Buy it... if you are a "glass half full" kind of person, for Jongnic Bontemps' mainstream debut offers significant thematic complexity to the franchise even if it is obscured by a questionable rendering.

Avoid it... if you expect the booming personality of Steve Jablonsky's music for this franchise to persist, this adequate entry staking similar but less refined ground.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts: (Jongnic Bontemps) Encouraged by the positive reaction to the authenticity of the 2018 film, Bumblebee, Paramount struggled to determine if the "Transformers" franchise should continue with a direct sequel to that movie or take a somewhat parallel path. The studio ultimately developed ideas for both and produced a combination of the two, the setting of 2023's Transformers: Rise of the Beasts still shifted to a time prior to that of the original 2007 live-action movie but not as loyal as Bumblebee to the original cartoon series. The filmmakers opted to add 1980's characters related to the 1986 animated film and the "Beast Wars" spinoff, pitting these characters against each other on Earth in 1994. One could argue that these movies remain viable only so long as Peter Cullen lives to voice lead Autobot Optimus Prime, who teams here with a handful of his regular, car-masquerading cohorts and their animal-fashioned allies, the Maximals, to defeat forces aligned with the universe's foremost anti-environmentalist, the planet-eating Unicron. Of course, there has to be a random selection of dorky humans who get caught up in the action, none of who get conveniently stepped on by the massive robots. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is its distinctly multi-cultural characters, story, and crew helmed by director Steven Caple Jr. That infusion of African-American and Latin personality affects both the film's songs and original score as they address the 1994 Brooklyn and Peruvian settings. Caple Jr. pitched Paramount to hire his college buddy and Creed II collaborator, Jongnic Bontemps, to write the score for this seventh "Transformers" movie, but the studio was understandably skeptical. The African-American composer had built studio technology for major composers and dabbled in composition on a few feature films, but he was otherwise a total unknown. A massive enthusiast of the "Transformers" concept, however, Bontemps wrote ten minutes of original demo music for an epic "Transformers" sound and recorded it at his own expense with a 40-piece orchestra in early 2021.

Paramount, which had received popular music from Steve Jablonsky and Dario Marianelli for the prior "Transformers" live-action movies, looked at a variety of options though tentatively agreed to hire Bontemps in the end, but only if he worked on Paramount's lot in a studio created for him on site. Bontemps admits to the immensity of the challenge, and with Caple Jr. he ultimately spent two years of development with a score that yielded several failed attempts, including a style of sound design for the film that was rejected due to a lack of human element. Ultimately, the two agreed that the approach taken by Jablonsky for the first five films was the safest route to take. Because of the setting and human characters, though, not to mention the personality of the Autobot Mirage, the composer merged a traditional orchestra with both expected synthetics and what he calls the "grooves of Brooklyn" to help audiences better connect with the story and its robots. He relied on his own hip-hop experience for the 1994 Brooklyn setting, and employing a Roland 808 drum machine was important for the scenes placed there. But the setting of Peru for the other half of the film was trickier, so Bontemps hired a variety of Latin-American instrumentalists and consultants for that sequence of music, supplementing ethnic woodwinds with a modified contrabass saxophone and rubber tire drum set. All of this was layered onto a 74-member orchestra of brass and strings only, including a 25-piece brass section with no trumpets. Six percussionists and the composer's highly processed electronics round out the performance. There is a touch of Ludwig Göransson influence in the bass thumping effects heard at times. Less palatable are the synthetic add-ons, actual animal growls at 2:21 into "Switchback Chase" and an elephant noise at 3:49 in that cue serving more as sound effects than music. A cue like that contains an excess of annoying digital manipulation, a clear but harsh attempt to address the mechanical element of the robots. An outright transforming sound is amusingly distracting at the outset, 0:48, and end of "Volcano Battle." Such applications are not unexpected in the Jablonsky tradition, but they do sound cheap. Listeners have heard these processing techniques throughout the last ten to twenty years, and it no longer impresses artistically.

