Oh, like I *wasn’t* going to see this — and given how the trailers didn’t really impress me, and the early buzz left me skeptical (yes, even the strong praise from fellow Transformers fans), I was pleasantly surprised. The first domestically-released animated TRANSFORMERS movie since the original 1986 film, Josh Cooley’s TRANSFORMERS ONE winds the clock all the way back to the days before the Autobot-Decepticon war, where young Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) are non-transforming miner-bots extracting Energon from the depths of Cybertron. Pax is an eager dreamer, and D-16 the “oh boy, what are we getting ourselves into THIS time” best bud who always gets dragged along for the ride. A series of hare-brained plans going wrong, right, and then wrong again get the pair, along with a slightly loopy little yellow bot named B-127 (Keegan Michael Key) and their former mining crew chief Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson), stranded on the dangerous surface of Cybertron, in search of the lost Matrix of Leadership that will restore their world — scarred by a long war with the alien Quintessons — to its former glory. The quest leads them, however, to uncomfortable truths: about the war, about current Cybertronian leadership in the person of Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm), and about what has been stolen from their entire generation. The two friends’ very different ways of processing and reacting to these truths will reshape the planet’s future — and turn Pax into the legendary inspiring beacon of hope Optimus Prime, and D-16 into the cruel, malevolent Emperor of Destruction Megatron.
TRANSFORMERS ONE weaves together so many strands of the forty years of TRANSFORMERS lore into a narrative that works strikingly well, and I’m honestly surprised that it manages to pack so much story into less than two hours — it felt longer, but not a in a bad way. There’s a nice flattening of the disparate/contradictory backstories from the earliest years of the franchise (the comic books’ origin of Cybertron as a vessel of the “god” Primus, who created the Transformers; and the cartoons’ origin of the planet as a robot factory ruled over by the cruel Quintessons, whose product lines overthrew them and became the Transformers), and the simplifying of Pax and D-16’s relationship works for, again, a sub-two-hour movie (Pax in prior media was never a miner — a dockworker in the original cartoon, an archivist in the 2000s comics, and a cop in the 2010s comics, but never a miner like the future Megatron — the two previously always came from different worlds). It does nag at me that it feels like Transformers with *name*-names should have a slightly different station than ones with “designation” names, like D-16 and B-127 — but that really would just add another layer to the already slightly worrisome story of Megatron rising from humble origins to become a megalomaniacal would-be despot where Optimus Prime’s origins (again, not HERE, but usually) tend to be what we think of a more middle-class. (The fact that Pax/Prime here is also played by blonde beefcake Hemsworth, the God of Thunder himself, and that our righteously angry Megs — who I would add seems to ME to be right about everything until the point where revenge becomes more important than his friend’s life — is played by Tyree Henry, who is Black, feels like it slightly shades back in the problematic differences between the soon-to-be Autobot and Deception leaders in that “what are you trying to say here?” way that the script has clearly tried to flatten out.)
The cast really is excellent, Hemsworth over the course of the film segueing nicely from young dreamer to something that doesn’t recreate but does evoke Peter Cullen. Tyree Henry I think does thread the needle of selling this poor guy who’s trying to stay on the straight and narrow, do right, and get by whose whole world is pulled out from underneath him and it just breaks him — I did see one review where the flip didn’t quite land for the viewer, but I thought it made sense. Key as the future Bumblebee is given a version of the character who’s a comic relief chatterbox (ironic given what the live action side of the film franchise has been doing to him for coming up on two decades), and he’s nowhere near as annoying as a character like that easily could be. Special notice should be paid to the most brilliant casting of the film, Steve Buscemi as future Decepticon Air Commander Starscream; the role fits him like a glove, and I really do hope they do another one of these, presumably chronicling Megatron formally starting the war, just to see the classic dynamics of the Decepticon high command take shape, with him taking center stage.
Visually, it’s a real feast, with some great setting designs and spectacular set pieces and an all-timer of an Optimus-Megatron fight. I wasn’t too keen on the non-transforming robot designs when I saw them in the trailers, but they grew on me as the movie went on; I think the uniformity of them thematically makes sense, like, “you’re all very standardized, none of you is important.” Honestly, my only real design gripe is that I don’t think this film’s designers improved at all on the classic Quintesson designs. The ships aren’t quite weird enough, and while the main Quint we see hits certain key design cues (floating, bulbous body, tentacles), we see no sign of the five-face gimmick that’s the whole reason they’re called that. Maybe next time.
Anyway, a fine sci-fi adventure-tragedy that does these classic characters proud and hits enough of the core beats of earlier versions of this story that I didn’t come home griping and disappointed. Definitely worth seeing on a big screen; my mom remarked that it would probably be pretty spectacular in IMAX and I can’t disagree. (It is a CONSTANT frustration that there isn’t one nearer than two hours away.)