After 17 years of big-screen Transformers mayhem, Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley appears to have finally figured out the best possible place and presentation for the robots in disguise, and as it turns out, that place is right back where they started: animation. Written by Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari, Transformers One is, at heart, about sentient robots fighting aliens and each other for the fate of the technological utopia of Cybertron. No need to get poor John Turturro peed on again, or Mark Wahlberg to stare blankly at nothing on a green screen. A realm without physical limits is truly where the Transformers belong, but it doesn’t stop the film from delivering some surprising pathos while it’s there.
Indeed, Transformers One is, in itself, more than meets the eye. It seems like a simple, even frivolous, origin story at the outset, when we meet Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), mining robots toiling away in Cybertron’s depths under the supervision of the sardonic Elita (Scarlett Johansson) for the Energon the planet’s inhabitants need to keep transforming and rolling out. Miners, though, never know the pleasure, being born without the cog necessary to transform. While D-16 is just happy to do his job, Orion dreams of showing his fellow workers and Cybertron’s current leader, Sentinel Prime (an unrecognizably bro-y Jon Hamm), that miners are just as important and powerful by illegally entering himself and D-16 in a visually audacious planet-wide race against a slew of full-fledged Transformers.
At first, Transformers One is little more than a light-hearted, if hyperkinetic, underdog tale—albeit with impressively beautiful animation, and more than a few chuckle-worthy sight gags. That’s especially true once the sheltered and overexcited motormouth B-127 (Keegan Michael Key) shows up. But the real conflict is very much in plain sight, what with our knowing that Orion and D-16 are a young Optimus Prime and Megatron. And yet, the screenplay is smart enough to dodge the prequel trap, building a genuine camaraderie and affection between the two, never once telegraphing the rift that will eventually put them on opposing sides.
The inciting event does come when our heroes find themselves on Cybertron’s barren surface and learn how Sentinel Prime got and kept his power. Even by the standards of the Michael Bay films, Transformers One goes to a dark place, with the story shifting toward a Metropolis-lite class conflict among robots, with a justifiably pissed-off D-16 losing any semblance of restraint after his first taste of life-changing power. This stretch could’ve certainly benefited from slowing down to focus on D-16’s descent into fury, or further grappled with the potential ramifications of what he intends to do, but what’s here is sufficient enough to get the grim point across.
Even still, Transformers One manages to remember all the elements that got it to this point, and pulls off an impressively deft balancing act between the moral complexity of the story, the good humor that endeared us to the characters, and the sheer visceral charge of how undeniably cool the Transformers get to be here. It’s the kind of ride where a moment of two friends realizing that they’ve been radicalized in very different ways gets the space to breathe, where hearing Steve Buscemi play an over-it-all version of famed henchman Starscream is a delight, and everyone gets to marvel at the off-the-charts cool of Airachnid, a genuinely frightening and badass spidery henchwoman who transforms into a drone.
All of that is in service of the big moment where Optimus Prime eventually becomes Optimus Prime. Only this time, when he starts going on about how “freedom is the right of all sentient beings,” we get to know just how much he means it, and earns the right to say it.
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