One of the more interesting aspects of Bontemps' score for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is its very dry and surprisingly treble-heavy recording that saps much of the life out of the score. For a composition that has a fair amount of overlapping thematic ideas, the soundscape is shallow and doesn't offer much separation in the layers. Everything sounds maximized and pushed forward in the mix, with no nuance to the various lines of musical action. Even the choir applied for moments of awe and fantasy struggles to spread the music out. In essence, this technique makes the score sound dumber and more raw than the composition would actually entail. Some of this rather brutish tone may owe to the lack of a wind section and trumpets in the orchestra (thank Hans Zimmer for supporting the myth that such instruments don't belong in these scores), though the absence of a resounding bass region for a score in this franchise is surprising. Ultimately, Paramount hired Steve Jablonsky as a consultant and producer near the end of the scoring process to assist Bontemps in interpolating connections to his first and fifth scores in the franchise, even if the general booming sound makes no genuine appearance at all. The irony in all of this intrigue over the general sound of the score is that Bontemps actually developed a remarkable slate of themes for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. He creates five major new identities, one minor motif, and brings back two ideas from the franchise's past. There are very few moments in this work when at least one of these ideas isn't being expressed, and the composer sure-handedly overlaps them with skill as the work progresses. The quality of the new themes ranges significantly, with one knockout winner and several others, while not particularly memorable, functional enough to make the connections for viewers of the movie. The new themes exist for the beast-inspired Maximals, the villainous Terrorcons and their leader, Scourge, the Autobots, the humans and their relationship with Mirage in particular, and a secondary motif for the coveted Transwarp Key that attracts all the attention in the story. That motif for the Transwarp Key provides the fantasy element of the score in very small doses, heard on bowl-like effects at 0:16 into "Museum Heist" but expanding to its primary duties on similar chords at 0:04 into "Hiding in Plain Sight" on flute and in choral fantasy mode early in "The Cave."

Among the new major themes Bontemps crafts for Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is one of impressive strength for the Maximals set of animal-like robots, and this powerful melody easily produces the best material in the score. Debuting at 0:13 into "The Maximals" on massive low brass before shifting to strings, this entire concert arrangement-like cue rotates through various guises of the theme. It abruptly cuts off the villain material at 2:17 into "A Long Time Ago" in continued suite-like form but returns at 5:04 with brave stature. After a prolonged absence, the theme returns at 0:56 into "Switchback Chase" on brass but dominates with repeated like-minded renditions at 0:10 and 1:23 into "Saving Elena," adding choir for flair and shifting to solo cello over those voices for a sad passage in the middle. From there, the theme often overlaps others, combining quietly with the Mirage/human theme at 0:49 into "One Last Stand" and featuring nice development of the pair of identities together later in the cue. The secondary phrasing of the Maximals theme takes a sharper, heroic focus near the cue's end. It extends out of the Autobot theme at 1:15 and 2:07 into "The Final Battle Begins" and serves as a string interlude to that theme at 0:59 into "No Matter the Cost." Remarkably, the Maximals theme is applied as a brass interlude to Jablonsky Autobot theme at 0:40 and 1:47 into "Humans and Autobots United." At the opposite end of the quality spectrum is the music for the Terrorcons and Scourge. Defined by ample electronic grinding, scraping, and groaning noises, this identity is a duo consisting of a metallic cry, as opening "The Maximals," and the only slightly more sophisticated theme proper, a menacing three-note figure wavering around key. The cry motif and theme debut at 1:45 into "A Long Time Ago" with annoying dissonance, both returning at 3:42 while the theme is offered on distorted electric guitar in awful torment. It closes the cue against fragments of the Mirage/human theme. This material continues its association with the Unicron music in "Unicron/Scourge" the theme on electric guitar at 1:13 under the cry effect; the theme stews in much of the rest of the cue before its big moment with its full progressions (a fourth and final note) at 3:13. The cry is adapted to a string-like mode early in "Battle at Ellis Island" but rediscovers its true metallic form at 1:01 before the theme itself strikes at 1:09 for a few verses and eventually duels with new Autobot theme.