It was sort of awkward for me to watch Predacons Rising without having fully watched through season three of Prime. I did so anyway though, as I basically knew what was going to happen at the end of season three. That said, Predacons Rising picks up where season three ends, with Megatron slayed and the great war between Autobot and Decepticon apparently over. Now it’s time to finally revive Cybertron, but to do so means getting the Allspark fired back up. Optimus Prime, voiced of course by Peter Cullen, hid the all important Allspark and thus sets out to retrieve it. Meanwhile, Unicron revives the fallen Megatron and infuses himself within Megatron’s body. Mission objective: finally destroy the Autobots and Cybertron altogether.
Meanwhile, the other Autobots, including Arcee, Bulkhead, Ultra Magnus, and Bumblebee are also staying busy. Bulkhead is overseeing a construction operation of a landing platform on Cybertron while Ultra Magnus and Smokescreen are searching for Starscream and Shockwave. They instead come across to Predacons who defeat them, nearly killing Ultra Magnus in the process. Starscream and Shockwave have been working on cloning the fallen Predacons by using their remnants in Shockwave’s lab. The plan is to have a large enough force to surprise the Autobots and take over Cybertron for themselves. Ultimately, the Autobots, Decepticons, and even the Predacons form a temporary alliance to battle the Unicron-infused Megatron. Once banished, Optimus can proceed with the final phase of reigniting the Spark…
Predacons Rising puts a sort of sobering closing to the Prime series. It does so with a movie that runs a little over an hour, and as such, I admit it felt somewhat rushed. It’s not a bad movie, but I thought it focused too much on action. It’s enjoyable, but long enough to hold a lot of weight or for it to be considered the best Transformers movie in the franchise’s history. Still, as a fan of Transformers Prime, it’s required viewing, and while it should have been a more robust, aim-for-the-best grade effort, it falls short of that.
The Blu-ray/DVD combo pack is packaged as you would expect, with removable cover and single-disc sized case with a disc on either side of the inside of the case. Presentation quality is excellent as we’ve come to expect from Transformers Prime on Blu-ray, but as is typical with Shout! releases, no subtitles are included. The lone extra feature is “A Look at Polygon Pictures,” which is in HD and runs about ten minutes. Here, the studio in Asia, Polygon Pictures, is profiled by producers Jeff Kline, David Hartman, and Therese Trujillo. It’s very interesting to get a sort of over-the-shoulder view of the artists and techs at Polygon as they create and render the animations for Prime. Both the Hasbro and the Polygon crew did actually get together once and some nice photos of the meet-up are shared. It’s a cool feature that, as someone who enjoys the technical side of things, I enjoyed.
Predacons Rising is a pretty straight-forward release, as is this review. Let’s get to the summary…
