OK. I’ll admit it. Despite bring a fan of the Transformers franchise (I’m a G1 guy, if you’re wondering), even I was struggling to be convinced by the trailers for Transformers One. It’s not that the film was animated – and anyone who thinks that might need to take a closer look at their Transformer history – but it did seem to be laced with the kind of overly glib humour that might not be the ideal tone for a vicious and bitter intergalactic, robot civil war.
However, just like their name implies, the Transformers have always been a little more than meets the eye, so after a big screen history that gone from glorified, bitchin’ toy advert to displaying the best and worst that Michael Bay had to offer, it’s finally time to go back to how it all started. That’s right, the Transformers are getting a big screen origin story that doesn’t involve any squishy little fleshlings getting in their way, but can their first animated cinematic adventure since 1986 manage to finally ground a franchise that’s in dire need of a break from rapidly changing forms?
After years of war with the violent Quintessons, the race of transforming robots known as – what else – Transformers find that their home planet of Cyberton is experiencing something of an energy crisis after war drove the entire species to live in vast cities under the surface. Sentinal Prime, the last of the ruling class of Transformers known as the Primes has ordered a sub-race of Transformers to be created without the ability to transform who will mine the planet for the Energon that is desperately needed to keep the planet running and it’s here that we meet rule-breaking mining bot Orion Pax as he tries to find meaning to his existence than just digging big holes.
However, his desire to keep bending the rules as far as they can possibly go comes with rather serious consequences as his various, well meaning schemes get him, his best friend D-16 and his supervisor Elita-1 constantly demoted from mining to waste management. However, after meeting eccentric oddball-bot B-127, Orion stumbles on a map that may show the last known location of the Matrix of Leadership, a powerful energy source that could restore Cybertron’s Energon levels back to what they once were.
Hoping that doing so will finally prove that mining bots are just as important as regular Transformers, Orion convinces D-16, Elita-1 and B-127 to accompany him on a quest to the surface to find the last resting place of the Primes and finally bring equality back to their beloved home planet. However, the deeper into their adventure they go, the more brutal the truths they unearth are and soon they discover a conspiracy that will send both Orion and D-16 on wildly diffrent paths that with see them take up vastly diffrent mantles. But that exactly does it take to transform the cocky Orion Pax into the noble leader known as Optimus Prime and a rule following D-16 into the fearsome Megatron? Rise up and find out.
So there’s been something of a feeling that the Transformers franchise has always had something of an identity problem when it came to their big screen outings. Starting with a sugar infused animated movie back in the 80s that came laden with lashings of childhood trauma to go with its bitchin’ rock soundtrack, we eventually shifted to the live action “Bayverse” that delivered yet more hyperactive visuals alongside worrying racial stereotypes, adolescent jokes about robot genitalia and plots that rarely made a lick of sense. From there a Bumblebee spin-off movie managed to give the franchise some desperately needed heart and a soft reboot of the franchise promiced/threatened to introduce G.I. Joe into the mix, but there’s a real sense that the franchise has never quite been able to nail the cog that’s made the notion of form shifting robots so successful for around four decades.
Well, imagine my surprise when I found that Transformers One not only managed to burrow right to the core of the beloved toy line and everything that has subsequently spun out of it, but it actually managed to enhance everything about it by taking us back to the start and giving us a family movie that has some pretty profound things to say about the abuse of the class system and the necessity (and dangers) of revolution. I confess, when I watched the early trailers and saw that a young Optimus Prime and Megatron were once buddies who traded fist bumps and bro-banter rather than laser blasts and death blows, I was a little worried, but thanks to some nicely weighty themes and the fact that it attempts to actually give it’s leads genuine personalities, there’s a very good chance that Transformers One could be one of, if not the best movies the franchise has ever seen.
The secret is that the movie not only gives us actual character arcs for characters who either were inspiring speech spouters or dastardly threat spitters, but it makes sure it doesn’t do it at the expense of the basic lore. Thus we get to spend some actual quality time with the younger incarnations of these iconic beings thanks to a swaggering vocal performance from Chris Hemsworth who seems to be going full Starlord one a hero known for being a little more stoic and a surprisingly nuanced turn by Brian Tryee Henry, who’s idealistic D-16 cuts a Magneto-esque turn which hits all the right notes due to the fact that the lore makes him have an understandable motive.
Sure, there’s a ton of comedy here and a whole string of MCU style snarky asides (chiefly from Keegan-Michael Key’s motormouth prototype, Bumblebee), but when the truth behind Jon Hamm’s smug Sentinel Prime comes to light, director Josh Cooley makes sure that the balance between the jokes and the drama allows for a bunch of seismic character moments to take centre stage. Behold D-16 suddenly sprout Megatron’s signature arm mounted fusion cannon in a moment of rage, or the introduction of the disgraced former High Guard who contain a fair few familiar faces such as Steve Buscemi’s Starscream that stand as exhilarating signposts toward the creation of Megatron. And it’s here where Transformers One finds its true strength and smartly avoids the usual pitfalls of the origin story. While Hemsworth doesn’t wait until the final act to really start refining his Peter Cullen impersonation, watching everything come together to create the status quo we all recognise proves to be genuinely moving to an old fan like me.
It isn’t perfect. In a world where other animated properties are experimenting with what the medium can do, Transformers One is content to just be flashy and slick which means that it isn’t as transcendent as the Spider-Verse movies or even as mischievously subversive as the recent Ninja Turtle movie, but when it comes to rebuilding a franchise from the ground up in the unlikely form of a coming of age story, I’d be more than happy to see further sequels rolling out sooner rather than later.
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