The continued popularity of Transformers as a media franchise doesn’t surprise me in the least. It’s giant robots that turn into cars and jets and stuff. No-brainer. Genius concept. But the continued success of the film franchise has been a total shocker. The first movie in 2007 was a fun anomaly. None of the next four were any good. People loved Bumblebee, oh yay, a new beginning! But then last year’s Rise of the Beasts, which I reviewed, was just visual noise… and noise-noise. So now we have Transformers One, a fully animated prequel, and guess what? It’s kinda great.
One of the reasons I ended up not enjoying Rise of the Beasts that much is they made a big deal about the Maximals coming to prominence but then spent most of the runtime with Bumblebee, Optimus, and the rest of the car-based Transformers. I had gotten tired of all those characters, somehow. But what Transformers One has in its favor is a fresh take on those old G-1 characters. We’d never seen the origins of the Transformers we know on Cybertron, in all its vibrant, bustling glory. I think, even 40 years later, Transformers is just better suited to animation.
The story takes place in the distant past of Cybertron. The energon rivers have dried up and the massive city of Iacon is really starting to feel it. Ages ago, the ruling council of Transformers, the Primes, fought against an alien threat and lost, with the Matrix of Leadership missing. Only Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm) remains to protect Iacon and its citizens from the constant threat of destruction.
Zoom in on a couple of hapless mining bots, best friends Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry). They dig down, down, down into the core of Cybertron attempting to find more energon, day in and day out. Orion is a dreamer and a troublemaker while D-16 is a rule follower to the utmost. Despite their meager lives, Orion believes the two of them together can make a difference.
A chance discovery among rubble and garbage leads them to travel to the surface in the hopes of tracking down the Matrix of Leadership. Along the way they recruit mining shift leader Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and motormouth trash sorter B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key) and eventually discover terrible truths about their lives and eventually grow to be the bots we all know they can be (if you’ve ever seen any Transformers media).
So it’s no secret, really, who all of these characters will become. They don’t look that dissimilar to the iconic versions. The fun of the movie is seeing how they get there, and why certain characters go the way they do. Often times prequel or origin movies feel like foregone conclusions. That’s partially the case here. We know where everything ends up, but the journey is enjoyable enough to hold your attention, especially with how dark it gets.
The biggest positive of the movie is the gorgeously vibrant and tactile animation. Iacon is enormous and busy, like what New York was like in 1997’s The Fifth Element but 40 times larger and with way more realistic graphics. I was blown away by sequences like a massive F-Zero-style race through the city early in the film, or fast-paced train escape later on. It’s a blast. Letting the visuals and sound wash over you is just a delight. Transformers One is not attempting artistic heights like the Spider-Verse films or even TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, but what it’s doing succeeds fully.
Now to some less positive parts. Tonally, the movie isn’t at all consistent. Early on, Orion and D-16 get into silly shenanigans, and B-127 says goofy lines constantly, and the movie just feels like it’s totally for kids. Totally fine in and of itself, I love kids movies. However, as the story progresses, the tone gets progressively darker and more upsetting as the lines between good and evil feel more clearly defined. This too isn’t a problem. The stakes are enormous, it only makes sense for it to feel weighty. The problem is, when we get a stray joke or bit of slapstick in the second half, it feels completely at odds with the rest of the movie.
I’m a 40-year-old, so naturally I dug the more outwardly Transformery stuff we get in the second half of the movie. The action is big and exciting and packs a wallop while friends become enemies and enemies become friends. But the early part of the movie is clearly aimed at a younger audience, which I thought was just okay. I’m not saying this is good or bad. I’m merely saying, it gives the movie a bit of an identity crisis.
That said, Transformers One is a fun reminder of why we all liked the robots who were more than meets the eye in the first place. It doesn’t touch the artistic crossover heights of Spider-Verse or Mutant Mayhem but that doesn’t mean it isn’t pretty darn great. The voice cast do an admirable job assaying younger, unrefined versions of established characters. The growth of Orion and D-16 lands more than it has any right to. The movie is just solid. Bumblebee aside, easily makes for the best of the big screen Transformers. Low bar, I know, but it clears it easily.
Transformers One hits theaters on September 20.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.