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For what it’s really worth, this is the first Transformers movie I’ve seen that I found entertaining. (I didn’t see the Bumblebee offshoot, which a lot of people liked.) Don’t get me wrong, I’m not categorically against movies about trademarked toy brands or video games, but when you combine that sort of commercial ethos with the Michael Bay aesthetic you get not only overkill but overkill that numbs to the point of incomprehension. Rise of the Beasts is co-produced by Bay but directed by Steven Caple Jr., who did a fine job on the second Creed movie. Unlike Bay, he seems genuinely engaged with the story and takes more than a few beats to drive home each plot point so that the cacophonous mayhem and violence has some sort of organic sense to it. And while the script has five names attached to it, it also has a simplicity of spirit that implies you don’t need a Ph.D in Hasbro Studies to get the whole zeitgeist behind the franchise. I tend to forget that stuff anyway.

It’s also got halfway relatable human characters. Though there was obviously a certain logic behind making the two leads put-upon members of minority groups, the sympathy factor attached to this idea makes for more actual drama than the series deserves. Anthony Ramos is appealing as Noah Diaz, the ex-military tech head who can’t seem to get a decent job in mid-90s Brooklyn and turns to grand theft auto in order to make some quick cash to help his younger brother, who is suffering from sickle cell anemia. It’s during the heist that he comes in contact with Mirage (Pete Davidson), the punky sports car Transformer with whom he develops a kind of standup comedy routine. And the always reliable Dominique Fishback is Elena, a museum artifacts expert whose knowledge about Central American civilizations beats that of her white, tenured superiors by a mile, and which those superiors take advantage of. Though the social commentary these two characters spark is rather thin, it gives more context to a story about a race of robots, the Autobots, who are stranded on a planet far from home and which take it upon themselves to defend their new home from extraterrestrial invaders. The story has its own species of overkill—the invaders want nothing less than to literally consume planet earth—but since it takes place temporally before the action described in the Bay Transformer movies (thus making it a kind of prequel), we get a better sense of what’s at stake for these machines, and that happens to be a chance to return to their home world if they can get their mechanical mitts on a certain key that unlocks a space portal. If this sounds like the same plot device at the center of the new Mission Impossible movie, I can only say it must be a huge coincidence.

The Beasts of the title are another group of stranded robots who resemble terrestrial animals and which were created for a TV show I know nothing about. However, they are voiced by an impressive lineup of stars, including Michelle Yeoh, Ron Perlman, and Peter Dinklage. Most of the viewer’s attention, however, will be spent on the action set pieces, which are more comprehensible than what I’m used to but typical overkill nonetheless. Nobody expects Chekhov, but a few scenes of the Autobots reflecting on what violence really accomplishes might be refreshing. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011) Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Paramount Pictures TM Hasbro

Given that this first feature by director Elegance Bratton is clearly autobiographical to a certain extent, it’s surprising how little distinctive detail it offers into the mind of a young gay Black man who decides to join the Marines as a way to lift himself out of squalor. We can see that Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) has been living on the streets of New York for years, having been kicked out of his mother’s (Gabrielle Union, also producer) home when he was a teenager because his homosexuality disgusted her. These are compelling plot points, especially when they seem to be rooted in fact, but they require the kind of elaboration that would make them understandable beyond their function as dramatic devices, and Bratton never really makes them that believable. When an older gay homeless friend hears of French’s plan to enlist, he laughs and says they will never accept a “young queen” like him, and the rest of the movie simply sets out to prove him wrong.

Consequently, the bulk of the film is taken up by French having to live up to the Marine ethos, which means lots of the usual boot camp crap from screaming commanders, in this case a man named Laws (Bokeem Woodbine) who promises right from the start to “break” every one of the new recruits. At first, French seems more worried about concealing his sexual orientation from his fellow jarheads than he is about surviving basic training—he even pretends to call his “girlfriend” at one point—and the conflicting purposes aren’t delineated naturally. Bizarrely, French is revealed, so to speak, during a shower session as he falls into an erotic hallucination, and while the subsequent bullying he receives makes good (or, at least, better) on explicating the tribulations of a gay man in the military, it just becomes one more test of the character’s mental wherewithal rather than a pointed comment on the toxic mindset instilled by this sort of group dynamic. More interesting is the cruelty visited upon another recruit, Ismail (Eman Esfandi), for his Middle Eastern background—the movie takes place in 2005, with the military still operating in post-911 mode—and toward which French acts with admirable defiance.

