Interview with Transformers Rise of the Beasts Composer Jongnic Bontemps on Unicron, Maximals and More

DeathReviews wrote:"Why Bay focused more on action"? Like we need anybody to explain that? That's all Bay ever does. It's not like Bay movies are well-known for depth, or emotional appeal, realistic characters, appealing personalities, pathos, or intelligent writing and dialogue. Yelling, mumbling, chases and explosions are what his films are 'known' for.

There is nuance to this though. We see why in his films we'd never get a reaction shot from a bot and why they werent really characters. Characters emote and that costs money he'd rather spent on something else. Adding to that the need for more details and jagged shapes so that the light can bounce off it and have the transformers appear more like they are sharing the same scene as humans and you get a very clear sense of how all those previous films are the way they are.

Saw it a second time this morning and I am still struggling with something.

"If you could follow those symbols to Peru, so will Scourge."

[And]

"We need to hurry, Scourge could already be on his way there."


Okay, but... how?

A native-to-Earth anthropologist managed to connect the symbols at the two sites by way of being incredibly gifted, well-educated, and maybe a little bit lucky (with tens of thousands of pages of history to go through looking for a match to the symbols, she seemed to land on the right ones really quick).

Scourge arrives on a completely alien planet with his posse in their little bitty clown-car spaceship and he is going to quickly find the missing half of the key how? Searching for clues in the museum he incinerated? Rolling into the local library? Cold calling experts on ancient aliens? Setting up a webpage on Geocities? What was Scourge's incredibly efficient research process supposed to be?

Yes, his face did seem organic

I love music and I really get hooked into the movie right away.

The Dark Knight Returns (animated movie)
Equalizer
Age of Extinction
The Batman
Batman v Superman
Wakanda Forever (made the movie way better for me than it actually is)
300 Rise of an Empire
Inception
King Arthur
Interstellar
Man of Steel
The Dark Knight Rises

(in short, Hans Zimmer wins the oscar every single year, the man is just a god)

Steve Jablonsky really made cool scores for 2, 3 and 4 (I didn't like TF5's score at all and TF 1 he was still getting into his own).

For Rise of the Beasts I had hope they would have a distinct atmospheric score, but it was generic. Maybe I'll be more impressed on second viewing but nothing jumped out.
Same for Bumblebee, forgettable generic score.

I hope for the next movie we get an engaging and atmosperhic score again.

noctorro wrote:I love music and I really get hooked into the movie right away.

The Dark Knight Returns (animated movie)
Equalizer
Age of Extinction
The Batman
Batman v Superman
Wakanda Forever (made the movie way better for me than it actually is)
300 Rise of an Empire
Inception
King Arthur
Interstellar
Man of Steel
The Dark Knight Rises

(in short, Hans Zimmer wins the oscar every single year, the man is just a god)

Steve Jablonsky really made cool scores for 2, 3 and 4 (I didn't like TF5's score at all and TF 1 he was still getting into his own).

For Rise of the Beasts I had hope they would have a distinct atmospheric score, but it was generic. Maybe I'll be more impressed on second viewing but nothing jumped out.
Same for Bumblebee, forgettable generic score.

I hope for the next movie we get an engaging and atmosperhic score again.

In this movie and Bee, it was more about the SOUNDTRACK than the SCORE. I think that's why it was generic.

Dr. Caelus wrote:Saw it a second time this morning and I am still struggling with something.

"If you could follow those symbols to Peru, so will Scourge."

[And]

"We need to hurry, Scourge could already be on his way there."


Okay, but... how?

A native-to-Earth anthropologist managed to connect the symbols at the two sites by way of being incredibly gifted, well-educated, and maybe a little bit lucky (with tens of thousands of pages of history to go through looking for a match to the symbols, she seemed to land on the right ones really quick).

Scourge arrives on a completely alien planet with his posse in their little bitty clown-car spaceship and he is going to quickly find the missing half of the key how? Searching for clues in the museum he incinerated? Rolling into the local library? Cold calling experts on ancient aliens? Setting up a webpage on Geocities? What was Scourge's incredibly efficient research process supposed to be?

Good question, the movie could have conveyed the information in a more clear way, but if I had to guess, is that since they had half of the key, they used it to search for a similar energy or signal.

To those who watched Transformers Rise of the Beasts, you may be curious about what was cut and how the movie changed during production. We will have 3 articles detailing different aspects such as a cut character, scenes we saw in the trailers and from the set videos that were cut, and the difference between earlier test screenings and the final film.

We already went over the the cut character and now we will look at what was cut/changed from the original trailer. Here it is, you'll probably notice some very different shots (like the one in the thumbnail).



Now compare that transformation for Optimus Primal to this one from the final movie and you'll see that it was completely redone.



The same goes for the Transformation moment of Cheetor as well, which is "shot" from the front in the final edit rather than from the back.

There is a lot more than this, but those are pretty big since we've been told that the CGI is the most expensive aspect about this movie and yet it seems we have different takes on the final battle with different animations, transformations and moments. Plus remember that shot of Rhinox in the cave? Not there either.



And the same goes for the final part of the first trailer where Elena sees Arcee.

There are also lines that were dropped such as:

Mirage saying “He eats planets, so uhhh way bigger than a planet”

Airazor saying “Optimus, we must trust each other to protect the home we all share”

Scourge saying “In the end, everything you ever cared for will be consumed”

You'll let us know of other moments you remember from the trailer that did not end up in the film in the end.

Bounti76 wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember Rhinox speaking at all in the movie, yet David Sobolov is credited as his voice actor. I remember Cheetor speaking one or two lines very briefly, but nothing from Rhinox.

Rhinox has one line, he says "clear the way" after Noah talks to him and Primal during the final fight.

Regardless of what you think of the Rise of the Beasts film, it shows that the director and writers did see the robots as the titular characters that they are rather than giant props in the background. Steven Caple Jr, the director was a fan of the source material and did good on his word to provide a Transformers movie with a focus on the Transformers as much as he could (we previously wrote why that's usually not the norm in these films). So it begs to reason why Wheeljack was such a change from his previous look, especially when he had a more accurate look in the Bumblebee movie. Well, it turns out that this decision and push was out of his hands according to this interview from UPROXX. From the interview below, we see that this more nerdy look came from the higher ups, be that Hasbro or Paramount (not that it matters, both companies must sign off on these decisions) and that Wheeljack's look was changed so that he can be more different from the rest of the cast, both in look and the personality inferred by the look. Also, we've gotten early designs of the film which show that Wheeljack's new design was done at a very preliminary stage of production, before Caple was even attached to the film. And it remained this way. Along with Wheeljack, ee have other "previs" designs to share with you from Fred Pashe, who also worked on Beast Machines back in the day. Enjoy!

"When I got into the film, they had already wanted the Wheeljack part of this picture, but they wanted to redesign it and actually lean more into the science and nerdy part of Wheeljack. They felt like the Wheeljack – I don’t know if this is the studio or Hasbro who was here before me – he was kind of falling into the lane of the other characters. Kind of tough. Ironhide, and those kind of vibes. Just didn’t feel like enough variety across the board. And so, for me as a fan, I was like, “All right, how can I keep some of the essence?” But I was like, I’m going to just dive deep into the lore and just gave him his whole sort of personality and a different look as we start to now develop and move on. But yeah, that was it. It was no shade or callbacks to the other Wheeljack at all. But people started calling Pablo Wheeljack, which I thought was kind of funny. And Cristo likes it too. He’s like, “I’m down for that.” Cristo Fernandez, who plays him, which is cool."

Previs Wheeljack is how Pablo Haters see him before praying to his Beewun form