1/2

PG-13, 117 minutes. Starts tonight at Mystic, Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon.

The “Transformers” film franchise, spawned in 2007 with Michael Bay’s “Transformers,” was one of the first straight-faced blockbuster franchises based on a toy (and an ‘80s cartoon series). It is now, astonishingly, seven films deep with the release of “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” which is both a prequel to “Transformers” and a sequel to 2018’s “Bumblebee,” which was set in 1987. “Rise of the Beasts,” set in 1994, is also based on the “Transformers: Beast Wars” media franchise of comic books and anime, which introduced the Maximal characters, alien robots that look like giant animals, not shape-shifting cars. Got all that? It’s OK if you don’t, because the screenplay — by Joby Harold, Darnell Metayer, Josh Peters, Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, with a story by Harold — will repeat the pertinent information ad nauseam, until you never want to hear the phrase “trans-warp key” ever again. The basics are as such: a giant, planet-eating dark god known as Unicron needs a gleaming key that has been hidden by the Maximals (reminder, those are the beastie bots) in order to gobble as many planets as he’d like, Earth included. What does the key do? Honestly, who knows, it’s just the necessary thingamajig over which the primary players can scrabble and fight throughout a twohour span. When an aspiring archaeologist, Elena (Danielle Fishback), accidentally uncovers half of the key hidden in an ancient Incan bird statue and triggers the beacon, the benevolent Autobots, stranded on Earth and led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), send their new human friend Noah (Anthony Ramos) to retrieve it. Noah, an Army vet looking for work to support his sick younger brother, got caught up with the Autobots while trying to boost a snazzy Porsche, the Autobot Mirage, voiced by a surprisingly lively Pete Davidson. Thus, the two kids from Brooklyn have to team up with the Autobots to prevent Unicron and his minions the Terrorcons — including a particularly nasty one known as Scourge (Peter Dinklage) — from feasting on Earth and destroying the planet. Crashy-crashy action ensues.