Where Transformers: War for Cybertron – Siege went big, its follow-up, Earthrise, goes small.
Siege was like a grand adventure across the Transformers’ homeworld of Cybertron. It set up the depth of the ideological and geographical struggles between Autobots and Decepticons while introducing the key players in each faction. And it still found time to stage big set-piece moments in locations like the mysterious Sea of Rust.
Earthrise scales things back. When we last left the Transformers, Optimus Prime and his Autobot allies had disappeared into a spacebridge, in pursuit of the life-giving (for Transformers, anyway) Allspark. A small resistance faction of Autobots remained behind to keep up the fight against the Decepticons as the enemy leader, Megatron, slipped deeper into tyranny.
The two leaders are everything to this story. Where Siege was more about the wide-ranging struggle, Earthrise takes us deep into the mindsets of the forces guiding the two opposing Transformers factions. It’s narrower in focus and in setting, but it rightly doubles down on the emotional and intellectual complexity that Siege introduced to this Transformers story.
Earthrise takes us deep into the mindsets of the forces guiding the two opposing Transformers factions.
That depth has been War for Cybertron‘s greatest asset, the glue that keeps this far-out techno-fantasy adventure digestible for a modern audience that isn’t necessarily caught up on Transformers lore. Even as Earthrise assaults viewers with an army of proper names like Scorponok or Quintesson, it commits itself to providing the context we need to stay connected, and in an organic and intelligent way.
That’s good, because it’s hard to escape the lore specifics in a story like this, which is going to mean different things to different people. For longtime Transformers fans, the references hint at a story that continues to draw on, and sharply reinterpret, the 36-year-old source material. Name-dropping characters like Sky Lynx or Galvatron is going to get longtime fans excited in a teasing way, but Earthrise never fails to step back and deliver the explanations newcomers need.
Suffice to say, there are reasons to steer clear of spoilers, regardless of your Transformers background. Earthrise crams a lot of surprises into each 24-minute episode. But that comes at a cost. It very much feels like a middle chapter, carrying the story of Siege forward while laying the groundwork for what’s next, but at the expense of the first chapter’s feeling of big-ness.
That can sometimes leave Earthrise feeling like it suffers from inertia. Almost all of the action revolves around a limited spread of locations and a singular showdown between Optimus and Megatron. The depth that’s added to our understanding of those two characters and their ongoing struggle is essential to the bigger story, but that bigger story doesn’t move forward much across the six 25-minute episodes when all is said and done.
I can’t help but think back to The Empire Strikes Back as I consider Earthrise. That Star Wars story is something of a gold standard for middle chapters because it packs in so much important character development alongside a plot that feels big because of all the places it goes. Earthrise doesn’t quite nail the same feeling of forward momentum, and I think it’s because the scope of the journey is so much smaller this time around.
Image: netflix
We do spend some time catching up with the struggles left behind on Cybertron, and we spend some more setting up the events that lead Optimus and Megatron to an abandoned-but-still-functional spacebridge that may be the key to reaching the Allspark. But the journey this time is much more cerebral by design.
For every promising twist and turn, there’s a B-plot that feels more like filler. We don’t spend nearly enough time catching up with the Autobots that stayed behind on Cybertron, or with the Decepticon plot they’re trying to undermine. The more filler-y bits shouldn’t have been discarded — they’re central to the larger plot. But I do feel like a couple extra episodes could have helped deliver what this second War for Cybertron chapter was missing. There’s a lot going on in an overall two-and-a-half-hour running time — perhaps it’s a bit too much. It could’ve used more space to unfurl itself.
If only all of mainstream entertainment’s backward steps could be so enjoyable.
The result is a stretch of episodes that necessarily pick up where Siege left off, filling out the margins of that earlier story while carrying us forward. But the distance we travel isn’t so huge in the end. In that sense, Earthrise is a bit of a backward step after the promising start earlier in 2020.
If only all of mainstream entertainment’s backward steps could be so enjoyable. Transformers: War for Cybertron carries on in this new chapter as a compelling remix of a decades-old series. Earthrise may not rise to the highs of the Siege that preceded it, but it’s an exciting ride all the same, and one that shows great promise for a worthwhile eventual conclusion, presumably sometime in 2021.
All six episodes of Transformers: War for Cybertron – Earthrise come to Netflix on Dec. 30.