Rise of the Beasts was a new chance to make the Transformers look great on screen, but…

polygon.com:

In terms of quality, Transformers has the lowest batting average of any modern movie franchise, a record that stays firmly intact thanks to Rise of the Beasts. Where Michael Bay’s five (yes, five) entries in the franchise are all visual soup splashed across the screen, the latest installment — helmed by Creed II’s Steven Caple Jr. — similarly defies comprehensibility, albeit for slightly different reasons. To some extent, each shot is a little more neatly composed. But they’re all strung together with the barest visual and narrative connective tissue, resulting in a baffling film that feels strange not only for a modern blockbuster, but for a Transformers movie as well.

Based on the Beast Wars line of comics, games, toys, and TV shows, the seventh entry in the exhaustive saga begins with a lengthy prologue about a planet-devouring Transformer, Unicron (Colman Domingo), forcing a number of animal-themed Transformers, the Maximals, off their Earth-like home world. Before their planet is destroyed, an ape, a cheetah, and a falcon Transformer manage to steal the latest in a series of plot-driving artifacts related to the Transformers’ home world of Cybertron.

This time, it’s called the “Trans Warp Key,” though its function is similar to that of at least two previous series McGuffins: It opens up a giant portal in the sky. Even before the plot kicks off, this supposed franchise relaunch is already in firmly familiar territory, a trend that continues for a significant chunk of its 127 minutes.

It’s a tale as old as time: A human character stumbles upon a group of Transformers that includes Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and Bumblebee (voiceless yet again), and gets roped into their battle with an evil faction, which inevitably