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.
