Ready to rollout? The action-packed trailer for Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts has just dropped – confirming the fan-pleasing arrival of big-bad Unicron, opening up the mad mythology of the Maximals, teasing a fresh batch of ‘bots, and stuffed with eye-candy action sequences to boot. It’s all helmed by Steven Caple Jr, the filmmaker behind Creed II, stepping into another franchise he loves and ready to make his own mark on it.
He caught up with Empire ahead of the trailer’s release to break down the machine-on-machine mayhem – teasing his bigger plans for Unicron, the relevance of the film’s ‘90s New York setting, the bonkers brew of influences that have come together to create fresh Autobot hero Mirage, and much more. Dive in.
Pure Maximalism
You could hardly accuse the Transformers movies of being lo-fi cinema – but Rise Of The Beasts looks set to be more Maximalist than ever. By which we mean, a new breed of ‘former is dropping in for this one called the Maximals – robots not exactly in disguise, but who can turn into animals. Leading them is the gorilla-shaped Optimus Primal, voiced (as he was in 2018 cartoon Power Of The Primes) by Ron Perlman. “He came in like, ‘I want to adjust some things, and do something differently that I didn't do in the cartoon’,” says Caple Jr. “To have that kind of energy just felt right.”
This fresh deck of ‘droids brings all kinds of new personalities to the fore. “Cheetor’s fast, very quick, very agile. He talks fast,” the director explains. “He has a little spunk to his character. Airazor, she's very beautiful – she’s a bird, she’s regal, she’s elegant. So was the actress who plays her, Michelle Yeoh. Optimus Primal is a big character because he's clearly the Optimus Prime of the group, the leader. I wanted to make sure he was very noble and had these leadership qualities.” Expect a different kind of background to these incoming heroes, armed with vital knowledge. “They’re from their own planet, and I won't spoil it from there,” teases Caple Jr. “They travel to Earth to protect something really important, and from a person that's really huge, and a big bad villain that we've been waiting to see for a very long time. And Prime doesn't know this. We learn a lot of what's coming through the Maximals.”
I <3 NY
Just as Bumblebee specifically took place in ‘80s San Francisco, Rise Of The Beasts has picked a distinct setting: 1994, New York City. “We’ve always been on the West Coast,” says Caple Jr. “But they’ve never gone to the East Coast. And it was the most challenging place because [on] the East Coast there's a lot of people, there's a lot of buildings. So the Transformers really can't flourish. They can't drive out to the desert and transform and have a conversation, because you’re in a big major city. What better place to really try to be in disguise than New York?” It’s fair to say, Optimus Prime isn’t a fan of his new temporary home. “It has a certain smell to it, you know – you can either love it or hate it,” the director laughs. “I felt like for Optimus Prime, someone who wants to go home, he might hate it!”
For Caple Jr, it was a time and place that offered plenty of opportunities. “The ‘90s is really vibrant with colours, and for the culture and music and hip hop. It was a big pivotal moment,” he says. “I thought it’d be nice to capture that. How can we make sure that people who were at least raised in the ‘90s, or got a taste of it, can really feel it? New York felt like the mecca of that.” Stay tuned to see if Bumblebee nips to Central Perk for a coffee.
Brooklyn stand up
Channelling that New York spirit is In The Heights’ Anthony Ramos, stepping up as lead human Noah. And he’s a different kind of protagonist to Sam Witwicky and Bumblebee’s Charlie Watson. “New Yorkers are tough, man,” chuckles Caple Jr. “It was a great place for character work. So if Optimus Prime, this alien, landed, you meet a human – this dude's picking up the pipe and saying, ‘Let's go! Let's fight! I don't know what the hell you are!’, versus having this Amblin-esque ‘E.T phone home’ moment.”
Noah, he explains, is “hitting a glass ceiling, trying to find a job. He’s having issues with his confidence a bit. He’s a Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn who's trying to take care of his family.” His disdain for authority figures extends to a certain Autobot. “When he meets Optimus Prime, he doesn't want to help him at first,” says the director. “He sees Optimus Prime like the people who he goes to a job interview with – like a boss. ‘Why would I help you?’ And then when he figures out what’s happening on a bigger scale, who’s really coming and what the threat is, he decides to actually participate.”