The story is geared to climax at the titular ceremony, which is presented as a confirmation of French’s success at becoming a Marine, and as almost always the case with these kinds of “character tests,” this success is automatically presented as a triumph in its own right, regardless of what you think of the military. The outed gay man is suddenly accepted as he is, not only be his superiors, but by his equals, who, in another bizarre sequence, actually defend him to his mother, who attends the ceremony only to reestablish her position as never willing to accept his “lifestyle,” as she calls it. At this point, such a position is less infuriating than it is tiresome. It may be true, but without some effort to help the viewer comprehend what makes her resentment so intractible, it comes across as corny, an attempt to extract emotional capital from a hackneyed response. 

Opens Aug. 4 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Inspection home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Oorah Productions LLC

As fascinating as this docudrama about the legendary London-based indie label is, it necessarily leaves a whole lot out of the history of Jamaican music, which was the specialty of Trojan Records. Director Nicolas Jack Davies, a music video producer, presents a chronologically fastidious but skeletal explanation of the influx of Carribean immigrants to the UK in the late 50s and early 60s and how the music and culture they brought with them affected the massive pop contours of the 60s and early 70s. For sure, this story hasn’t been told with any kind of formality on film before, and Trojan was seminal in molding a youth environment that came to accept Black music for what it was. (Though Trojan was not, as one commenter put it, “the Motown” of British pop. Motown was the Motown of British pop.) But a whole movie about reggae that doesn’t touch upon Bob Marley and the roots/Rastafarian movement, or the eventual dominance of dub and dancehall, isn’t going to tell anywhere near the whole story.

That’s because Davies wants to focus on the UK, where Jamaicans were “encouraged” to immigrate but weren’t really welcome. He delves momentarily into the NCP problem (“no colored people”) and interviews several old-timers who admit to not wanting to leave Jamaica in the first place but had to for economic reasons. Consequently, they longed for a connection to home, and that was mostly music. Davies does a good job of explaining the sound system concept, wherein DJs built formidable audio setups and hired themselves out for dance parties, where they played records. In the beginning, the music was standard R&B from the U.S. south, which Jamaicans could pick up on their radios, but these heavily bass and beat-driven singles (Louis Jordan’s “Caldonia” is cited as a representative favorite) eventually were translated by local artists into ska, with that insistent off-beat syncopation driven by the rhythm guitar. It’s what gave ska and rocksteady its distinctive bounce, which had its first big hit with Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” in 1964.

Trojan was started by an Indian immigrant from Jamaica, Lee Gopthal, who parlayed a side job as an agent for Jamaican producers into a distribution gig. One of the labels he represented was Island, whose founder Chris Blackwell partnered with Gopthal on a retail shop specializing in Jamaican records. In 1967, the two men started Trojan (as in the horse), which not only licensed Jamaican musicians but eventually started producing their own records made by reggae and ska artists resident in the UK. What Davies gets right and what makes the documentary more than just a history lesson is the way he dovetails the fortunes of Trojan with the emerging English youth culture of the late 60s. Trojan’s brief was dance music with attitude (rude boys were essentially well-dressed gangster types), and besides serving the urban Black community of immigrants and their children, it also attracted the attention of “skinheads”—white kids who weren’t into the standard pop and hippie-identified rock music that dominated radio and media, and therefore should be distinguished from late-70s skinheads who tended to lean white supremacist. This was, for all intents and purposes, the start of the two-tone movement that would coalesce in the late 70s as the ska revival, which piggy-backed on punk with bands containing Black and white members in equal portions.

Davies gets some fine talking head remarks from Derrick Morgan, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Bunny Lee, Marcia Griffiths, Don Letts and a dozen more originals from the scene, but has to rely on dramatizations for most of the illustrative footage, since he doesn’t seem to have access to much archival material. And since this is about Trojan rather than music in general, it ends in 1975 when, tragically, the label was put out of business by partners who believed the reggae/ska movement had passed, and didn’t really trust Gopthal in the first place. (One told him, with perfect racist glibness, that if he wanted to own a business he should have become a “greengrocer.”) Of course they were wrong, as evidenced by the rise of Bob Marley around the same time, but Trojan did delineate a distinctive era, and the music here alone is worth the price of admission. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Rudeboy home page in Japanese