Quick Movie Reviews – ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ & ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’

SPOILERS ALERT!!!

Hello everyone! 🙂

Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley.

Usually, I don’t see two movies at the cinema in a row on the same day, but last Saturday, I saw ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ in the morning and ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ in the afternoon. I enjoyed both movies and I’m hoping to do in-depth reviews on the two films in future. 🙂

For now, let me share some quick thoughts on each film. ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ is of course the sequel to the 2018 film ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’. I enjoyed the film when I saw it, although I don’t think it’s as good as the first ‘Spider-Verse’ film, having re-watched it before this.

I also prefer ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ (both versions) as a ‘Spider-Man’ multiverse film over the animated ‘Spider-Verse’ films. Mind you, this is ‘Part One’ of a two-part story. There’s more to look forward to in ‘Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse’ next year. I hope it’ll be a satisfying conclusion.

My main issue with ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ is that there are several art styles used in the animation of certain worlds featured in the Spider-Verse, which I know was a thing in the first ‘Spider-Verse’ film, but it’s more prominent here, particularly in Gwen’s world, which I found jarring.

The film is also busy with there being too many Spider-Men in the Spider Society to identify with. I wish they all had their own movies beforehand. I understood Japanese Spider-Man was going to be in the film, but I didn’t see him anywhere. Perhaps he’ll appear properly in ‘Part Two’ of this story. 😐

Despite these issues, I enjoyed Miles Morales’ journey as Spidey, involving him meeting up with Gwen Stacy and reuniting with Peter B. Parker. I liked the scenes between Peter, his Mary Jane and their baby daughter Mayday. The revelation that Miles isn’t meant to be Spider-Man is interesting. 🙂

Moving on to ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’, I have to say I enjoyed this film more than ‘Across the Spider-Verse’. This was because the film is live-action; I was able to get into the story and the characters more; and, for me, this is one of the best ‘Transformers’ films ever made in its film series.

Admittedly, ‘Rise of the Beasts’ isn’t as good as ‘Bumblebee’, but it’s better than the first five ‘Transformers’ films from Michael Bay (and he’s one of the producers of ‘Rise of the Beasts’). I’m also not a fan of the film’s design of the Maximals, having enjoyed them from watching ‘Beast Wars’.

In my opinion, the Maximals are supposed to be look like real animals. They’re not supposed to be robotic-looking animals. The key to ‘Transformers’ is in their tagline – ‘Robots in Disguise’. Admittedly, the Dinobots didn’t look like real dinosaurs, but that shouldn’t apply to the Maximals. 😐

Despite that, I enjoyed the journey of the Autobots teaming up with the Maximals to fight off the Terrorcons, who are servants of Unicron (no connection to ‘The Last Knight’ here). It’s a shame the Predacons didn’t appear in this movie, as we could have easily had Predacon Megatron as the villain.

Also, I’m disappointed that Rattrap didn’t appear in the film. Neither did the ‘Beast Wars’ version of Dinobot. Nor did Waspinator and Silverbolt. Then again, no-one could voice Rattrap, Dinobot, Waspinator and Silverbolt better than Scott McNeill in ‘Beast Wars’. 😀 Otherwise, the film is very good.

‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ won me over compared to ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’. They’re both enjoyable films in their own way, but I found ‘Rise of the Beasts’ easier to get into than ‘Across the Spider-Verse’. I’m looking forward to sharing in-depth reviews on these two films soon. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Bye for now!

Tim 🙂