Creating a Mirage
Like the Fleetwood Mac album of the same name, Mirage has always been a lesser-celebrated Autobot. Here, he’s much more central – step aside, Bumblebee. “Everything's always Bumblebee-centric,” notes Caple Jr. “I say that being a Bumblebee fan, to the core!” Coming into Rise Of The Beasts, the filmmaker wanted something different. “I was like, ‘How do we switch this up?’ Everyone falls in line – Arcee, Bumblebee, they all listen to Prime because he's the boss, the leader. What if we had a rebel? An outcast? Someone who, every time Prime wants to go right, he’s like, ‘What about left? What about using the humans?’ That's where Mirage came about.”
Creating a fully-fledged character for a minor Aubobot brought in all kinds of influences – from nabbing a Porsche from a ‘90s favourite Michael Bay film (“It’s the year of Bad Boys – Will Smith and Martin Lawrence were riding in a Porsche,” the director notes), to studying Bugs Bunny (“Who's rebellious, who's an outcast? Who could be fast, fast-talking, comedic, slick?”), to dialling into a Jim Carrey favourite. “Do you remember The Mask?” asks Caple Jr. “That became a thing that kept whispering in my left ear. He was really tough to handle, you never knew when to trust him when he put on the mask. That's something interesting.” The final piece of the puzzle was casting Pete Davidson as Mirage’s voice. “Mirage was him. Everything Mirage was, felt like it was Pete Davidson. Now we have a rebel on our team.” Autobots… rebel?
Cream of the ‘Cron
This is the thing Transformers fans have been waiting on for years: Unicron, the planet-eating baddie of the animated Transformers: The Movie, being deployed properly in live-action. For Caple Jr. (“I’m a fan first,” he says) it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. “My first time ever watching the [animated] film was a VHS tape. The first character I was introduced to in the Transformers world, crazily enough, was Unicron. His intro in the animated movie blew me away. I got super emotional. He chomped up a whole planet, killed these baby robots – I was like, ‘Damn!’”
The plan, he teases, is to put Unicron on the map for a while to come. “This is stage one – this is the intro,” says Caple Jr. “I don’t feel like it’s over yet. I won’t spoil the movie for you, but I feel like this was the intro to Unicron and seeing what he can do, and then we can just grow from here. We don’t have to force it all in one movie. But I do think he needs to come alive. I do think he needs to speak. I do think we need to hint more – in the previous films, we would see just a horn or something small like that. The fans would go ballistic and say, ‘We want Unicron!’ I hope I did them right by giving them Unicron.” Anyone know a tasty planet he should try next?
Battle beasts
If you thought bringing together the Autobots, the Maximals, and the threat of Unicron would result in a quiet sit-down of a finale, you’ve never seen a Transformers movie before. And the brawls of Rise Of The Beasts look particularly balletic – teased here in an extended tracking shot filled with car-nage. “You’ve got an ape hanging off a damn bridge and roaring; you got a cheetah coming from the left; Rhinox being ridden by Arcee, who's a motorcycle. It's chaos, in the greatest way,” enthuses Caple Jr. “You’ve got the cars, you’ve got the robots, you’ve got the animals, you’ve got the humans. I try to blend everything into one.”
While previous Transformers brawls have been tricky to follow, Caple Jr. is keen to make each android’s identity shine through in the action. “Everyone has their own special ability – similar to their personality,” he notes. “With Mirage, his ability and the way he fights matches who he is as a character, and who he is as a vehicle. Rhinox is smashing anything in sight. Primal’s gonna be climbing, he’s gonna be agile, he’s gonna be strong as hell.” The result should be a kid’s dream come true. “I told the creators when we were in pre-production and designing the fight scenes, ‘I want it to feel like you’re a kid in a bathtub playing with your toys. What is the craziest thing I can do?’” Playtime is about to begin.
Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts comes to UK cinemas from 8 June.