TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS is the new Transformers picture directed by Steven Caple Jr. (THE LAND, CREED II). It’s not a reboot, but a new chapter set in 1994 – after Travis Knight’s BUMBLEBEE, before all the Michael Bay ones. So technically it’s a prequel, but there’s not much important continuity (as there really isn’t in any of these movies).
Aside from a new director and attitude, the flashy new attraction is the Maximals – robotic animal characters from the 1996 computer animated show Beast Wars. You know how it is, you’re on Cybertron just minding your own business being a mechanical rhino or cheetah made out of metal but with fur on some parts, suddenly you gotta flee to an organic jungle world to hide the portal-opening Transwarp Key from the the giant planet-munching robot Unicron. That character was famously voiced by Orson Welles in THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE, and here he’s Colman Domingo (ZOLA), a great choice of voice to process even lower and blast through Imax speakers so loud you can feel it vibrating your bones. (read the rest of this shit…)
CREED
THE LAND is a movie that played Sundance last year, that I watched because its writer-director, Steven Caple, Jr., was just announced as the director of CREED 2. And I hate to start out a review this way, but it’s fucking 2017, so… I need to say that I’m not sure where we’re at on Sylvester Stallone. Horrible allegations were published, but not in one of these exhaustively researched and backed up pieces that have taken down Harvey Weinstein and others – this was in the tabloid 
