s turn at the helm is, but diving deeper reveals a much more harrowing truth about the franchise's early days.

At 56 percent, Rise of the Beasts boasts a higher score than Revenge of the Fallen, Age of Extinction, and The Last Knight, which is to be expected, but the latest installment's rating also exceeds the combined ratings of those three aforementioned Bay movies, which number 20, 18, and 16 percent respectively for a combined total of 54. Only 2007's inaugural Transformers film outclasses Rise of the Beasts, albeit by just one point of difference.

This isn't to say that we were in need of a passable Transformers movie to identify Bay's run as the blight on cinema it's become famous for; that bell has been sounded more times than we can count. Nevertheless, we’re suckers for humbling statistics, and this one was too good to pass up.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is due in theaters on June 9.

Charlotte is a freelance writer for We Got This Covered, a graduate of St. Thomas University's English program, a fountain of film opinions, and the single biggest fan of Peter Jackson's 'King Kong,' probably. Having written professionally since 2018, her work has also appeared in The Town Crier and The East